Liam Junior’s wandering gaze and pose of bored indifference gave her the chance to study him surreptitiously. The jungle’s deep shadows only made his features seem more sharply cut, more imposingly masculine. Lines radiated out from his eyes and slashed between his brows. His was an outdoorsman’s face that had been exposed to the elements: sun and wind and rain. It was a face that hid far more than it revealed.
What would you think of him, Homer? You’d probably have found him interesting, weirdness and all. You’d probably have learned everything important about him by now, too, and have him eating out of your hand.
But she wasn’t Homer. Somehow her attempt to exorcise the Sinclair family demon had gotten far out of hand. Liam Junior was right: she didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of choice at the moment. She could either follow her insane impulse to murder him, or take what help he could give and put up with the rest.
“All right,” she said. “So what do you plan to do?”
“See you safely back with your people, whoever they are.”
“We agree on that, anyway. Since we disagree about where we are, the best thing to do is get to a high place and take a good look around.”
He grinned, a flash of white teeth brilliant and startling beside his tanned skin. “You do show occasional sense, Miss MacKenzie.”
Sense enough to know that the highest scalable point in this part of the jungle was probably the vine-covered ruin right next to them. Mac grimaced. Her clothes were sticky, her feet were blistered, and the last thing she wanted to do was scramble up the crumbling steps of an unrestored temple.
“You don’t happen to know the best way up this thing, do you?” she asked.
“Not here. I know a better place.”
And he was off again, pausing just long enough to let her glimpse the direction he’d gone. Mac tried out a string of antiquated and colorful imprecations and followed. The sooner she found out where she was, the sooner she could get back to the real world.
She had to give it to him, though—he knew what he was doing. In a matter of minutes he’d cut his way through dense vegetation to another pyramid temple, this one even taller than the first. Familiar, almost. And from the base up the sloping length of the narrow temple steps, someone had worn out a faint path through the growth that coated almost every stone surface.
It was still a very long way up.
“You wait here,” Liam’s clone ordered. “Don’t move an inch from this spot until I come back down.”
Oh, yeah. He did have these odd notions of female competence—or incompetence. “Just watch me,” she said, and grabbed for the first handhold.
The unrestored steps were hardly steps at all, but they were adequate for the job. No different from climbing trees when she was a kid, really. She’d almost forgotten how much she loved sitting among the branches…
Her foot slipped on crumbling stone. A hard body stopped her backward slide; arms like rock closed around her waist.
“Don’t get yourself killed just yet,” he said, breath warm against her neck. “The view is more interesting than I’d expected.”
It took some effort, but she caught her balance just enough to pull free and start again. Her ears were burning. Just what was he trying to prove?
Jaw set, she scrambled the rest of the way without once backsliding. Feeling him right behind her was motive enough. Her body felt like a single live wire, still singing from that brief contact. What in hell was wrong with her?
That was one of several questions she couldn’t answer, but she didn’t propose to let him guess how off balance she felt.
When she gained the top of the stairs she knelt on the platform crowning the summit of the pyramid, exhausted but triumphant. Behind her was the temple proper with its gaping entrance and decorative carved comb on top. Below…
Below was the jungle. Jungle uncleared, with only a few faint paths visible between the pyramid temples that rose above the green. Temples that were far too impressive not to be well known and explored. Temples that were placed in a pattern identical to that of Tikal.