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 his 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.