Jaguar Hunt

  “The things I do for you.” He hurried to join her and opened the door.

  She yawned, her jaguar jaws opening wide, her tongue curling, and she realized just how tired she was. Once she was inside, he closed the door behind her and returned to the shower while she raced for the bedroom. She paused at his room and considered the size of the twin bunk beds. His feet would be hanging off the railing at the foot of the bed. Did he deserve it? She didn’t think so now.

  But she didn’t want to give up the big bed, either. She sighed and retired to her bedroom. Shifting back to human form, she slipped into a pale blue tank top and a pair of blue bikini panties, the only sleepwear she’d brought, thinking her JAG partner would never see what she wore at night. Taking her toiletry bag to the bathroom, she fished out her hair dryer and blew her curls dry. She yawned again and headed back to the bedroom.

  When David entered the cabana and shut the front door, she knew they needed to discuss what was going on with the boys, but she was too tired to sit up and talk with him in the living room. She envisioned keeling over on the couch and falling asleep in the middle of their discussion.

  Her mind made up, she turned and called out from the hallway, “I’ll share my bed with you. If you don’t snore. No tossing and turning, either.”

  When he reached the hallway, he smiled at her standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

  “I’ll be quiet as a jaguar.” He appeared eager to please, heading into his room with a quick stride, a towel slung low on his lean hips, his arousal tenting the terry-cloth fabric.

  Tammy wasn’t sure what she was getting into and hoped she wasn’t making a big mistake. She climbed into bed and pulled the spread nearly to her shoulders. She thought about David’s appearance as a jaguar. His coat was a distinctive tan, not as golden or orange as other jaguars, and he had less white on his belly and under his chin than she had. Beautiful. Just as beautiful as the way he looked in his human form. All hard body, muscular, tanned, lickable.

  A few minutes later, he climbed into bed wearing only a pair of white boxers. She swore the queen-sized bed had shrunk to half its size because he took up so much of it.

  “What do you think they’re trying to tell us?” she asked, turning on her side to discuss what they’d found.

  “It’s definitely about the zip-line adventure. I don’t have any doubt they know we know they were going to be there.”

  She shook her head. “They probably won’t be there tomorrow. And we won’t be able to catch them.”

  “I suspect you’re right,” David said, arms folded behind his head as he stared up at the canopy over the bed.

  “So why the games?”

  He glanced at her. “They’re smart? They’re bored? They’re teens? How would I know?”

  She let out her breath. “You said you were like them once.”

  “Okay, yeah. To an extent. But Wade and I bungee-jumped from bridges, borrowed boats to go out into deep waters to fish, went caving where we shouldn’t have gone. Dangerous stuff like that. We didn’t mess with JAG or Enforcer agents.”

  “What if it’s as you say? You stood up for them at the shifter club. Got yourself taken to jail over it. Maybe they overheard something about the stolen jaguar and were looking into it, but you and I went after them. Maybe they’re trying to show us the way.”

  “More like a wild-goose chase,” David said.

  She pondered that, wondering again how the boys would have known she and David had come after them. “Why wouldn’t they just come out and tell us what they know?”

  “That’s what we have to find out. Once we catch and question them, we’ll turn them over to Martin.”

  Tammy’s parents had kept her brothers and her in line when they were that age. She couldn’t understand why these kids were running loose without any supervision. “Why is it that their parents aren’t watching over them?”

  “Their parents are off in England at a medical conference this summer. They probably figure the boys are old enough to watch out for themselves.”

  “Yeah, right.” She wondered what the kids’ parents would think of the boys’ actions. Would they have discounted them as typical teen pranks? Been angry with them?

  Kids needed some guidance growing up. That made her wonder about David and his brother, and how come they had gotten into so much mischief that the Service wanted to take them in hand.

  “And you? How come you and your brother got yourselves into so many dangerous situations as kids?”

  “When our mother died, our dad was so devastated that he forgot about providing some…positive reinforcement and direction. Wade and I were on our own.”

  Tammy chewed on her bottom lip, wondering what to say. Now she felt guilty because she’d assumed he and his brother hadn’t had a good reason to be out of control, other than having parents who ignored them, like these teens. She couldn’t imagine not being as close to her mom as she was. Her dad, however…

  She reached out and patted David’s bare chest. His hot, hard bare chest. It just seemed a natural thing to do, but when she noted his heated gaze on her, she quickly withdrew her hand before he thought she was looking for some kitty-cat loving.

  “I’m sorry, David. I didn’t know.” She wanted to know how his mother died, but she didn’t want to ask if he didn’t feel like sharing. “Were…your parents close?”

  “Yeah. They were devoted to each other. Before we lost my mom, we shared a lot of family outings—camping, visits to the Amazon and Belize… Never a dull moment.”

