TWICE A HERO

by Susan Krinard

  She tried to step back, but the temple wall was behind her. "You… uh…" She thrust out her jaw and glared. "Let me by. I'm going back to the ruins."

  "If I'm not real, Mac, you should have no difficulty walking through me."

  Suddenly she chuckled. "Great idea," she said. With the full force of her slender weight she pushed against him. The assault drove him back a pace. She stepped to the side, strode to the rim of the temple platform, and slid her foot over the edge.

  He caught her arm just as an ancient stone step gave way under her foot. "Are you so eager to break your neck?" he snapped. "Or are you more afraid of something else?"

  Her eyes were wide and dark and surprisingly large, rimmed with thick lashes he hadn't noticed before. There was a slight trembling to the lids and at the corners of her lips, as if she'd realized how easy it would have been to tumble down that steep incline in her reckless attempt to escape.

  Escape him. Was that what she was trying to do? Did she have good reason?

  He let her go. She shook her arm to work out the numbness. "Can I break my neck if I'm already dead? Maybe it wouldn't hurt."

  If this was a game, he couldn't see the point in it. "Dying hurts," he said roughly.

  The color drained from her skin. She seemed about ready to say something, and then thought better of it.

  "No," she said, as if to herself alone. "If I go back, I'll understand. The answer is there, in the tunnel."

  The answer? He'd like more than a few answers himself.

  He scrutinized the jungle below them. The rain had stopped, but in a little over two hours it would be dark. He was hungry and wanted coffee, but there was no chance of that. Coffee was not one of the few necessities Perry had seen fit to leave him. At least there was shelter in camp. Best to take the girl with him, and then decide…

  Mac had already made her decision. She had turned around and was climbing backward down the cleared path along the crumbling temple stairway, clutching vines and bushes for handholds, her tongue caught between her teeth. Her feet slipped, and she steadied herself and kept going, never once glancing back up at him.

  Damned crazy troublemaking female. Suffragist or not, suspect or not, she needed a keeper—a job no sane man would want. He'd never let Caroline get into a position even remotely like this one. Scrambling down the side of a pyramid, no skirts or corsets or furbelows, drenched with sweat, hair bedraggled. Not a hair on Caroline's golden head would ever be disarranged by any hardship as long as he was alive.

  Caroline. He had to get back to San Francisco. Her aunt Amelia was no match for Perry's smooth tongue; he'd be spending every available hour at the Gresham house, using his jaded charm on Caroline, trying to make her believe he loved her. And in less than six weeks she'd be eighteen, in full control of her considerable fortune…

  With a pungent oath Liam retrieved his machete, slung his bag over his shoulder, and followed Mac down.

  She reached the base of the pyramid unscathed and was already striding back the way they'd come by the time he caught up with her. Her sense of direction was surprisingly good for a woman. She found the path he'd cut with no help from him, and marched through the muck and clouds of mosquitoes without moderating her furious pace.

  "Don't feel obligated to come with me," she puffed. "I can find my way just fine now, thank you."

  The path wasn't wide enough for two. Liam dogged her heels, restraining an impulse to grab her. "I have no intention of leaving you," he said acidly. "There's still the small matter of Perry's photograph—"

  "Yeah. I'll say."

  Impossible female. Let her exhaust herself, and then she'd be more tractable. He dodged a palm frond that slapped back into his chest and settled into an easy, ground-eating stride far more efficient than her break-neck rush. Soon enough her breath became ragged, but some stubborn spirit kept her moving.

  He could almost admire that. Almost.

  They reached the original ruins in just under an hour. Mac—the name was too apt to discard—had half hidden herself behind a cluster of palms. He could see her doubled over, hands on knees, face flushed and hair sodden. That she'd gone on so long was amazing. Liam tipped up his hat and dragged his damp sleeve across his forehead, watching her fumble for her canteen.

  She was tired, hot, and thirsty. Good. It would be easier to make her drop her guard.

  "What do you propose to do now?" he asked.

