“Don’t even think of standing up,” she ordered.
Oh, yes. She’d read him right. The hard set of his shadowed jaw and the bleakness in his gaze told her how much he hated to be helpless this way in front of her. It reminded him of Chinatown, and the failure he saw within himself—the self-contempt, the terror she’d seen so vividly when they’d both been close to death.
“Well, Mac?” His breathing was harsh. “Are you here to play nursemaid to the invalid?”
The attack wasn’t aimed at her. It was all for himself. “You’re too cantankerous to need nursing, O’Shea. I felt more sorry for the doctor.”
“It seems I’m to be talked to death instead.”
Mac dragged a chair close to the bedside. “There are things I need to explain—”
“Like Perry?”
“You… know he didn’t try to kill you.”
His muscles bunched, and she knew he wanted very badly to rise and pace the room like a caged jaguar. “If you’ve only come to talk about Perry—” he rasped.
“No.” She reached out to him, unable to help herself. “What I need to tell you Perry doesn’t even know. I—”
Her hand was seized in a firm but remarkably careful grip. “Good God,” Liam said. “You are hurt.”
She followed his anxious look. The modest bandage around her hand was hardly like Liam’s; she’d almost forgotten the cut was there. “Just a scratch,” she said, giving him a lopsided grin. “I’m not too handy with a knife—not fighting with it, anyway. It’s nothing, really. I’ve had worse mosquito bites in the jungle—”
“You little idiot. Did you mean to get both yourself and Caroline killed?”
Gently she worked her hand from his grasp. “I can’t take credit for bringing Caroline along. She came on her own. And it so happened I heard your conversation with the messenger at the Palace.” She chuckled thickly. “Couldn’t let you go and get yourself killed, considering the trouble I took to save your life in the jungle.”
The corner of his lips twitched. “You’ll never let me forget that, will you?”
I hope in time we’re both able to forget. She shook her head. “I have something to tell you about that. If you’re ready to listen. If you can accept the truth this time, I’ll give to you. I told you part of it before, when you couldn’t accept it. Maybe enough’s happened that now you can.”
He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back. “Go ahead. I’m entirely at your mercy.”
“The day I pushed you out of the way of that bullet in the jungle, I changed the course of history. You… you were supposed to die, Liam O’Shea, in the Petén in August of 1884.”
That pronouncement caught his full attention. “Of course,” he drawled. “Your time travel again. That’s why you refused to tell me my future.”
So he remembered that conversation. “Yes,” she admitted. “I knew it could happen any time.”
“And you just happened to be there, my savior, when my fate came upon me.”
“You were the reason I came to the jungle in the first place, in my own time. That was why I had the photograph, why I recognized you.” She braced herself. “You see, I was in the ruins to… make amends for something one of my own ancestors was supposed to have done. To apologize to the… spirit of the man he was supposed to have murdered.”
She could see the progression of thoughts behind Liam’s mask of indifference, the gradual realization as he began to catch on.
“I don’t expect you to understand theories even I can’t make sense of,” she said. “When I found myself in the past—when I saved your life—everything changed. Because you were alive when you were supposed to be dead, you could go back to San Franciso and marry Caroline. I couldn’t let that happen.”
He stared at her with eyes as opaque as silver coins. “Why couldn’t you, Mac?”
Her heart thumped painfully against the wall of her ribs. “Because my name isn’t Rose MacKenzie. It’s MacKenzie Rose Sinclair. Perry is my great-greatgrandfather, Caroline is my great-great-grandmother, and if they didn’t marry, my family and everything they’d ever done would cease to exist.”