by Hazel Hunter
CONTENTS
Title
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Note from the Author
Copyright
WORDS OF LOVE
A Romance in the Ruins Novella
By Hazel Hunter
CHAPTER ONE
If the timing wasn’t right, Jesse knew she’d end up in the brown water. She perched at the bow of the Zodiac as Brett maneuvered them closer.
“Don’t go until I say go,” Brett called from the rear.
Jesse quickly turned and nodded.
The mud and water sped past them as Brett gunned the single outboard engine, fighting the river’s strong current. The embankment was steep and the jungle began immediately at its top. There was no room for error.
“Get ready,” Brett yelled.
Jesse stood up, one foot inside the hull and one on top of the inflatable round edge. She steadied herself with her left hand and held the rope in her right.
A month ago, she thought, if someone had told me I’d be on a river in the Guatemalan jungle, I’d have told them they were crazy.
She grinned.
It certainly felt crazy–but crazy good. Crazy–
“Go!” yelled Brett.
Quickly, Jesse stood on the rubbery edge. Although she was slim, it started to give under her weight. Before she could teeter, she jumped–and mostly got it right.
Both feet splashed into the water and, to her shock, she sank to her waist. She gasped and reflexively held her arms up to keep them clear of the water. It was moving so much faster than she’d thought from the boat. Now she understood the necessity of the orange life vests they wore. She immediately started for the embankment and felt the rope go taut.
“Give yourself some slack,” Brett yelled over the straining engine.
She let some rope slip through her hands but didn’t turn around. It took every bit of concentration to keep her footing. One small step after another, she moved toward the low embankment. As she got nearer, she moved more quickly and finally her waist rose out of the water, then her thighs and knees. In another few moments, she was standing in mud.
“Good girl!” Brett yelled.
She smiled and finally turned to him.
Leaning forward, with one hand on the throttle, the only thing he was missing was the leather jacket and fedora. His lightweight shirt and pants clung to him in the humidity. The life vest seemed dwarfed by his broad chest and shoulders. Through the opening in the middle, his shirt was open a few buttons. It’d been like that all day. Her eyes had repeatedly been drawn to the shadowed curves of his chest and then down to his tapered waist. His deeply blue eyes always seemed to glitter and his thick, blond hair was always perfectly touseled. Brett Delacourt wasn’t just the most handsome professor at school, he was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen.
He pointed up the embankment, snapping her out of her reverie.
“You’ll be safer up there,” he said, his other hand constantly moving the tiller to compensate for the current.
Right, she thought. Concentrate. She looked around her. He has nowhere to put the boat but this embankment.
She turned, found a less steep section, and climbed the slick slope. At the top, the rope was taut again.
“Good,” Brett called. “When I beach it, tie the rope around something as fast as you can. The bigger, the better.”
“Okay,” she said, and looked behind her.
“Here I come!” he yelled as she heard the engine whine.
The rope went slack in her hand and she dashed to the nearest tree, about two feet in diameter. Though she heard the boat bottom grate on the embankment below her, she didn’t turn to look. She quickly circled the tree a couple of times and then made a knot.
“Perfect!” Brett called.
Heart pounding and a little breathless, she watched as he turned off the engine. The river pulled at the back of the boat, turning it parallel to the shore, but the front stayed on the mud and the rope held it in place.
“Stay there,” Brett said. “This’ll just take me a few minutes.”
He turned off the engine and raised the rotor out of the water.
As her heart rate slowed, it finally occurred to her to look around.
In every direction, the jungle was thick. The further they’d come up the Pasión River, the narrower it had become and the denser the rainforest. But it wasn’t just any rainforest–it was the heart of the pre-Columbian Maya world.
She took a deep breath and slowly let it go. Words from the Popol Vuh, the creation story of the Maya sounded in her head.
Then, when the gods meditated, they knew that man must appear. They planned the creation, and the growth of the trees and the thickets and the birth of life and the creation of man. Thus it was arranged in the darkness and in the night by the Heart of Heaven.
Handwritten lines of sepia ink floated in front of her eyes as she quickly translated the archaic Spanish and their attempts to imitate Mayan K’iche.
“Jessica?” she heard Brett say.
He was standing directly below her and handing up her suitcase.
She blinked.
“Hi,” she said, quickly. “I mean here, let me take that.”
• • • • •
“You can take off the life vest,” Brett said as Jessica grasped the shiny, purple, hardshell luggage. “I’ll stow them with the boat.”
Her tennis shoes were nearly at his eye level and he couldn’t help but glance at them again. They should have been my first clue.
Brett looked up at Jessica as she hauled up the suitcase.
And the baggage should have been my second.