  She choked on a mouthful of water and glared at him through the lacy curtain of serrated leaves. "Don't concern yourself… O'Shea. I've got everything under control. If you'll just return my flashlight now…"

  "Under control," indeed. "Nothing's changed, Mac. You're not going off alone—"

  "I'm not going off anywhere. I just need to take care of something in the tunnel." She clenched her fists. "Please."

  It would be simple enough to keep track of her from the tunnel entrance. She couldn't go far. Something had upset her, and he was determined to learn exactly what it was.

  He extended the lantern and she snatched it from his hand. Without another word she squared her shoulders and marched straight into the tunnel as if she were about to confront a man-eating dragon.

  For all he knew that was exactly what she anticipated. Better a dragon than him—if even a part of his suspicions proved true.

  Liam set down his haversack and pitched the brim of his hat low over his eyes. He made himself comfortable under the shade of the temple wall, checked his pistol and let it rest in his lap. He'd give her a half hour, no more. There was little time to waste indulging her freakish starts or devious games—if that was what they were.

  He'd left the sack in the tunnel when he and Perry had first arrived, never suspecting the need for emergency supplies would come from such an unpredictable quarter. Along with the additional food Perry had left him, there might be enough to tide two people over for a week, no more.

  Two men. A woman was another matter entirely. If she were truly alone here…

  He jerked awake, shoved back his hat and sat up. The long shadows and dim light told him that over an hour had passed. Damn it, he'd slept—an amateur's mistake.

  There was still a faint throbbing in his knee where something had struck it. Mac couldn't have come out of the tunnel without tripping over his legs; Liam stood and looked from the tunnel entrance to the faint clearing beside the temple.

  She was sitting on a fallen stele, staring into the jungle. Her pack lay at her feet. There was something strange in her bearing, in the way she didn't move as the seconds passed, the way she held her hands out in front of her with a peculiar stiffness.

  She turned her head as he came near. Her gaze held his with a vulnerability that stopped his questions before he could voice them.

  "Something is… very weird here," she said. "I found the wall, but… it just ends. There's no way through. It's the same and not the same. I know it's the right wall, but the bones…" She shuddered. "They aren't there anymore."

  He knew the wall she meant; it was the place he and Perry had found the carved plaque of stone from which they'd made their matching pendants. Symbols of a brotherhood that no longer existed.

  He shook off his lapse and crouched before Mac. "The wall with the hieroglyphs?" he asked. "It ends the tunnel. There is no way through. What bones are you talking about?"

  "I thought they were—" She lifted her hands. For the first time he saw that her palms were raw with bleeding scratches, as if made by ragged stone. "This isn't possible, you know. There isn't any real proof. I—"

  Liam caught her hands and held them still. "What in hell did you do to yourself?"

  She laughed raggedly. "I was sure there must be something, but—"

  Her coherence hadn't improved since she'd gone into the tunnel again, and neither had her rationality. "Be quiet," he commanded. "Just stay there and be quiet." He went back for his sack and dropped it beside the stele, pulling out his own canteen. She remained unnaturally still, watching him as he poured w
ater over her palms and washed away the blood.

  "You don't have to do this," she said, smiling with the distracted air of a good-natured lunatic. "I'm okay. Everything will be fine."

  He caught her chin in his hand. Her cheek was clammy, and the pulse that beat under the skin at the base of her neck was faint and rapid. She was in a state of shock; he'd seen such conditions before. "I told you to be quiet," he said gruffly. "Sit still and do as you're told."

  She blinked and shrugged without protest, proving just how disturbed she must be. Liam used his knife to tear off pieces of mosquito netting from the sack of emergency supplies and made bandages for her hands, knotting them firmly behind her knuckles.

  "You know, the Maya were obsessed with time," she went on. "It would make a weird kind of sense, if it's true. The funny thing is, I know I'm not crazy."

  Liam lifted her in his arms and carried her to the shade under the ruined wall. "Of course not," he grunted. Slender as she was, she was no wraith. He eased her down on what remained of the mosquito netting.

