Hot for His Hostage (28 page)

The man’s brilliant green eyes darkened to the shade of a troubled ocean. Zoe wasn’t
the only one who picked up on the strange change. “A bit?” Shay rebounded. “Why does
that sound like the world’s biggest understatement?”

Ghid exhaled through his nose. “Because you’re damn good at discerning that kind of
shit.”

“He always was.” Tait’s tone was full of the years he’d been on the receiving end
of Shay’s perceptive abilities. Zoe could sympathize. She’d only been exposed to hours
of the stuff, and had come out of the experiences in a tangle of awe and annoyance.

After ticking a brow at his brother, Shay turned again to Ghid. “So where does
this
story start?”

Ghid’s awkward posture still prevailed, so he finally decided to sit. “Where most
of the good ones do,” he told them. “At the beginning. So…you guys remember your buddy
Homer?”

“Nuclear bomb Homer?”

Tait’s quip had Shay throwing a glance to Zoe. A new giggle sprang to her lips at
his I-told-you-so smirk, suppressed by pressing a hand over her mouth.

“Yeah.” Ghid leveled another stunner by sliding in half a smile over the end of it.
“Mel told me about your little fun with that theme.”

Tait’s eyes narrowed. “‘Mel’?”

Shay shifted a little. “It’s what he calls Mom.”

“Why?”

Shay backhanded his shoulder. “Why do you think?”

Tait stabbed a new glare at Ghid. Then viciously twisted his lips. “Are you fucking
kidding—”

“Lock it down.” Shay turned his move into a steeled grip. “Dad’s been dead for a long
time. Ghid just risked his ass in a big way to save mine. And he’s got pie, even if
it’s bizarre.”

None of them gave the comment even half a laugh. As Ghid pushed his fingers together
in a taut steeple, Zoe bit her lip hard.
Mierda
. The man actually appeared like a self-conscious CO himself, about to hand walking
papers to a couple of his guys. Her gut twisted in sympathy for him, too. “You two
never really knew what they were working on, did you?”

Shay looked at the man with extended contemplation, perhaps trying to tell what the
angle was on the question. “I know she was a bio-scientist and so was he, so that
dictated the focus of their work. We had a damn zoo of research animals at the house
for a while.”

Tait broke into a dazzling grin. “Shit. The zoo. Now that part was fun. Mom let us
keep the iguana in our room at night, didn’t she? We called him Messy.”

“Original,” Ghid muttered.

“What? He
was
.” Tait openly moped. “But Homez took Scout back to his place most days, and I wasn’t
a happy camper about that.”

Shay shrugged. “But when Homez left, Scout stayed.”

“Barbecue bonus,” Tait concurred. “Of sorts.”

“Sure.”

“I fucking loved that dog. Nearly as much as you loved the horse.”

“Yeah.” Shay’s return to boyhood joy brought dimples she’d never seen to the corners
of his mouth. “Hercules. He deserved that name, too. Fucking awesome animal. An Arabian
of some sort. Homez would let me sneak in to feed him carrots. I definitely had a
guy crush.”

Ghid’s stare at Shay grew more intense. “Hmmm. That’s probably a good thing.”

Shay’s response was equally as forceful—with discomfort. “Why?”

Zoe was glad to see she wasn’t the only one unnerved by the man’s vibe of cryptic
and creepy. The impression gained strength as Ghid pushed back to his feet, arms angled
back as if he aimed to go find a street brawl. But surprisingly, his comeback was
built on solid composure. “The animals in your zoo…weren’t test subjects. They were
Melanie and Homer’s inspiration. And…DNA sources.”

“Huh?”

“What?”

Ghid stopped in front of the window. “You two might be proud to know that in her way,
your mom was a member of a unique Special Forces team of her own.”

Shay scowled. “At the risk of sounding redundant,
huh
?” 

Ghid squared his stance, leveled his jaw, and fixed them with the fresh laser focus
of his gaze. “The research she performed in your garage was part of a very special
project, jointly embarked on a top-secret basis by twelve of the world’s leading nations.
The initiative was given ten years of funding, and was simply called “Big Idea.” The
sole goal was to combine the knowledge of the planet’s greatest scientific minds to
craft innovative solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.”

