Wedded in a Whirlwind. Liz Fielding
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the message home.
‘I knew the temples were there…’—She knew!—‘…and I was determined to prove it. Now you can read for yourself what I had to endure to discover the terrible truth behind the sacrificial stone…’
‘Give me strength,’ he muttered as he attempted to get his head around what he was seeing. And then, when he did, something painful squeezed at his chest and his mouth dried. She hadn’t simply taken the chance to make a heap of money using his diaries, his work.
He could have understood the temptation and, wrapped in her hot thighs, he might even have forgiven her. But there was another smaller photograph of Fliss and Felipe Dominez, Cordillera’s playboy Minister of Tourism, snapped as they’d left one of London’s fashionable nightclubs. She was wearing a dress that left little to the imagination and they were exchanging the kind of intimate look shared only by two people who knew one another very well.
So the only question left unanswered was when had Dominez and Fliss met?
Had it been by chance on one of her little excursions into town for supplies? Had Dominez sought her out and made her an offer she couldn’t possibly refuse?
Or had he been set up from the very start?
It wasn’t that unusual for postgraduate archaeology students to turn up out of the blue, having paid their own way to the site. They needed field experience to boost their CVs and he needed all the help he could get. The fact that Fliss Grant had a mouth, a body, as hot as sin that she’d been willing and eager to share with him had just made having her around that much more pleasurable.
No, he decided. This hadn’t been chance. The speed with which she’d achieved publication suggested that it was the culmination of a well thought out and efficiently executed plan.
Fliss Grant, it seemed, had ‘endured’ and ‘endured’ in order to get her hands on his diaries, his notes, his photographs and why would he be surprised by that? Women, as he was well aware, would endure anything to get what they wanted.
Not that she’d actually used any direct quotes, but then why would she bother? This publishing venture had nothing to do with dry scholarship.
He had no doubt that some hack, paid by Dominez, had ghosted this fairy tale from the bones of his excavation diaries, just as someone had been paid to make sketches from his photographs, producing an impression of the temple complex peopled with priests and sacrificial figures that had more in common with a fifties Hollywood epic than reality.
Not that he’d been credited in any way.
From this account, anyone would think Fliss had excavated the temple single-handed, enough to warn anyone with an atom of common sense that this was all hokum. But then this was straight out of the ‘God was an astronaut’ school of archaeology.
As he scanned the prurient accounts of priestly rites, he knew he should be grateful that his name had been omitted from this tabloid version of the temple’s history with its sexed-up versions of the images carved into the stone walls. The ‘naked virgins’, ‘bloody sacrifice’ scenarios, the sexual innuendo, were not something he’d want his name attached to.
But somehow, at that moment, gratitude of any kind was beyond him. This rubbish would reduce him to a laughing stock within the academic archaeological world and, without a word, he reached for the bottle of local brandy that Rob pushed in his direction.
It was unbelievably hot. No temple, no matter how ancient, was worth this kind of suffering, Manda decided, wiping the back of her arm across her forehead to mop up the sweat.
‘Come along, keep up,’ the guide called, with an imperious gesture. ‘There’s a lot more to see.’
He was evidently new to the job and hadn’t quite got the customer service thing nailed.
Since rebellion in the ranks was apparently unthinkable, he didn’t wait to ensure that he was obeyed but plunged further along the path in the direction of yet more ruins, his charges meekly trailing after him. Well, most of them.
Manda was not meek. Far from it. And she’d already had enough of this particular ancient civilisation to last her a lifetime.
Refusing to move another yard, she sank on to a huge fallen chunk of dressed stone that someone, long ago, had started to chisel into a representation of some beast. He’d evidently given up halfway through his task and if it had been a day like this, he had her sympathy.
She leaned forward, unfastening another button of a limp linen shirt that had not been designed for this kind of sweaty exertion, flapping the two edges to encourage what air there was to circulate and cool her damp skin.
Next time she grabbed the first flight on offer to the Far East, she’d take more notice of where she was going. Cordillera, she’d been assured when she’d called the booking agency, was going to be the next ‘big’ destination. She had caught part of a chat show interview with some impossibly glamorous female archaeologist who’d written a book about how she’d personally—and apparently entirely unaided—uncovered some ancient civilisation on the island, so maybe it was true.
Not really her thing; she’d been more interested in promises of unspoiled palm-fringed coves and white sand. Unspoiled was a euphemism for a lack of amenities, she discovered. They were trying, but the ‘resort’ at which she was staying was, so far, little more than a construction site.
Normally one look would have been enough. She’d have turned right around and caught the next plane out of there, flown on to somewhere where luxury was guaranteed.
But she’d cut and run from feelings she couldn’t handle, had told herself she didn’t care where she was going and, having stuck the equivalent of a metaphorical pin in the map, fate had brought her here.
Maybe this was fate’s idea of a joke but it had fulfilled a major part of her desire to be out of contact and its awfulness had, somehow, seemed exactly right.
But the lack of facilities, and an airport blockbuster that hadn’t lived up to its blurb, had left her bored enough to break the habit of a lifetime and allow herself to be persuaded by a representative from the tourist office, eager to promote the island, that it was something of a privilege to be one of the first outsiders to see the ruins. A real adventure. Something she’d tell all her friends about when she got home.
She hadn’t been totally convinced but at the time anything had seemed better than sitting alone with nothing but her thoughts for company.
Big mistake, she thought, pushing back damp strands of hair that were sticking to her forehead and pulling a face. Unfortunately, thirty miles inland, halfway up the side of a mountain on a route march around the seemingly endless maze of what they had been assured were the ancient temples and palaces, it was too late to change her mind.
Jago had been sitting on the altar stone for what felt like hours still holding the bottle of local brandy that Rob had slid across the bar, muttering, ‘On the house, mate…’
One more season was all he’d needed and then, come the next rains, he’d have returned to London and published his findings in the academic journals. Written a book that would never have made the bestseller list. There was nothing here sensational enough for that. No treasure. No startling revelations.
He wasn’t interested in sensationalism, bestseller lists, anything that would expose him to the glare of celebrity. If he’d wanted them, they could have been his for the asking any time in the last fifteen years.
All he’d wanted was to drop out of sight and lose himself in the work he loved.
He looked down at the bottle in his hand and finally broke the seal.
* * *
For a while Manda remained where she was, perched on her stone, quite content to wait until the rest of her party returned, idly tracing the outline of the half-finished figure with the tip of her finger. It was the head of a bird, she realised, a hawk of some kind, and she glanced up at a