  She hesitated to ask her next question, but she really wanted to know the answer before she revealed anything to him about her own parents’ situation.

  “Your parents never…had any affairs?”

  Ever since she’d discovered her father’s infidelity, she’d wanted to talk to someone, but she hadn’t known whom she could confide in. She didn’t know if her mom knew about it, or what she would do if Tammy broke the news to her. Her brothers didn’t know, and she was afraid of how they would react. She couldn’t tell her cousins Maya and Connor. She’d only met them once and didn’t know them well enough. Not that she knew David well, either. But since he was more or less a stranger, maybe he could be more objective. Unless he didn’t think cheating on one’s spouse was that big a deal.

  When David closed his eyes and didn’t answer her, she thought he’d fallen asleep.

  “David?”

  “No, I don’t believe either of my parents ever cheated on the other. It’s kind of hard for shifters to have an affair. For one thing, we can smell someone else’s scent on someone.”

  She nearly snorted at that. She was the perfect case of being cheated on in a shifter relationship. “Unless the cheating party is away on trips and washes his clothes and himself before he returns home.”

  Again, David was quiet for a while. He shook his head. “Nah, don’t think so.” Then he looked at her with concern. “Yours?”

  She felt her stomach fall as if she was in a hot air balloon that had suddenly lost a lot of air and was ready to crash. She shouldn’t have brought it up. She wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  “How close are you to your brother?” she asked, unable to answer him just yet. If Tammy discussed this with David, she wanted to know if he would tell Wade. Then Wade would tell Maya, and Maya would tell Connor. Tammy didn’t want her cousins to know. They hadn’t even met her father and mother yet, and she didn’t want to negatively influence them. What if the word got back to her brothers about the affair and they confronted their father?

  David studied her. “Wade and I are close. Really close. We’ve always been. What about you and your brothers?”

  She sighed. “As close as we can get.”

  “But I imagine they treat you like one of the guys.”

  “In the beginning. But now, not so much. They’ve become overprote
ctive brothers.”

  “Yeah, I know,” David said, his tone amused.

  That didn’t bode well. “What do you mean?”

  “They called me. Each of them. Before we got together for this mission.”

  She stared at David, not believing her brothers would do that. Then again, all of them were in the JAG with David and, as such, were nearly like brothers. “What did they say?”

  “Huntley warned me you only dated humans.”

  She growled.

  “Everett told me you’ve ditched several partners. Even my own brother called and said I had to keep my hands off you or else.”

  She couldn’t believe it! She barely knew Wade. “I’ll kill them.”

  David laughed. “Does that mean you’re interested in dating a JAG agent? You’re not going to try to dump me on this mission? And I don’t have to keep my hands to myself?”

  “I have already tried to ditch you,” Tammy reminded him, sidestepping his other two points. And now she was in bed with him, showing how well her efforts to ditch him were going.

  He was too cute for his own good. She couldn’t believe her brothers, and even David’s, had warned him about her. As soon as she was done with this assignment—or sooner, if she could get hold of them—she’d have words with them over their interference. The nerve.

  “But I’ve decided I might need you for this mission.”

  He waited.

  She wasn’t agreeing to anything else.

  “Okay, so that means I still have to work harder to get you to agree to the other two conditions?”

  She laughed, but he looked earnest! And she was thinking she needed to put on the brakes really quickly before she did something she’d regret—like giving any thought to dating him after the mission was over. After the disaster with the previous guy? The last thing she needed was to date another JAG agent anytime soon.

  Chapter 7

  David liked that Tammy had a sense of humor when it came to him. He wasn’t all teasing, but he was glad she took his joking in stride. If a woman couldn’t laugh with him or at him, she was a lost cause. He’d never had to toil this rigorously to get a woman to consider him date-worthy. He liked that Tammy set boundaries. Made her more of a challenge. Working for acceptance would make the reward all the more worthwhile.

  He sighed dramatically. “I take that as a yes, I’ll have to work harder at it.”

  Tammy shook her head but was smiling when she did it. That gave him hope.

  What bothered him was that he assumed she needed to talk to him about one of her parents having an illicit affair. He wanted her to feel she could get whatever was bothering her off her chest. Had she not confided in her brothers?

  When his own brother was upset about something, David had always been a great sounding board. Or so Wade seemed to believe. David liked to think he could be that for him or anyone else.

  “Thanks for washing me,” she said, startling him from his thoughts.

  “Anytime.” Every time. If he could have his hands on her when she was in any form, he would be a happy cat.

  “Maybe we can get that bungalow tomorrow. After what’s happened today, I suspect we’re not going to catch up to those two really quickly.”

  David didn’t say anything, mulling over the possibilities and wondering why she’d suddenly changed her mind.

