TWICE A HERO By Susan Krinard

“I’ll be damned,” he said again, this time with a more pronounced drawl of disgust. “Who in hell was idiotic enough to bring an American woman to the jungle?”

“Excuse me?”

His gaze swept the surrounding jungle before fixing on her again, dark with annoyance. “Whoever did it should be horsewhipped. How did you get separated from him?”

“Him,” who? The guide? Horsewhipped? “I think that might be sort of a severe punishment,” she said, “considering I only paid him five dollars to guide me here from Tikal.”

He cast her an even more dubious glance, if that were possible. “Then where’s the rest of your party?”

“Doing the cha-cha in Tikal, probably.”

He was not amused by her lame attempt at humor. “The men you came with. The fools who thought a woman could manage in a place like this.”

Mac was in far too strange a mood to be annoyed. With a little effort, she could almost imagine that this was the way the real Liam would have talked. He’d have been a product of his times—in other words, a born male chauvinist. Whoever this guy was, and whatever his problems, he was unwittingly playing the role to a tee.

“Well, la-dee-dah,” she said, tapping her cheek. “I came to this big bad jungle all by my little old self. What’s getting into women these days?”

The glint of annoyance in his eyes had become something of a disturbance to rival the tropical storm overhead. “By yourself,” he repeated with patent disbelief.

“Yup. Amazing but true.”

Liam’s double took a step forward, crowding her close to the ruin behind her. “Miss—” He looked her up and down again in such a way that his assessment of her person could not have been mistaken. “I presume you are a miss? No man in his right mind would let his wife come to the Petén.”

No man in his right mind would make such bizarre statements. She returned the favor of examining his nicely revealed physique. The slopes and valleys of his chest and midriff were prominently delineated through the wet fabric of his shirt. Both it and his trousers were a little unusual in cut, as were his mud-splotched boots. He wore a heavy leather belt and some kind of bandoleer hung with small pouches and loops. Expedition wear of the sort you’d see in a ’40s safari movie.

Another surge of recklessness moved her mouth before her brain could stop it. “It’s Miss,” she said. “MacKenzie’s the name. But I think it’s ‘Ms.’ to you.”

He didn’t get it. She could see it went right over his head. Maybe it was time to start asking a few questions of her own. “I didn’t catch your name, Mr…”

His gaze made another sweep from her boot toes to her dripping hair. “Dressed as you are and in such a state, Miss MacKenzie, I doubt you could catch anything but the grippe.”

She guessed what he implied. She knew how she must appear, in waterlogged jeans and camp shirt, not in the least pretty or delicate or curvaceous in the way that seemed to attract the opposite sex. She had no reason to want to be attractive to a man like this. She’d thought she was well past caring.

But, oddly enough, she wasn’t.

“Charming,” she said. “What century did you emerge from, pray tell? The first? Or maybe a little earlier—the Precambrian era, perhaps?”

The creases deepened between his strong brows; Mac saw more puzzlement than anger in his expression. Didn’t the guy know when he’d gotten as good as he gave?

But his apparent confusion didn’t last long. “I see,” he said. “I’ve heard of your type. Are you one of those female suffragists who think they’re the equals of men in all things?”

Female suffragists? Where’d he dig up that label? “I don’t just think it, I know it. You have a problem with that?”

For the first time he smiled. It wasn’t a particularly nice smile. A spark of some undefined sensation shot the length of her spine. She could be playing with fire here, pursuing her own imaginary game with no thought to who or what this guy really was. She wondered why that edge of danger didn’t trouble her any more than the bizarre coincidence of his appearance. The last time she’d felt this way was when she’d been on prescription muscle relaxants for a pulled shoulder.

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