Tait let out a low whistle. “By ‘challenges’, I’m assuming you don’t mean shit like
the soccer/football discrepancy and asshats who won’t pick up their dog’s crap.”

“Both valid points,” Ghid returned, “but no. Big Idea was about addressing shit like
the ozone layer…world weather patterns…poverty…”

“Oh.” Shay snorted. “Just
that
kind of stuff.”

Ghid didn’t mirror the sarcasm. Still serious, he stated, “Some pretty amazing shit
came out of the project. Though it was all streamlined to the public via different
avenues, you can thank Big Idea for biologically enhanced vegetables that resist pesticides,
most materials that recycle besides tin cans, and lifesaving improvements in how tsunamis
and hurricanes are tracked.”

Tait spread his hands. “So how does this circle back to the work Mom and Homez were
doing?”

During his question, Zoe’s heartbeat leaped by at least twenty beats per minute. Then
thirty. Two words from Ghid’s explanation slammed like a lightning bolt then fused
with another blow—memories as vivid and disturbing as the minutes that formed them,
in the hallway back at the base.  

Biologically enhanced.

Biologically enhanced.

She’d still held the water pitcher. It slipped from her numb hand now, crashing to
the hardwood floor near the table. “
Por Dios
,” she rasped.

“Zoe.” Shay rushed over. “You okay, dancer? Did you—”

“I saw them.” She gripped Shay’s arm but blurted it straight at Ghid. “In—in the hallway.
At the base. That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it?
They’re
what you’re talking about.”

Her mind raced, shoveling Ghid’s pie pieces into all the logical slots. But it still
made no sense. It didn’t come close.

Ruthless shivers roared up and down her spine. She’d dismissed all those poor creatures
as an illusion of her exhaustion, stress, and fear, or at the worst, an evolution
of humans forced to mate with the aliens that so many assumed were housed in Area
51.

Not government-sanctioned science experiments.

Not products of some idealistic “project” for mankind.

Not the brainchild of Melody Bommer—the mother of the man who’d wrapped himself around
her heart. The man she pressed more tightly to now, who swore softly in his distress
for her.

“Zoe, what the hell are you talking about?” Shay finally murmured. She felt his head
turn, probably to look at Ghid. “What the
hell
is she talking about?”

Ghid’s labored sigh turned every air molecule in the room into a cactus ball. “Come
sit down again, Shay. Bring her with you.”

Zoe’s knees felt like rubber. Just how correctly had she pieced the pie together?
And how thoroughly would she want to throw up after being forced to eat it?

“Forget the weeds,” Tait professed as Shay eased her to the couch. “I’m wandering
the goddamn forest now.”

“Make room because I’m right there with you.” Shay dropped next to her with stiff
movements. “DNA sources? Ghid, what the fuck?”

Zoe joined them in scrutinizing the man. As she expected, Ghid didn’t even try for
a fashion model pose anymore. His posture was firm and his face the same tough mask—though
his eyes, searching all three of them now, were a thousand sharp green shards apiece.
What he had to tell them wasn’t easy. Not by a long stretch.

Zoe twined her fingers into Shay’s and squeezed. Hard.

“Their concept started out simply,” Ghid began. “The concept of transplanting animal
organs
into humans was decades old when Big Idea began. Melanie and Homer began with a version
of that idea. They wondered if they could target human diseases by successfully extracting
the blood cells from animals who had the corresponding strengths, then adding them
to a serum formulated to activate them in the human bloodstream…”

“Wow,” Tait murmured.

“There’s an idea for a winning cocktail,” Colton added.

Shay was totally silent. The ominous stillness he joined with it was unnoticeable
to everyone except Zoe. She knew exactly what he remembered from the base now. And
exactly why it led him to clutch her hand with brutal force.

“Shit, Mom, I thought it was from you. I saw it as a sign that everything would work
out okay…”

“He went back to the house and put it there…for you…Bastard…”

“What? Why?”

