Beautiful Sacrifice

mouth just enough to say, “Good and good and good and good.”
    “Can you spend part of your time on the Reyes Balamlands with me? Celia agreed to fund the digs and pay me more than enough for—”
    He shut her up by kissing her again. “I already talked to my uncles. I can work from the estate or from the moon, so long as they don’t lose their Mexico expert. And they expect to meet you real soon.”
    Squirming until she could reach his shirt and begin unbuttoning it, Lina murmured in his ear, “Are you actually volunteering to be my bodyguard and site artist?”
    “I’ll guard every sweet inch of your body.”
    She smiled. “How about the artist part?”
    “Can I draw you naked?”
    “Only if mosquito netting is involved.”
    He laughed softly. “I can work with that.”

A UTHOR’S N OTE
     
    T HE WRITTEN, PHONETIC VERSION OF THE M AYAN LANGUAGE is a work in progress. Scholars disagree about when or whether to use apostrophes to indicate a vocal hitch in a word. C and K are often used interchangeably. Names are spelled one way by one expert source and a different way by the next. About all I could find consistent agreement on was that “Maya” refers to the people, their customs, their artifacts, everything but their language. That is called “Mayan.”
    I also was confronted with many choices as to accent marks. If a word is commonly understood and printed in the United States without any accents—for example, Mexico, Cancun, the Yucatan—I didn’t use accents, even though they are used in Mexico.
    Some Maya scholars agree there is a God K. Some don’t.
    Kawa’il, his cult, and his artifacts are my own invention.

About the Author
     
    ELIZABETH LOWELL ’s acclaimed suspense novels include the New York Times bestsellers Death Echo, Blue Smoke and Murder, Innocent as Sin, The Wrong Hostage, Always Time to Die, The Color of Death, Die in Plain Sight, Running Scared, and Moving Target, as well as four books featuring the Donovan family: Amber Beach, Jade Island, Pearl Cove, and Midnight in Ruby Bayou . Lowell has more than thirty million books in print. She lives in Nevada with her husband, with whom she writes mystery novels under a pseudonym.
     
    www.elizabethlowell.com
     
    www.facebook.com/ElizabethLowellFans
     
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Also by Elizabeth Lowell
     
    Death Echo
     
    Blue Smoke and Murder
     
    Innocent as Sin
     
    The Wrong Hostage
     
    Whirlpool
     
    Always Time to Die
     
    The Secret Sister
     
    The Color of Death
     
    Death Is Forever
     
    Die in Plain Sight
     
    Running Scared
     
    Moving Target
     
    Midnight in Ruby Bayou
     
    Pearl Cove
     
    Jade Island
     
    Amber Beach
     

Credits
     
    Cover design by Mary Schuck
    Cover photographs by Marta Bevacqua/Trevillion Images

Copyright
     
    This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
     
    BEAUTIFUL SACRIFICE . Copyright © 2012 by Two of a Kind, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
     
    FIRST EDITION
     
    ISBN 978-0-06-162986-0
     
    EPub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780062101228
     
    12 13 14 15 16 OV / RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
     

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