  "I'm just not the kind of person who has delusions," she said, sliding bonelessly onto the makeshift bed. "Whatever Homer said, I don't have the imagination to come up with so much… perfect detail." She flexed her hands in their bandages, counting off on her fingers. "The wall is the same, but the bones aren't there. Neither is Homer's cap. And the first path is gone. And it did look like Tikal, only not the way it did when I left it—the way Maudslay photographed it. And then there's you…" She squinted up at him. "You're just too perfect."

  "Thanks."

  "And I think I've established that it can't be some sort of practical joke. Just not possible. I'm not dead—"

  "It's a wonder," Liam murmured, cursing his lack of a blanket to cover her with. He had only his shirt, and it was too' damp and thin to be of much use.

  "—so if I'm not crazy," she mumbled, "it must be real. Doesn't that make sense?"

  "Perfect sense." God save him.

  She tried to sit up, and he pushed her back down. Already her pulse seemed stronger, her skin less pale. He removed the cap of his own canteen, pulled down her lower lip with his thumb, and poured water into her mouth as if she were a child. After the first few swallows she gave a muffled protest and took the canteen herself.

  When she'd finished he reached for the canteen, but she stopped him with a touch. Her fingers were trembling as they brushed his hand and pointed at the engraved metal band near the mouthpiece.

  "You… really are… Liam O'Shea," she whispered.

  He followed her stare. The engraved, silver-chased canteen had been a gift from Caroline's father the year they'd met, when Liam had been a simple miner and Gresham the mine owner whose life he'd saved. Gresham was dead now, and he'd left Liam a far more precious endowment—a trust Liam was failing at this very moment.

  Damn Perry.

  "So my sainted mother named me," he said acidly. "Why does that surprise you?"

  She inched backward on her elbows and propped herself against the wall. "I don't know," she said. "No. I don't know how…"

  He took her shoulders between his hands. "Were you expecting to find me here?"

  "Here?" She chuckled weakly. "No. Not like—" She closed her eyes, laughter dying. "Can you give me my pack?"

  He did as she asked. Her movements were deliberate as she opened the top flap; for the first time he noticed the strange interlocking teeth that held it closed. But when she'd pulled out the photograph she pushed the pack behind her, out of his reach.

  "You wanted to know about this photograph?" she said. "It was taken in Tikal in 1880."

  Liam restrained his impatience. At last he was getting answers, however jumbled. "I was there," he said.

  "Okay. Now look at it closely." She held it up with all the exaggerated pedantry of a professor in a classroom. "Does it look like it's only a few years old?"

  He humored her, ignoring the stab of anger that came with the sight of Perry. Indeed, there was something aged about the paper, creased and a bit ragged about the edges, the image faded. He'd seen this photograph in Perry's rooms only a month ago, protected behind glass.

  There was no question about it. Perry must have given it to Mac. Their meeting in the tunnel couldn't have been coincidence.

  "How long have you had this?" he demanded.

  She didn't even flinch at his harshness. "Not long. But it's been around for quite some time. You're seeing a century of wear and tear."

  Liam laughed. There was nothing else to do. But she didn't draw back, didn't smile, didn't do anything but gaze at him with a sort of desperate earnestness.

  "Don't you see?" she begged. "Of course you don't. You think I'm nuts. I would too, except—I can't even explain it myself. Something happened to me in that tunnel. Before I met you. Oh, damn." She wrapped her arms around her narrow waist and bent over.

  If he was right about her she deserved to suffer. And yet…

  "Lie down," he ordered. "You're ill."

  Her head snapped up. "You want answers, O'Shea? You want to know how I got here? I can tell you how I got to Tikal the first time. By airplane and tour bus, with a bunch of other tourists. Does that make any sense to you?"

  Sense? Nothing about her made sense. "Airplane," he repeated flatly.

  "You know, the metal things that fly in the sky." She nodded at his silence. "You don't know. The Wright brothers haven't done their thing yet. They're only teenagers… uh, now. And there were no tour buses in the Petén in the… 1880s…" She drifted away again. "This is too fantastic. Homer would never accept this."

