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.
“Listen,” she said. “I’ll spell it out as cogently as I can, but you’re going to have to accept that it’s not going to sound rational or reasonable.”
His lip curled. “Don’t be concerned, Mac. I’ve become accustomed to your insanity.”
She winced. “Okay. I really did come to Tikal as a tourist, with a bunch of other tourists. I wasn’t part of a group, though. I was exploring the ruins there when an Indian guide offered to show me something interesting. He cut me a path through the jungle to this place.
“Right after I arrived, my guide disappeared. I decided to explore anyway, and went into the temple, where I found the tunnel. I’d been walking quite a few minutes when I hit the glyph wall, and found…” She caught her breath and slowed down again. She wasn’t about to bring up the bones, or all the implications of that discovery. She wasn’t ready to deal with it herself.
“I, uh, ran into the wall and started feeling very dizzy, almost sick. I leaned against the wall, and—” A memory jumped into her mind—of holding her own pendant and Liam’s in either hand, pressing her fists against the wall just before it disappeared. The flash of an idea teased her mind and then was gone. “A few seconds later the wall vanished. I was disoriented, and I couldn’t find the wall again, so I just started the way I thought was out. And ran into you.”
Liam regarded her blankly. “Very interesting, but hardly enlightening.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But that isn’t the punch line. When I went into that tunnel, the date was August 15, 1997. And when I came out, as you told me, it was 1884.” She faced him squarely. “In short, I walked through that tunnel and traveled from the future into the past. One hundred and thirteen years. From my time… into yours.”
His expression went through a series of transformations that were almost alarming. “Let me get this straight. You claim to have come from the next century?”
“I know it sounds weird.” She smiled crookedly and clasped her hands, hoping that she seemed both earnest and sane. “It’s hard enough for me to accept. I don’t blame you for, um, doubting me—”
“Doubting you?” he said with elaborate sarcasm.
“Not at all. But you do intrigue me. You actually traveled… through time?”