—Written by Quint Parker, a freelance writer and photojournalist, who spends way too much time sweating in the Mexican jungle amidst the Maya ruins when he’s not running from man-eating mosquitoes.
Angélica set aside the printout of Quint’s article, chuckling about his bio at the end. As much as she didn’t want to concede defeat to the word wizard, her dad had been right to let Quint win the game they’d started on their initial trek into Site 5. She’d definitely enjoyed celebrating his win with him last night after they’d made it home. Clothes had gone flying in her haste to touch, taste, and show him how much she’d missed being alone with him for the last few weeks.
She pulled her thoughts away from last night’s amorous entanglement and returned to Quint’s article. In just a few thousand words, Mr. Big-time Photojournalist had summed up their time at the dig site, wrapping their accomplishments in a nice, professional bow. He’d glossed over their frustrations while including just enough details about their field work without mentioning a peep about the shock and horror they’d experienced at the end.
The bat-house was not somewhere she wanted to revisit anytime soon. KuTu had used the whistle of death to close the wall, making Quint stay far away just to be safe. Then they’d nailed together some wood to cover the hole in the floor leading down to the sacrificial chamber. To try to keep future trespassers out of the ruin, they’d piled stones to the ceiling in the entrance and redirected some living vines so that they would grow down over the front of the structure again.
As for the rest of the site, they’d buttoned it up as best they could, burying the skulls that had been piled in front of the wall, and removing any means to get inside the site. Now all they could do was wait to see if someone tried to go over the wall.
She settled into one of the two lounge chairs on her back deck and stared out over the dark Caribbean toward the reddish-orange horizon. The sun was going to pop up in the east within a half hour and start its trek across the sky. The waves below were painted with mauve and deep yellow as they tumbled onto the pale sand.
It was good to be back home enjoying beach sunrises, cool ocean breezes, and a soft, cushy bed under a steady ceiling fan. A cold drink in the evening with a hot demon at her side was the cherry on the top.
The screen door opened and Quint stepped out, carrying two glasses of iced coffee.
Yum!
Dressed only in his swim trunks, which were still clearly damp from a pre-dawn dip in the warm water, he was offering an abundance of bare skin for her to admire.
Quint paused to stare at the sunrise for a moment before handing her a glass and settling onto the lounger next to her. “So beautiful,” he said, taking a drink of coffee.
She agreed. “I love how the waves turn pink just before the sun comes up.”
He looked her way, his gaze traveling slowly south down over her white crocheted swimsuit coverup before returning topside. “I wasn’t talking about the sunrise.”
“You’re such a smooth operator, Prince Charming.” She took a sip of the cold, creamy liquid, tasting the Maya chocolate Quint liked to stir in for a bit of complex flavor. “So delicious.” She made a point of slowly licking her upper lip as he watched. “And I wasn’t talking about the coffee.”
In the soft morning light, his sexy beard stubble and dark eyelashes had her libido waking up, bright eyed and bushy tailed. But it was that devilish smile of his that pulled the rug out from under her heart every damned time.
“You’re sitting too far away from me, sweetheart,” he said. “I need to touch some bare skin to fully enjoy the sunrise with my morning coffee.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Or you could just take everything off, come over here, and let me get handsy.”
“How will me naked make the sunrise better?”
He scoffed. “Who gives a damned about the sun? It just keeps coming up day after day.”
She thumbed behind her. “You’re forgetting that Dad will see us through the kitchen window.”
“No, he won’t. He said he needed to work out some kinks after all the hard work he did over the last few days and took Rover for a walk down to the bakery at the end of the road. He’s bringing us back some scones andbuñuelos.”
She blinked in surprise. “He really took my javelina on a walk?”
Angélica had picked up Rover from Teodoro’s place in Coba on the trip home from Site 5 yesterday, intending to start sharing custody of the javelina with Teodoro and María now that she had anoutdoor area fenced and prepped just for her not-a-dog pet. Teodoro had been working on leash-training Rover before they’d started work at Site 5, and now the javelina would squeal and spin when shown the leash.
“You meanourjavelina,” Quint corrected. “You may have found baby Rover in the jungle, but if you’ll remember, I was his part-time babysitter from early on, sharing my tent with the little guy, teaching him to fetch your pink bra for me so I could snuggle with it on lonely nights.”
She laughed. “You did not train Rover to do that.”
“Let’s just say I encouraged his fetching behavior with multiple rewards of María’s homemade tortillas.”
NowthatAngélica could believe. “I’m shocked that Dad is finally getting over his ‘the javelina is not a pet’ mindset. It’s almost as surprising as Mom somehow changing places with Fernel.”
Quint swallowed a gulp of his coffee. “At least we don’t have to worry about your mom seeingeverythinganymore.”
“Yeah, but I’m still struggling to wrap my mind around what happened.” She smiled out at the pale pink hues now filling the horizon. “But I’m happy as hell to have her back in my life—I mean ‘him’ in my life.” She shook her head. “This is going to be hard to get used to.”
“What is? The fact that your mother is somehow alive again, or that she is in the host body of a forty-ish male who we now know had shit-tons of money probably earned from selling looted treasures on the antiquities black market?”
“It’s surreal, all of it.” Angélica rubbed her finger down the cold sweat on the outside of her glass. “And I still don’t understand where the real Dr. Fernel went, even though KuTu explained his theoryaboutCamazotzstealing Dr. Fernel’s life force and leaving a vortex-like vacuum at the moment that somehow sucked in Mom’s ghost.”
