McCall’s heart was a red-hot hammer in his chest by the time he boosted Ellie over the topmost block of the wall. He hoisted himself the last two feet and crouched there, listening to the scraping sounds she made going down the other side, then the definite but controlled thump of her landing. Darkness was almost upon them now; he couldn’t see a thing beyond the ruined wall but rain…and more rain.

“Ellie?” he said hoarsely-a muted shout in all that noise. Hearing no response, he dropped over the side of the wall and after a bumping, scraping but thankfully short descent, felt the reasuring smoothness of stone under his feet. And Ellie touching him, one hand reaching for him, clutching at the leg of his jeans. “You okay?” he croaked, feeling oddly lightheaded-with relief, he imagined. “Hey-let’s get the hell out of here. Looks like it’s clear-” He took a step.

With a strangled cry, Ellie wrapped her arms around his knees. He gave a startled yelp of his own and pitched forward, face first, into darkness. He put out his arms to break his fall, expecting to break one of them in the process, or a wrist, at least. Instead-and even more horrifying-his hands met…nothing. Just emptiness. Thin air.

“McCall-” He could hear Ellie’s sobbing breaths. Her arms felt like a vise around his legs. “Hold on,” she was whimpering. “Please…hold on.”

“I’m holding, I’m holding,” he managed, grinding sounds into words through clenched teeth as, using muscles he hadn’t even known about, he fought to bring his upper body back onto solid ground. When he caught a handhold-a vine? A root?-pain shot through his arm and shoulder and down into his back and ribs, taking his breath. Ignoring it-after all, what was one more pulled muscle, more or less?-he gritted his teeth and pulled himself onto the stone ledge where Ellie was lying flat on her belly, arms still wrapped in a death-grip around his knees.

“Hey, you can let go now,” he said gently as he rolled over and lay back, propped on his elbows, breathing hard. And after a moment, looking around him at the darkness and rain. “What the hell is this? Some kind of well?” How calm he sounded, denying his hammering pulse and the chilling residue of adrenaline.

“I think it’s a cenote,” Ellie said in a cracked, unsteady voice, shifting around so that she was facing him, on her knees. “I’ve read about them. That’s a collapsed cave-collapsed, then flooded. There are a lot of them around here. They must have used it as a cistern.”

“I know what they are.” There was less rain and wind here, in the shelter of the wall. He could feel her reach for him…feel her touch his face. His heart surged frighteningly as he caught her hand and pressed it to his lips. “Thanks,” he growled against her palm.

She gave an odd little hiccupping laugh. “No problemo.”

Then they both went still as the sounds of momentarily forgotten pursuit grew suddenly loud and triumphant on the other side of the wall.

“We’re trapped,” Ellie whispered. “Unless we jump. And I don’t know if there’s even any water in there, or how deep, or how far down it is.”

McCall craned stiffly to peer into the void. “It’s too dark to see. We’d probably kill-”

“Wait!” It was an excited breath against his cheek. “I have an idea. Quick-find a rock. The biggest one you can lift. Hurry!”

He heard scrapes and bumps and some quick, urgent breathing. There were bumps and scrapes from the other side of the wall, too, and someone barked, “Cuidado, estupido!” Reaching, searching with his hands, McCall found a stone, something roughly round and oblong-shaped. His fingers located ridges and indentations that could only have been made by human hands. “Got it,” he grunted.

“Get ready,” she gasped back at him, from only a foot or two away. “Follow me-do what I do. Okay?”

Crazy woman…what’s she up to now? Yeah, but she was his crazy woman. And he was about to trust her with his life. Why didn’t that worry him? Why, instead, did he feel a strange, wild exhilaration, and more alive than he could remember feeling in…Lord, so many years?

“Okay,” he breathed.

He felt her hand on his arm, one fierce little squeeze. “When I scream, throw your rock into the pit…”

“Gotcha. Ready when you are…”

The pursuit sounds had reached the top of the wall, and had grown stealthy…cautious…listening. Even the storm seemed to pause. And in that brief respite, Ellie yelled, “Now!” and then cut loose with a scream like a dying banshee. McCall let go with a milder bellow himself, though she hadn’t asked him to, and at the same time heaved his chunk of rock into the void. A moment later he heard two distinct splashes, one right after the other.

