Part 7 (1/2)

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 saida””

He grabbed her shoulders in earnest. ”How do you know my middle name?”

”Homer told me. Ia””

”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 wasa”isa”mya”” 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 soa no, not easy, but possible to accept.

Accept that she'd somehow come back in time.

d.a.m.n, 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. ”Uha”I'm sorry, Mr. O'Shea. I haven't been explaining this well. If you could just”a”she wedged her hands upward against his arms, pus.h.i.+nga””just let me goa”

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. Nowa”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 toa 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 founda” 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, anda”” A memory jumped into her minda”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 timea 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 mea””

”Doubting you?” he said with elaborate sarcasm.

”Not at all. But you do intrigue me. You actually traveleda through time?”

”Yes.”

”Fascinating. 1997, you said? I'd be very interested in seeing this distant time of yours.” He showed a flash of white teeth. ”Now that we've becomea comrades, I'm sure you won't object to taking me with you when you return.”

This was just as bad as she'd thought. His deep, rough voice was honeyed with mockery. No time to lose your temper, Maca ”But that's the problem,” she said. ”This all happened by accidenta”that is, I don't know how it happened. I can't reproduce whatever I did toa do it the first time. I can't go back through. It doesn't work. I tried.”

He arched a brow. ”Then perhaps you can explain to me how this marvelousa pa.s.sage through time functions, and how it came to be here in the middle of the jungle?”

Oh, brother. This was the tricky part. Until now she'd been as sure as any other reasonable person that time travel didn't exist. She was by no means an expert on the theories, though Homer had known some physicists at Berkeley who'd been interested in the subject.

She sifted through memory for examples that would make sense to a man from the 1880s. H.G. Wells's first serialization of The Time Machine wouldn't be published for four more yearsa”from the ”now” she was in. But she remembered reading somewhere that the notion of time travel had been popular even before Wells.

”Harper's!” she said triumphantly. ”In 1856 they published an article about time travel, about a guy going into the future. I don't remember much about it, buta””

”Is that where you came up with these ideas?”

Mac refused to be baited. ”The concept isn't beyond you, I a.s.sume?”

”Miss MacKenzie, you may try my patience, but not my intelligence.”

”That's a start.” She chewed her lip. ”Come to think of it, there are lots of examples from your time and before. Stories about people who went into the future through dreams or suspended animation or even sleeping too long. But that isn't what happened to me. I didn't just stay the same while the world changed. Ia walked into the past.”