Actually, any number of things should have warned him. In his own department, it was a given that archaeologists did at least some fieldwork. In fact, it was a requirement for his students. But not so in art history, where Jessica was a grad student. Although she’d said in her emails that she’d been to the field, that couldn’t possibly be true–at least not in Central America.
Tennis shoes instead of boots?
A suitcase and not a backpack?
He watched her, off in her own world again. It gave him yet another opportunity to regret this whole idea.
He needed an epigrapher now, no doubt about it–someone who could translate the Mayan glyphs on the spot, as needed, and on the fly. And he couldn’t turn to any of his usual colleagues. That would be a mistake. He’d worked very hard to keep his discovery a complete secret and, up to this point, it was. The most fabulous archaeological discovery in memory was still unknown to the rest of the world. But he wasn’t going to make any progress without glyph translations and it wasn’t his specialty.
If he brought in any of the recognized authorities, word would spread like wildfire. Just the presence of an epigrapher on a site with him might be enough. But a student, and a girl at that, would only feed his growing reputation–false as it was.
He grimaced at the thought.
As she took off the vest, he couldn’t help but think that her cl
othes were the last indication of her lack of field experience, though he hardly needed another.
They were the clothes she wore at school, bulky and oversized, and too heavy for this weather. Instead of the usual baseball cap, she wore a canvas sun hat, like the ones you could buy in the airport. With the big glasses, the bandana around her neck, and the long sleeves and pants, the only skin that was exposed to the sun was her hands. He looked at them as he took her vest. They were so white that they were almost bright, even under the thick cloud cover overhead. He hoped she was using sunscreen.
He stowed the vests and took his backpack, stocked to the gills with supplies. All of his own gear was already at the site, accumulated and cached over the last few years. As he tied the vests down, he remembered the questions of the man where he’d rented the boat. Brett had been surprised that Jessica was as fluent in Spanish as he was but he had motioned to her not to answer the questions. He fielded them and there had been too many. Yet another reason to get this site guarded, excavated, and published. But not until he’d found what he was looking for–the thing that all Mayan archaeologists had been looking for.
He shouldered the pack as a few big drops of rain hit the boat with hollow thunking sounds.
Dammit.
Tropical Storm Angela had not cooperated. Even in the short time they’d been at the shore, the river had risen at least two inches. He glanced upstream. Somewhere to the north rain was falling–a lot of it. He’d known from the start it was going to be close. The swift and swollen river was higher than he’d ever seen it. They needed to get to the site–fast.
He climbed the embankment and checked the knot in the rope. He gave it an extra yank and felt it tighten. When he turned to Jessica, she was smiling. Actually, she never seemed to stop smiling. Here in the mud, with a hard rain beginning, and already a day of travel behind them, she was smiling. And though he was used to the female students doing exactly that, it wasn’t one of those ‘please notice me’ smiles. She was happy. Her eyes said it, even through the thick glasses. Although he usually didn’t encourage students–his reputation did enough of that–he couldn’t help but smile back at her.
Thunder rumbled overhead and they both looked up at the sky.
“This was to punish them,” she said.
He stared at her.
“Because they had not thought of their mother,” she continued, still looking up. “Nor their father, the Heart of Heaven. The face of the earth was darkened and a black rain began to fall, by day and by night.”
That had to be the Popol Vuh again. She quoted it the way English majors quoted Shakespeare.
As another peal of thunder erupted, he glanced back at the boat–last chance to ditch this whole idea and go back.
He’d brought an inexperienced student to the Petén jungle, in the middle of the season’s first tropical storm. Obsession, his wife had called it.
Ex-wife, he corrected himself.
The rain suddenly started to come down in sheets.
“Stay right behind me,” he said, as he pushed into the foliage.
CHAPTER TWO
Brett could move fast.
As her suitcase bumped along behind her, Jesse struggled to keep up. The rising wind was blowing the rain nearly horizontal. It stung, even through the clothes.
At one point, she’d nearly lost him. He turned around regularly to check on her and had even tried to take her suitcase for her.
She’d been mortified. That was the last thing she wanted–to have Professor Brett Delacourt think she couldn’t handle her own stuff. But through the rain spattered glasses and growing darkness, she’d looked up at one point and saw only trees. She’d broken into a run and then tripped only to find him helping her up in the pelting rain and then he’d tried to carry her luggage. She’d insisted on taking it herself.
Now she wondered if that’d been wise. It felt like an anchor.
The canopy above them was nearly black, lit only occasionally by flashes of lightning, which was happening with greater frequency. The tops of the impossibly tall trees swayed violently.
Below her feet she saw that they were on some kind of muddy path. It was almost a small stream with all the water running down it.
