Maya smiled. This was going to be a good trip. She hoped.
***
Connor fumed about his sister. He was fascinated with the idea that an enforcement agency was run by and for jaguar shifters. If he’d learned of such a force before he and his sister had started their successful garden nursery, he might have considered joining it himself. Then again, he’d always looked out for Maya, and he couldn’t see spending long periods away from her.
Hell, he left her alone for two days, and she opened the house up to Wade Patterson, his brother, and two other male shifters. Sure they were cousins, but Connor hadn’t met them first to ensure they were safe. On top of that, she’d started a fight in a shifter bar? Not to mention that a zoo official believed Maya had stolen a jaguar from the Oregon Zoo. He couldn’t imagine what would have happened if he’d left her alone for a whole week! He wondered if she’d left anything out in telling him what had gone on. Like how intimate she’d been with this Wade Patterson.
Connor admitted that he had approved of her and Kat’s idea of posting Maya’s picture in her jaguar form in the greenhouse. They’d had quite a boost in garden sales. Now he was regretting that decision.
“I think you should find Wade and help him take down the hunters,” Maya said, appearing worried as she exited the closet. “I’m here now. I’ll take care of Kat.”
“No,” Connor said.
Maya gave him a cross look, just like she always did when he disagreed with her over an important issue.
“He’s on a job. He’s trained. He’s getting paid for it. We’re strictly here on vacation, and I’m staying with the two of you to keep you safe.” Connor was not leaving Kat alone, even with Maya’s protection, if hunters were close by.
“How’s Kat feeling?” Maya asked, changing the subject.
He knew from the way she’d done so that she hadn’t given up on the subject of helping Wade. She’d revisit it when she could. Maybe by soliciting Kat’s help to back her up. He loved that the two women were the best of friends, but their friendship kept him on his toes because they often conspired against him.
“Kat’s having a little morning sickness. Shifting seems to help settle her stomach. She can handle the pregnancy better as a cat. We don’t go until it’s dark out.”
“You saw no sign of the hunters?”
“None. Thousands of acres of rainforest exist out there. Half of Belize is covered by dense jungle. A lot of it hasn’t even been explored yet—by humans anyway. Because of Kat’s condition, we’ve stuck close to the cottages. And hunters wouldn’t suspect jaguars would hang around people. But if she’s feeling better, we’ll go farther out where we can’t smell any signs of humans.”
“You’ve marked your scent around the area,” she said, knowing he would.
It was part of what they were. That primal, territorial aspect couldn’t be tamed. Not when they were in the wild like this.
“Yeah, we have.” He smiled. “Kat hasn’t quite got the hang of it. She thinks if she scent-marks over where I’ve scent-marked, she’s claiming I’m her territory, and any other females can keep their paws to themselves.”
Maya chuckled. “I love Kat.”
Even when they visited the forested area around the lake on their property, they left their stamp on the area. Humans didn’t know jaguars existed in Texas, but the wildlife in the area certainly did. Not that the jaguars ate any of the critters around there, except for fishing in the lake, but the birds and snakes and squirrels and armadillos knew.
“I missed you both,” Maya said.
Connor knew she was being honest, but he snorted anyway. “Sounds like you didn’t have time. You were never alone.”
She was opening her mouth to rebut his comment when Kat opened the door to the cottage and smiled, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail, her green eyes sparkling with excitement. “You’re here!” She turned to Connor and scolded him. “You should have told me right away! Why didn’t you wake me?”
He only gave her a half smile.
Dressed in a pale blue long-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and hiking boots, Kat looked refreshed and ready to take a walk in the jungle.
Maya ran down the steps from the elevated bedroom to join her and gave her a big hug. “We have cousins!”
“And Wade Patterson is in the area,” Connor said, as if the devil himself had just shown up in their neck of the rainforest. He couldn’t help it. He was certain that as soon as Wade saw Kat, he’d make a move on his wife, and Connor would kill him.
Then both Maya and Kat would want to kill Connor.
Chapter 9
Wade had already decided that after they investigated the cabana where the two hunters were staying, he would check on Maya.
The smugglers had used a credit card at one of the resorts in the jungle town, and Wade’s boss had informed him that the two men were named Mylar Cranston and Tierney Smith.
They had rap sheets with crimes ranging from carjacking and jewelry-store theft to attempted murder over the past twenty years, as well as drug deals in Central and South America, which was where they undoubtedly got their connections to chase down jaguars.
Nice guys. The latest message from his boss was that the men were armed and considered extremely dangerous. No surprise there.
Martin had reserved a cabana for Wade and David at the same resort. The thatched roofs gave the buildings a rounded appearance and fit in with the jungle theme. Each of the cabanas was backed up against the jungle, with trees screening one from another. Inside, the two bedrooms were of simple fare, three twin beds and a queen. A blue tile floor matched the floral bedspreads, and a blue tablecloth over a table seated between two rattan chairs was also covered in floral print. Hanging on one wall, a large print of a jaguar reclining in a tree made Wade smile. He could have posed for that picture himself.
