“You were beautiful, a bird just learning to fly.” His voice was like a stroke, his eyes hot with memories.
“That was years ago,” she said. “The pictures are now.”
Hunter measured Mercurio like an undertaker sizing up future business.
Lina’s dark eyes watched the other man, hoping he would accept that she had long outgrown her crush on her father’s handsome assistant.
“People are dead because of those artifacts,” Hunter said. “We don’t want any more deaths on our hands.”
But his tone said he wouldn’t mind some of Mercurio’s blood on his knuckles.
Mercurio studied the photographs again, his mouth flat rather than seductive. “Were they found together?”
“At the Texas-Mexico border,” Hunter said. “Where they’d been before that is unknown.”
“I can’t tell you anything Lina can’t.” Mercurio shrugged. “They came from Reyes Balam land.”
She started to protest.
Hunter cut across her. “What is their function?”
“Religious,” Mercurio said. “Specifically, sacrificial. The quality of the knife, the scepter, the mask, the Chacmool, the incense burner—it all speaks of priest-kings communicating with gods. If there ever was a cult of Kawa’il, these goods belonged to its high priest.”
“Why couldn’t they have come from Belize?” Lina asked.
“I have several digs in Belize, most of them close to historic villages, places where traders came from the Yucatan peninsula to conduct business. Two of my digs are deeper in the jungle. Some of the sites have wall paintings. There is even one—just one—with the sigil of Kawa’il.”
Lina’s breath came in and stayed.
“The sigil is on the order of Mexico City graffiti,” Mercurio said, shrugging. “It is a crude statement that someone was there at some time with some paint. I’ve never found artifacts of high quality produced on any post– Terminal Classic site in Belize. Everything I’ve found is crude, made in the shadow of Yucatec memories by untrained people who barely survived the onslaught of the Spanish. The people who lived there were Maya, yes, but they had no greatness left in them. Like the villages today. Their gods are gone, and it shows in the poor rubble of their lives.”
“Yet you have that scrap of paper,” Hunter said. “Paper is the product of a high civilization.”
“Or the remnant of what once was,” Mercurio said. “If the scrap is from Belize, it was carried there.” He looked up from the photos, took Lina’s chin lightly in his hand, and turned her to face him.
Hunter eased forward, ready to deck the touchy-feely archaeologist.
“If I’d found artifacts as good as those in your photos,” Mercurio said, “I’d have quit my post and started my own foundation. Money to sponsor my digs would have flooded in.
“If we knew, we wouldn’t be here,” she said, stepping away from his grasp. “Thank you for your time.” She turned to Hunter. “We’d better go. My family will be impatient to meet you.”
Mercurio finally seemed to get the message. The look he gave Hunter was as hard as a blade.
“Thanks for showing us around, Dr. de la Poole,” Hunter said, hand extended.
Mercurio grasped it angrily. “Of course.”
This time Hunter didn’t hold back his grip.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
OUTSIDE, THE SUN WAS A MEMORY AND DARKNESS REAL. Lina and Hunter walked down the pathway, casting strange shadows from the knee-level lighting. No voices came to their ears. Nothing moved farther back in the landscaping.
“Old boyfriend?” Hunter asked blandly.
“Don’t start.” Lina all but snarled into the night. “Sometimes I wonder what goes through Mercurio’s head.”
“I don’t. He wanted you sweaty and horizontal.”
She grimaced. “In his dreams. By the time he noticed me sexually, I had outgrown my crush on him.”
“Bad timing.”
“In hindsight, it was brilliant.”
Hunter’s arm slid around her shoulders. “Yeah.”
She turned toward him and started to say something.
His mouth came down and suddenly Hunter was all Lina knew, all she
“I want you naked,” he said against her mouth.
“And horizontal?” she teased. But it sounded more like a suggestion.
“Any way I can get you, including straight up.”
“Like an ice-cream cone?”
“You change your mind about being shy?” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking about it. A lot.”
He shuddered when Lina’s tongue caressed up his neck and along his jawline, pausing over the dent in his chin. He lifted her until her legs were wrapped around his hips and his cock rubbed against her hot, moist center.
“Yeah, just like an ice-cream cone,” he said roughly. “I wanted to lick you all over last night, but I was afraid you’d bolt.”
“That was last night.”
“And now?”
“You make me adventurous.”
A door slammed somewhere behind them. Reluctantly Hunter allowed Lina to slide down his body until she was standing so close to him he could feel her hard nipples against his chest. He breathed out roughly.
“Car,” he said.
For a moment all Lina could think about was getting closer to him. Naked close. Then reality came like a cold rain.
“I’ll drive,” she said huskily. “The last part of the road is confusing if you don’t know your way, especially in the dark.” She shivered despite the warmth of the night and the heat of the man so close to her. “What you do to me should be illegal.”
“Not yet. We’ll get to that part later tonight.”
“My family is old-fashioned.”
“So am I.” He smiled, a flash of white in the darkness. “I’ve always wanted to climb up a trellis to a woman’s second-floor bedroom.”
“Naked?”
“Only after I get inside.”
Lina laughed. She wanted to kiss Hunter again, but didn’t trust herself. So she turned to the Bronco waiting out front. By the time she got in and fastened her seat belt, she could almost take a full breath again.
Almost.
If she didn’t look at Hunter’s lap.
She turned the key and drove onto the highway. Within minutes, the colorful lights of Pueblo Tulum had been replaced by the occasional eerie flash of animal eyes reflected in the Bronco’s headlights along the roadside. Shrines loomed and vanished like random ghosts congealing from the shadows of the jungle.
Eventually Lina turned off the highway onto a series of roads that became more and more narrow until they unraveled into tangle of dirt tracks and semipaved lanes.
