Beautiful Sacrifice

from his pocket. She started to say something about how hot he was, then told herself to stop teasing the jaguar.
    But it’s such fun.
    Beneath the scraped-back hair and jungle wear, Lina felt more female than she ever had in her life.
    “Where are we going?” Hunter asked as she unlocked the Bronco.
    “First, the Cenote de Balam, or Jaguar Cenote, as Philip calls it,” she said. “Then to a very special place I’ve never taken anyone.”
    “Breakfast along the way?” Hunter asked hopefully.
    “In my backpack. The canteen clipped to the bottom is coffee. I ate while I was throwing stuff together.”
    “Beautiful, sexy, intelligent, and understanding,” Hunter said, smiling wolfishly as he released and opened the canteen.
    “I’ll remind you of that when I irritate you.”
    Hunter was too busy swigging coffee to answer. But hewinked.
    “There’s a good limestone-paved walkway to the cenote from the compound,” Lina said, “but I don’t want to meet anyone. The villagers and workers use that path.”
    He grunted something agreeable around a mouthful of pork, chiles, and hard-boiled eggs wrapped in yesterday’s corn tortillas. Four more fat bundles just like it waited for him in the backpack. He was hungry enough to eat every one.
    “What about your cousin’s artifacts?” Hunter asked between bites.
    “Gorgeous. Echoes of Kawa’il. Nothing close to what we’re looking for.”
    “Did he say anything useful?”
    “Not to me.”
    On either side of the long estate driveway, elegantly spaced and manicured gardens flowed by. Before Hunter finished his second tortilla, she turned the Bronco onto what looked like a maintenance road. Moments later they were deep in the jungle. Untamed, unmanaged, raw with life. The jungle had a different kind of allure than the estate, the beauty of single moments framed in every shade of green—a bird flashing through a shaft of sunlight, a butterfly resting with blue incandescence on a white flower, the sudden rush and screech of howler monkeys passing overhead.
    The sun filtered through the intertwined growth of the canopy, enclosing the Bronco in a living green world. As the trees grew bigger, the spaces between them increased, though the sunlight didn’t. Despite the overwhelming shade, the inside of the vehicle got hot, then hotter.
    Hunter barely noticed. He expected heat in the Yucatan, even in December. It was the cool days that surprised people. But here, as in Texas, winter was being real slow about chasingsummer from the land.
    “Does the estate get its water from the cenote?” he asked as he swallowed the last bite of breakfast. “Or from cisterns during the wet?”
    “Cisterns. Nearly all of Quintana Roo sits on a limestone shelf. Water flows through it, rather than being held back or pushed to the surface by denser, less water-soluble rock. During the wet season, rain fills the underground cisterns we’ve built. In the old days, the dry season was difficult, especially after the Maya fell and the ancient cisterns and canals fell apart.”
    “So you don’t use the cenote at all?”
    She shook her head. “Not anymore. We just drill down into the limestone ‘sponge’ to reach freshwater stored in stone from rainfall. You don’t drill too far, though. Close to the sea, freshwater floats on top of saltwater. It’s easy to punch right through to undrinkable stuff.”
    “And if you don’t have a well?” Hunter asked. He enjoyed watching the relaxation and anticipation that spread through Lina with every minute away from the estate.
    “Then you go to the nearest cenote, dip out water, and carry it back up the path. You’ll see signs of the old trail worn into solid limestone around Cenote de Balam. The trail is older than local memories, far older than Bishop Landa and his soldiers.” She downshifted deftly and whipped around a washout. “The actual word isn’t ‘cenote.’ It’s dznot . The Spanish mangled the Mayan word.”
    “Pretty much what they did to the natives.”
    “Oh, the natives were good at going to hell all by themselves. But yes, there wasn’t a whole lot of cross-cultural understanding, then or now.”
    Laughing at the dry understatement, Hunter handed hera bottle of water.
    She braced the wheel with her knees and one hand and drank. A thin line of water dribbled down her chin and dampened the khaki blouse above one breast, slowly revealing the dark shadow of a nipple.
    Hunter forced himself to think of someone who