“Looks like you,” David remarked, glancing at the print.
“He’s not as handsome.”
David chuckled.
“Ready to take a look at their cabana?” Wade asked.
David dropped his bag in the other room and returned. “Ready if you are.”
They made their way through the jungle behind the cabanas, silent and cautious, working around toward the back side of the rental unit where they would be hidden from view. Several keel-billed toucans were sitting in a tree watching them, their necks and chests covered in brilliant yellow feathers, the rest of their plumage black. Looking like the Fruit Loops toucan, they had large rainbow-colored beaks in bright green, orange, blue, and red that made them stand out. They were sociable creatures and the national bird of Belize. A couple of them were making a croaking sound while insects whirred and buzzed and clicked and chirped in the dense jungle foliage.
Brushing against the leaves of a tree, Wade felt his long cotton sleeves gather rain droplets collected on the broad surfaces. He could smell that it had recently rained here, making the atmosphere steamy and heavy with moisture.
They drew closer to the back side of the building and listened for sounds within the structure—trying to hear voices or showering or anything that would indicate someone was inside.
Wade heard nothing. “They’re gone,” he whispered to his brother. Peering through the window in the bathroom, he observed two shaving kits, toothbrushes, and toothpaste sitting on the bathroom counter.
He pried open the window, climbed in, and took a deep breath, smelling the scents of the men so he’d recognize them in the jungle. The pungent odor of the lemon-scented insect repellent the men had used still hung heavy in the air.
David slipped in through the window after Wade, observing everything for himself, two pairs of eyes being better than one.
Wade looked around the bathroom where muddied white towels lay scattered on the floor. The towels were no longer wet, and there were no droplets of water in the tub. Dirt had collect
ed near the drain of the tub and dried. Toothpaste spittle was dried on the sink. The men hadn’t been here for a couple of days. From the disarray, he figured they must have told the staff they didn’t want maid service.
He moved into the room where the beds sat. The top sheets were rumpled on the queen bed as if it had been slept in. Discarded dirty briefs, socks, muddy jeans, and a T-shirt lay on the floor beside the bed. In the other bedroom, he found the queen comforter hanging half off the bed. Various articles of clothing smelling of sweat and heavily splattered with mud were scattered on the floor.
In the living area, he smelled the odor of two other men who had stood in the front entryway—a fainter scent as if they’d walked in and left right away. Jaguar shifters. They were two of the men he’d seen at the shifter club in Houston, he thought darkly.
Bill Bettinger, the one who’d struck David in the head with the bottle, and the other who had shoulder-length blond hair—the one Maya called Lion Mane and thought she’d seen at the airport. Hell. Their own kind was selling out non-shifter jaguars?
He growled low. Bastards.
David joined him, sniffed the air, and swore under his breath when he smelled the men’s scents. “Do you think they’re wild?”
“Might be, and they may be serving as the guides rather than hiring someone they didn’t know.”
When humans hunted jaguars, it was bad enough. He couldn’t understand why his kind would harm the jaguars when they had a kinship to them and the jaguars’ only predator was man. Then again, some would sell their own family if meant they’d get money for it.
Wade glanced around the living room. “If Bettinger and the other shifter return to the cabana, they’ll know you and I have been here snooping around. They’d most likely assume we’re with the Service. And we’re after them. Since the smugglers are human, if they return here before we find them, they won’t know we’ve been here.”
“Hell,” David said. “You’re right.”
“I hope the shifters won’t revisit the cabana so we have a better chance at reporting the information to the boss and keeping our business here secret until we can learn who the buyer is. Too bad Internet service is only available at the main lodge and not in the cabanas. We’ll have to let Martin know what we learn later.”
David walked toward one of the bedrooms. “I’ll search this one.”
Wade opened each of the drawers in a couple of dressers in the other bedroom, finding them empty. A bag sat on the floor next to the dresser. Inside the bag, the man had left behind civilian clothes—jeans, T-shirts. He must have planned to return and wear these when not in the jungle, or he would have taken them with him. Wade found the man’s airline ticket itinerary, showing he had already been here two days.
“The hunters came early,” Wade called out to his brother. “I wonder why Bettinger and the blond guy were at the club and not down here?”
He found no return flight information and assumed that was because they’d be here until they located the jaguar and took the cat out of the country via some means other than by plane. He noted a tag on the man’s bags. Address and phone number. “Mylar Cranston’s name is on the bag in here.” Now he knew his scent from the other by name.
Mentally, Wade filed the information away.
“This one belongs to Tierney Smith, according to the luggage tag. They apparently aren’t worried about anyone checking up on them,” David said from the other room.
Wade searched underneath the mattresses for anything of importance that might have been tucked away. His hand touched something metal beneath the mattress, and he lifted it to see what he’d found. A wicked-looking dagger. Wade smelled blood on it, though the weapon had been wiped clean.
“Looks like I might have found a murder weapon,” Wade said, grabbing a T-shirt from Mylar Cranston’s bag. “He probably kept it under his mattress, being paranoid that someone might break in and attempt to kill him.”