She was breathing harder than she had in her entire life. The humidity was stifling. Trekking in the jungle was something that yoga hadn’t prepared her for, but she kept an eye on the yellow trim of Jason’s backpack. He seemed to know exactly where he was going.
All she had to do was keep up.
• • • • •
They had to be close now, Brett thought, but the storm was hiding the usual visual cues. The great mound was barely visible in the dense forest at the best of times. This had to be the path. There was only one. Even Tropical Storm Angela didn’t change that.
And what a storm it was. He’d never seen one this bad. He’d been in the field since his undergrad days and he’d never seen anything like this.
Monsoon–a huge one.
Again he cursed himself and turned to check on Jessica. She was struggling, he could see it, but she wouldn’t let him help. Instead, she dragged the suitcase and kept her feet moving.
The wind was driving the rain into them and they were both panting. The uphill climb on the slick path was getting steeper. But they were nearly on top of the site. Just a little further to go.
“Almost there,” he yelled to her over the thunder, just as the jungle lit up all around them and the air exploded.
Almost as though it were a strobe effect, he watched as Jessica was hurled forward. A tree, about ten yards behind her near the path, burst into pieces as Brett realized what was happening.
Lightning strike.
Jessica thudded into his chest. He instinctively grabbed her and held tight as he landed on his backpack with a grunt. His eyes had shut tight against the sudden glare but he snapped them open as they rolled awkwardly off the backpack to their sides. They landed on the ground with a splash.
He looked down at her.
“Jessica, are you okay?”
He saw her blink through the glasses, though they sat askew on her face. He kept hold of her, even though they were on the ground.
“Jessica!” he tried again, shaking her a little. Rain was streaming over her face but she shakily pushed her glasses up her nose. “Are you okay?” he said.
She slowly nodded.
He wasn’t sure if that was true but he hoped so. They needed to get out of this storm. The path where they lay had turned into a creek.
“We’ve got to go,” he said, as he let her go.
He stood up, a little shaky himself. Then he reached down under both her arms and pulled her up to stand. She wobbled for a moment but straightened her hat and then started looking for something–her suitcase.
They saw it at the same time, lying in the path, almost covered with muddy water. As she turned to fetch it, Brett saw her back. The fabric was singed.
“Oh my god,” he said but she hadn’t heard in the downpour and the wind.
• • • • •
Jesse’s retinas still glowed with the lightning flash but she sloshed to the luggage and found the handle. She heaved it to its wheels and turned.
Brett was staring at her but there was hardly time to notice. Behind him, from upslope, something was coming. Something white, moving fast.
She wanted to say something, scream for him to move, but her throat was frozen. He was reaching out to her now and, as he extended his hand, she grabbed it.
As she dove off the path, she tugged him with her, off balance.
A white wall of boiling water surged past their feet, down the hill, as they fell into the thick foliage of the jungle floor. In moments, Brett was up and screaming something. The ringing in her ears made it impossible to understand the words but the look on his face was enough.
They were in trouble.
CHAPTER THREE
Now or never, he thought, as energy flooded through him.
&
nbsp; Run or die.
Jessica had only just got to her feet when he grabbed her arm and took off. He crashed through the soaked thicket to the left of the path that was now a boiling creek. As though nothing weighed him down, he ran upward. The ground cover was making for better traction than the path.
I should have thought of that before!
He felt the weight of Jessica’s arm in his hand and didn’t have to stop to check on her. He drug her along–crashing upward, forward, through and over the thicket.
There it is!
The mouth of the cave was just a dim smudge against the dark mound but there it was!
Lightning flashed above them and he felt Jessica jerk.
He had his arm around her waist now and was running, lifting her off the ground. He had no idea how long he ran like that but finally they were at the mound. His thighs burned but the sensation only propelled him harder. With a final push, he took the narrow, switchback path up to the left, then back right, and then onto the ledge in front of the cave.
Suddenly, they were inside.
Finally he slowed as the darkness of the interior overtook them. He knew without having to see it that the camp was only several yards away. As he doubled over in heaving grunts, trying to get his breath, he let Jessica go. He put his hands on his knees and shut his eyes.
That had been close.
A sudden chill of fear ran through him and he realized he was still wearing the backpack. He quickly stood and shrugged it off. It hit the stone floor with a thud. As he put his hands on his hips, still breathing hard, he looked at Jessica. But it was too dark to make her out.
Feeling in front of him, he found the table with the propane lantern on it. He quickly lit it and the campground appeared in front of them.
The cavern was enormous, fading into black almost immediately. The green canvas tent was next to the wall, off to the right. It was a tall freestanding field tent. He’d gotten tired of hunching over in the little camping domes.
“Home sweet–” he had started to say as he turned to her.