Shouts came from the top of the wall, changing rapidly in tone from triumph to dismay. McCall grabbed Ellie and pulled her down into the scrabble of vines and broken pillars at the base of the wall. With his arms wrapped tightly around her he crouched, holding them both as still as statues, praying with pounding heart for miracles, for invisibility, at least, while flashlight beams stabbed evilly through the rain curtains and arguments and questions in shouted Spanish flew back and forth in the darkness.

It came to him there, in those moments of utter terror and despair, that he would protect the woman in his arms, if necessary, to the death. His head felt clear and calm while he made his plan. He would make a stand here, he decided; hold them off, keep them busy while she made her escape back over the wall of the cistern. She had the receiver-she could make it to the car by herself. And most likely she could get the VW running by herself, too-he was beginning to believe there wasn’t much his crazy Cinnamon couldn’t do, if push came to shove.

Even as his heart swelled within him, though, his sense of nobility and purpose were tempered with irony. Funny, he thought, that he’d spent so many years trying to hide from his White Knight tendencies, only to finally die because of them. No regrets, though; no use trying to outrun destiny. He began to feel pumped-up and ready…charged with passion. So must Sir Galahad have felt, riding out to face the dragons.

It was about then he realized the shouts were becoming fainter and more distant.

Ellie stirred against him. He felt rather than heard her croak, “They’re going.”

“Yeah…” He felt odd, suddenly. Cold and clammy, hollow inside. His voice seemed to echo as he added, “They’ve gone to tell the general.”

“I can’t believe it.” Her voice was shaking, incredulous. “It worked. They think we jumped. I don’t believe it.”

“’Course it worked,” he mumbled. His wonderful, incredible, quick-thinking Cinnamon Girl… “C’mon, let’s get out of here…” The general might not be so easily fooled. McCall rose to his feet. And realized, to his utter horror, that he was about to pass out.

He sat down again, much more abruptly than he’d intended to.

“McCall? Are you all right? What’s wrong? McCall-” And she was touching him in the darkness, her fingers cold on his rain-wet face. Her hands slipped to his shoulders…his arms…clutched him-hard.

Pain knifed through him. Breath hissed between his teeth and nausea threatened.

“McCall! Oh God-McCall, you’re bleeding. Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

“First I knew of it,” he muttered, trying very hard not to throw up while her fingers were exploring his upper arm.

She said in an appalled tone, “I think you’ve been shot.”

“Just a scratch.” He felt quite pleased with himself at that. He thought it seemed like something Clint Eastwood would have said.

“There’s an awful lot of blood for ‘just a scratch,”’ she said accusingly. He heard rustling sounds as she straightened, then nothing as she thought it over. Then she bent down close to him again and shouted, as if he’d suddenly gone hard-of-hearing, “Are you okay? Can you make it to the jungle?”

“I’m fine,” he barked back at her, and was gratified to discover that it was more or less true. At least the nausea had passed, along with most of the dizziness, now that his heart rate was returning to normal. Suck it up, McCall. If you don’t make it, neither will she. There’s not a chance in hell she’ll leave you here…

He stood up again, more carefully this time, and announced that he was ready to get the hell outa there. It was pretty much the last thing he remembered with any degree of clarity about that night.

By her watch, it took less time than Ellie had expected to find the car; the smugglers’ path through the jungle apparently hadn’t followed a straight line. But just as on that blindfolded trek, the walk out seemed much farther and longer than it really was. Mostly because she was just so worried about McCall. He was hurt-she had no idea how badly. He’d lost blood-she had no way of knowing how much. Oh God, she thought, what if he’s bleeding to death, right now? She didn’t know what she’d do if he collapsed on her-he was too big to carry, and there was just no way in the world she was going to leave him. Not now. Not after…after what? The way he’d saved her life? That didn’t seem all that big a deal right now.

So…what? After she’d gone and fallen in love with him?

Okay, that was a very big deal. And the biggest of a whole series of shocks and confusing turnabouts that had left her reeling and not really sure about anything at the moment.

“I’m fine. Quit fussing over me,” he growled at her, the fourth or fifth time she asked him how he was feeling, sounding reassuringly like his old cranky McCall self. “You make it awful damn hard for a man to be manly and intrepid.”

“You don’t have to be, for me,” Ellie said, amused and tender.

“I do for me,” he snapped back at her, now sounding more than anything like a grumpy child. “I do still have some ego, you know.”