David joined him in the bedroom and studied the dagger. “Smells like old blood. Maybe a murder committed?”
“Yeah. It’ll undoubtedly have Cranston’s fingerprints on it, and the T-shirt has some of his beard trimmings. We should send these to Martin first chance we get. Did you find anything in the other room?”
“No. It was clean.”
“Let’s take a run through the jungle and see where they headed.”
David nodded. “Think Lion Mane and Bettinger will be with them?”
“Yeah. That means we’ll be dealing with at least four of them.”
David and Wade returned to their cabana and stripped. Wade opened the window in the bathroom, easy enough for them to get in and out of as cats, and with no lights in the jungle beyond. Perfect for a nighttime run.
He didn’t know if the two men were using their cabana as their place of operation while looking for the cats, or if they had set up tents in the rainforest and searched for the elusive jaguar from there.
They wouldn’t have to get a guide if Bettinger and Lion Mane knew their way around the jungle. They might have to pay a couple of men to help them carry the big cat to a waiting vehicle, then take off for Mexico and the States. Wade’s mission for now was to try to locate them and then take it from there.
Two miles from the resort, in the thick of the jungle, he smelled Connor and Kat’s scent. All he could think of was Maya and her safety, and his mission flew straight out the window.
David looked in the direction Wade did, and then Wade took off in the direction of her treetop cottage.
David bolted after him.
Chapter 10
Eating dinner was next on the agenda because Maya and Kat said they were starving.
Connor almost felt left out when Maya and Kat linked arms and strolled ahead of him on the narrow walkway as they headed toward the main lodge. “Tell me what the club was like,” Kat coaxed.
“Maya started a brawl,” Connor said, “and the place will probably never be the same.”
Kat glanced back at Connor. Maya rolled her eyes at him. He smiled.
Maya said, “We had drinks and…”
“Dancing?” Connor suddenly asked. “You danced with Wade Patterson?”
“And Thompson…”
“The guy from the zoo?” Connor asked, not believing this.
“Yeah, he was protecting me from the other shifters who wanted to dance with me.”
“Where the hell was Wade when all of this was going on?” Even though Connor still wasn’t sure about the man’s intentions with regard to Maya or Kat, he thought Wade would have looked out for her welfare better than that. “Where were our cousins?”
“They wanted to talk to Wade about business—you know, as it pertained to their line of work.”
Connor shook his head.
“The club sounds like fun,” Kat said, a sparkle in her eye.
“You’re not going,” Connor said.
Kat frowned over her shoulder at him. “For your information, I believe I’ve been to one like that in Florida. I didn’t know that’s what it was, of course. But I loved the jungle theme and seeing the men and women dancing on stage in loincloths.”
“You weren’t a wild cat back then, Kathleen,” he said. “It would be different now. Hell, as bad as Maya made the fight sound, can you imagine the two of you together, stirring things up? We’d be banned from ever entering the club again.”
Kat smiled at Maya. Connor shook his head again. He wondered if that was the reason their mother had kept them away from others of their kind, ensuring they lived in a more natural environment.
When they walked into the dining room, they found they were the first to take their seats for the evening meal.
Each of them chose to begin with the chicken soup.
Kat happily chatted about all that she’d seen in the jungle, from the largest flying bird in the Americas—
the jabiru stork—to a rare agami heron, tons of hummingbirds, neon-green parrots, macaws, and a snowy egret. She described several of the orchids they’d witnessed. Then she said, her eyes bright with excitement, “We saw an ocelot!”
“No jaguars, though?” Maya asked, a teasing light in her eyes.
Guests said hi to them as they took their seats around some of the tables. Connor and Kat always arrived early for dinner so they could go on their jungle treks at dusk, while the other guests spent their days in the jungle and stayed in their cottages at night.
“Did you hear the howler monkey?” one woman asked another at a different table. “It nearly gave me a seizure until I figured out what it was.”
“What was Wade like?” Kat asked Maya.
Connor tried not to stiffen, but he didn’t manage well—especially when Kat was asking about Wade.
“He’s protective,” Maya said.
Connor meant to keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t let that go. “Yeah, like he left you alone and a barroom brawl started over you.”
Two of the men and a woman at another table looked in their direction. Maya’s cheeks blossomed with color.
She tilted her chin up and said to Kat, “He came to my protection and even carried me out of there when I slipped on all the broken glass.” She gave Connor an “I told you so” look.
All conversation at the other tables concerning what the guests had discovered on treks to a nearby cave and the jungle died as soon as the barroom brawl was mentioned. Connor knew Kat and Maya should have had this discussion in one of their cottages.
Then he began to consider the sleeping arrangements at their home, and before he could stop himself from saying something about it, he asked, “None of the men slept in our bedroom, did they?”
“Of course not,” Maya said, sounding irritated. “We all slept in my bed.”
He knew she was kidding because there was no way in hell all of them could have slept in her queen-size bed with her. Not that he would have believed she’d slept with her cousins or David. Wade? Connor wasn’t certain about him.