  Liam's fingers itched, whether to strangle her or merely shake her he didn't know. "Homer?"

  "My grandfather. He gave me the photograph. It was… passed on to him. He never knew Perry. I never knew him. But now he's actually alive in San Francisco…"

  Enough was enough. "What in hell are you trying to say?"

  She gave him a whimsical grin. "You said the year is 1884. Well, Mr. Liam Ignatius O'Shea, that wasn't the year I went into that tunnel."

  "What?"

  "I said—"

  He grabbed her shoulders in earnest. "How do you know my middle name?"

  "Homer told me. I—"

  "No one knows my middle name."

  "I can see why you wouldn't want it spread around."

  "Even Perry doesn't know. How do you?"

  "Actually, Perry did. Does. And I know because he was—is—my—" She stopped herself abruptly and rushed on. "Because you're both in the history books."

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, give me strength. Was this fantastic story her attempt to divert his suspicion because she knew he'd unmasked Perry's plot? "History books," he repeated.

  "The history books we have in the year I went into that tunnel." The look she gave him then was just a little tempered with reasonable caution, as if she'd finally recognized his mood. "The year nineteen hundred and ninety-seven."

  * * *

  Somehow she had to make him believe. Mac didn't know exactly when the certainty had come over her. If she could make him believe, she'd know it was all true. Which she already did, more or less. The alternative wasn't acceptable. She wasn't a gullible person. She wasn't lost in a dreamworld. She was practical and had faith in what she could see and touch and feel.

  As she could see and touch and feel Liam O'Shea. The real, original Liam O'Shea, in all his potent masculine glory.

  And he was very much alive.

  That was only beginning to sink in. The pile of bones she'd found in the tunnel was gone, because Liam hadn't died. She didn't have to beg his apology for her ancestor's deed, because it hadn't happened yet. If she could only somehow convince him she wasn't losing her mind, all of this would start making sense.

  But convincing him wasn't going to be easy. What little she knew of him and her observations in the past hour didn't suggest a proclivity for trust or belief in the impossible. His expression was thunderous, and she was painfully aware of the pressure of h
is fingers digging into the hollows above her collarbones. He did, in fact, think she was crazy. And who could blame him?

  You've gone about this all wrong, Mac. Homer would be ashamed of you. But she hadn't been thinking coherently since she'd come out of the tunnel again. She'd been in some kind of shock. Maybe it was the shock itself that made it so… no, not easy, but possible to accept.

  Accept that she'd somehow come back in time.

  Damn, but that sounded very strange. She choked back a laugh. Laughing was not the right approach to take with Mr. O'Shea, who acted as if he'd prefer the company of a poisonous snake to hers.

  She cleared her throat. "Uh—I'm sorry, Mr. O'Shea. I haven't been explaining this well. If you could just"—she wedged her hands upward against his arms, pushing—"just let me go…"

  He did, if reluctantly. For a moment she let herself just look at him. Before, when she thought him only a coincidental copy of the man in the photograph, she'd been reluctantly impressed. Now—it really was him. The guy whose supposed murder had laid a curse on the Sinclairs, or at least Homer had been convinced of it and sent her down here to find his bones, but she'd found him instead, and now what in the world was she supposed to…

  Whoa. Slow down. "Let me start over," she said, as much for her own benefit as for his.

  He rocked back on his heels. The gunmetal gray of his eyes was as sharp as his machete blade, and just as capable of cutting. His anger was manifest; she sensed that another wrong word could send him over some dangerous edge. He was sarcastic, cynical, impatient, chauvinistic, and just plain annoying, and none of those qualities were conducive to his accepting what she was about to tell him.

  Yet she remembered the way she'd felt, lifted up, light as air, in his powerful arms. And how he'd laid her down so gently and fed her water and hovered over her. She'd felt bodiless then, and more than a little unreal.

  But this was real. Somehow, incredibly, she of all Sinclairs had been singled out for the most amazing adventure of all. She, unremarkable MacKenzie Rose.