that he would regret it, but completely unable to help himself. There was something about this woman that just got under his skin.
‘Mother Nature?’ she offered. ‘I was simply standing on a footpath, quietly minding my own business, when the ground opened up beneath me and I fell through your roof. As I believe I’ve already mentioned, while you were busy drowning your sorrows there was an earthquake.’
‘An earthquake?’ He frowned. Wished he hadn’t. ‘A genuine, honest-to-God earthquake?’
‘It seemed very real to me.’
‘Not just a tremor?’
‘Not a tremor. I was in Brazil last year when there was a tremor,’ she explained. ‘I promise you this was the real deal.’
Jago fumbled in his pocket for a box of matches. As he struck one, it flared briefly, for a moment blinding him with the sudden brightness so near to his face, but as his eyes adjusted to the light, he stared around, momentarily speechless at the destruction that surrounded him.
The outside walls of the temple, with their stone carvings, had been pushed inward and the floor that he had spent months digging down through the debris of centuries to clear was now little more than rubble.
The woman was right. It would have taken a serious earthquake to have caused this much damage.
It had, all in all, been one hell of a day.
A small anguished sound caught his attention and he turned to his unwelcome companion, temporarily forgotten as he had surveyed the heartbreaking destruction of the centuries-old temple complex built by a society whose lives he had devoted so much time to understanding. Reconstructing.
He swore and dropped the match as it burned down to his fingers.
The darkness after the brief flare of light seemed, if anything, more intense, thicker, substantial enough to cut into slices and in a moment of panic he groped in the box for another match.
It was empty.
There was a new carton somewhere, but his supplies were stored at the far end of the temple. And the far end of the temple, as he’d just seen, was no more…
‘We’re trapped, aren’t we?’
Her voice had, in that instant of light, lost all that assured bravado.
‘Of course we’re not trapped,’ he snapped back. The last thing he needed was hysterics. ‘I just need a minute to figure the best way out.’
‘There isn’t one. I saw—’
Too late. Her voice was rising in panic and his own clammy moment of fear was still too close to risk her going over the edge and taking him with her.
‘Shut up and let me think.’
She gave a juddering little hiccup as she struggled to obey him, to control herself, but he forced himself to ignore the instinct to reach out, hold her, comfort her.
She’d said she’d been standing on the path, presumably the one leading to the acropolis, but she couldn’t have been alone.
‘How did you get up here?’ His voice was sharper this time, demanding an answer.
‘I told you,’ she said. ‘By bus.’
His head still hurt like hell, but the realisation that he was caught up in the aftermath of an earthquake had done much to concentrate his mind. He’d broken the seal on the bottle of brandy, but the minute the liquor had touched his lips he’d set it down, recognising the stupidity of drinking himself into oblivion.
That was what Rob had done when his yacht had gone down in a storm. Was still doing. Washed up on the beach and pretty much a wreck himself…
‘What kind of bus?’ he demanded. ‘Nobody lives up here.’ The locals avoided the area, ancient folk memory keeping them well away from the place.
‘Not a local bus. I was on a sightseeing trip.’
He grunted.
A sightseeing trip. Of course.
The government was trying attract tourism investment, but Cordillera would be hard pushed to compete with the other established resorts of the Far East unless there was something else, something different to tempt the jaded traveller.
The ruins of a sexed-up ancient civilisation would do as well as anything. And once the finance was fixed, the resorts built, the visitors would flood in.
He hadn’t wanted hordes of tourists trampling about the place disturbing his work. As archaeological director of the site he had the authority to keep them out and he’d used it.
He’d seen the damage that could be done, knew that once there was a market for artefacts, it wouldn’t be long before the locals would forget their fear and start digging up the forest for stuff, chiselling chunks of their history to sell to tourists.
He’d known that sooner or later he would be overruled, but in the meantime he’d kept everything but the bare bones of his discoveries to himself, delaying publication for as long as possible.
Impatient for results he could exploit to his advantage, it seemed that Felipe Dominez had looked for another way.
‘I hadn’t realised that we were already on the tourist route,’ he said bitterly.
‘I don’t think you are,’ she assured him. ‘If a trade delegation whose flight was delayed hadn’t been shanghaied into taking the trip, it would have been me, a couple of dozen other unfortunates who believed that Cordillera was going to be the next big thing and the driver-cum-tour-guide. Why the business people bothered I can’t imagine.’
‘I can,’ he said sourly, ‘if the alternative was the doubtful comforts of the airport departure lounge.’
‘Maybe, but at least there they’d be sure someone was going to try and dig them out of the rubble. Here—’
He didn’t think it wise to let her dwell on what was likely to be her fate ‘here’.
‘What happened to the rest of your party?’ he cut in quickly.
‘It was hot and sticky and I was suffering from a severe case of ancient culture fatigue so I decided to sit out the second half of the tour. When the ground opened up and swallowed me I was on my own.’
‘But you’ll be missed?’
‘Will I?’ Manda asked.
In the panic she knew it was unlikely. Even supposing anyone else had survived. They could easily have suffered the same fate as she had and she was unbelievably lucky not to have been buried beneath tons of debris… Maybe. That would at least have been quick.
Trapped down here, the alternative might prove to be a lot worse, she thought, and dug what was left of her nails into the palms of her hands.
Breathe…
‘I suppose that eventually