“You drank it. The honey. Didn’t you, Shay?”

“Yeah…I drank it.”

Without second thought, she offered him her other hand. He didn’t hesitate to accept,
twisting her fingers just as tight.  

“So…did it work?” His words were so taut, they snapped up Tait’s concerned stare.
“At all?”

With the last two words, Colton’s attention was snagged, too. While Zoe longed to
return their looks with even a small smile of assurance, she couldn’t. No use in perpetuating
a lie. She couldn’t fix this any more than they could. And that dragged her into a
grieving silence, too.

 Ghid regarded Shay with eyes that stunned Zoe with their new intensity—and empathy.
“There’s a damn interesting answer for that,” he stated.

“Interesting,” Tait echoed. “Crap. There he goes again with ‘interesting’.”

Ghid headed for the window again, his steps slow yet steady. “At first, the results
blew them away. Mel and Homer started with a simple serum blending raven and elephant
cells, both animals known for their memory retention. They gave it to a small group
of targeted subjects in an Alzheimer’s study, and had awesome results. While waiting
for the numbers to come in on that one, they developed another serum. More complicated.
The end game was endurance and running speed.”

“Let me guess,” Tait offered. “They gathered a bunch of teen guys and told them they
could have an advance copy of the new Halo game if they ran a mile in less than ten?”

That actually garnered a tick at one side of Ghid’s mouth before he replied, “They
used antelope, Iditarod sled dogs, and cheetahs.”

Colton took his turn to snort. “In a magical serum? That you fed to—who?”

“Targeted subjects,” Ghid replied without faltering. “Again with astounding results.”
He threw his gaze to Tait and Shay again. “Your mother and Homer Adler were delivering
the scientific world’s equivalent of shock and awe.”

“Shit,” Tait responded.

“
Shit
.” Shay grinded Zoe’s fingers into putty. She didn’t care. If he kept holding on,
they could weather this together.
Please keep holding on
.

“That justifies the menagerie.” Tait tapped two fingers on the couch’s arm while drilling
his gaze into the modern photo art on the wall. “But it doesn’t clarify anything else.”

“No.” Shay’s agreement was rough and low. “It doesn’t.”

“If things were so awesome, then why did Mom leave? And then Homez?”

Ghid’s reply was prefaced by an odd change to his face. A toughening in his jaw but
a thick storm in his eyes. Zoe sensed it was the man’s version of sadness but couldn’t
be sure. “They’d harnessed lightning in a bottle,” he offered, “but had very different
ideas about what to do with it.”

“And that’s why they fought,” Tait murmured.

Shay shook his head. “And we thought it was because Homer let us feed the table scraps
to Scout.”

“Well,
I
did. You were always better about obeying the rules than me.”

“No. You were just always there to take the blame, instead.”

“You made up for it by keeping me sane, brother.”

Zoe bit into her bottom lip, dealing with the emotions flooding in.
Dios,
how she could empathize with Tait’s words. Though younger sibs were often sheltered
from the tough crap, that didn’t make them any less important in the grand scheme
of things. In many ways, it made them more valuable than ever. She watched Shay take
that comprehension in and make it his own. Despite the battered landscape of his face,
he’d never been more stunning to her.

They were having to take a painful road back to brotherhood…but they were getting
there.

“So what happened, Ghid?” Shay asked then. “Mom and Homer hit an impasse. The results
were shitty. We have that part figured out.”

Ghid reset his stance before going on. “In a nutshell, Adler got impatient. And greedy.”

Tait leaned forward. “Didn’t you say Big Idea was subsidized by a government cooperative?
Where does greed play into that?”

“Money isn’t the only wealth that corrupts,” Ghid replied. “Homer felt marginalized
and impatient. He wanted to present the Big Idea honchos with some ‘wow’ results,
but your mom thought a public ra-ra was still premature. They hadn’t had a chance
to study the serum’s long-term effects. They had no idea about side effects.” While
grating through his next sentence, he locked eyes with Zoe. “Or deformities.”