  “We’re already sharing the bed. I know that. But I’d really like to take a regular shower—indoors, without everyone watching. If anyone’s watching.”

  “Sure.” He was kind of surprised. But he’d suspected the shower situation bothered her when she hadn’t shifted into human form to wash up.

  “Do you think they were watching?” she asked.

  He fought smiling because she looked so sincere. “If I were still a teenage boy…” David trailed off suggestively.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. And why I want a private shower. We get too muddy and sweaty in this muggy heat not to take showers, and I don’t want to put on a show for the teens. I might corrupt their innocence.”

  David chuckled at that. “Yeah, you got it.”

  “What do you think the staff will think when they see the condoms hanging at the zip-lining place in the morning?”

  “Kids’ prank. Though they’ve probably never seen anything quite like it.”

  “Too bad you couldn’t have salvaged them,” she teased.

  At least he thought she was kidding. “I never reuse used condoms—even if they haven’t been used for the purpose intended.”

  “Good to know.”

  He heard a hint of a smile in her voice.

  “You’ll be watching for us to reach the platform you’re on, but how will you see them before they get close enough for you to know it’s them and not others on the tour?” she asked.

  “I brought a pair of binoculars with me, great for hunting or bird-watching with a 420-feet field of view at a thousand yards.”

  “Okay, I think that will work well. We’ll eat breakfast, and then we’ll go to the zip-lining place.”

  He studied her, wondering if she truly was all right with zip-lining. “I really think you meeting up with them first would work the best. But…”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind doing it?”

  “Yeah. I agree I might have a better chance talking with the kids. Besides, I managed the seventy-five-foot Slide for Life at the Enforcer camp water-survival course—one little handlebar to hold on to, no safety net over the lake, no safety harness. The concept sounds similar to zip-lining, though they didn’t call it that back then. The thirty-five-foot water drop was the same thing—shimmied out on a rope and dropped into the lake. I’m fine with it. At least here they have safety hookups. Right?”

  “Yeah, they do.” He knew she wasn’t fine with it. He had smelled her nervousness when she told him earlier tonight that she wanted to be the one at the termination point and not flying through the canopy on a cable. She hadn’t wanted to toss for it. She hadn’t wanted to do it period. He admired her now for giving it a go just to see if they could make a connection with the teens.

  “That’s what we’ll do, then.” She was frowning, though.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m still worried about the missing zoo cat. I hope we can catch the boys quickly, and I hope that they actually know something that will lead us to it.”

  “I’m going out on a limb here because I don’t really know the kids that well,” David said, “but I suspect if they believed the cat was in imminent danger, they would already have warned somebody of authority.”

  “Yeah, but you know how teens can be. Unreliable.”

  “I agree. But the way they were talking in the club, how they mentioned she was safe… I got the impression they knew it for sure.”

  “All right. I keep going back to the scenario of how you were following the kids. Here we are trying to chase them down, and they’re the ones making all the calls. I still want to know how they knew where we were. How your boss knew so easily where they were scheduled to be, all except their lodging. I know Martin’s got the manpower and the resources, but it seems too convenient to me.”

  “You’re back to believing that this is a setup, you mean.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. That they somehow let your boss know where they were going to be.”

  “It’s possible,” David acknowledged.

  “I don’t believe this all has to do with fun and games,” Tammy continued. “The boys seem too smart for that. Yes, they’re playing with us, but I think they’re also afraid of a real one-on-one confrontation. They don’t know if they can trust us.”

  “But I protected them from the bouncer at the shifter club.”

  “Right. But you’ve been following the
m, and you were suddenly teamed with me to track the zoo cat I’ve been looking for.”

  “So without knowing why we were teamed up, maybe they thought I was called in to deal with them more harshly if they had committed a more serious crime than underage drinking, like stealing the zoo cat.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What if they did steal her from the Oregon Zoo?”

  She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, mulling it over. “Why would they? I checked out the exhibit where she was being housed. Plenty of space to run in. Nicely treed. Running water in a man-made creek in the enclosure. If they did, it wasn’t out of vigilante justice for an ill-treated jaguar.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve let Martin know what we’ve found so far,” David said.

  She smiled a little. “Did you tell him about the condoms?”

  He just grinned at her.

  She yawned. “All right. I’m exhausted. Let’s call it a night.”

  “Good night.” David closed his eyes, but he couldn’t stop taking in deep breaths of her jasmine soap and she-cat scent mixed into one delightful fragrance. He couldn’t ignore the beat of her heart—or his—that told him he was way too turned on, and that she was feeling the same way. He couldn’t help feeling the heat of her body and wanting to ratchet it up a few degrees, starting with a kiss.

  A kiss. Hell, he’d never gone to bed with a woman when it meant total hands off. But lips…they didn’t count, did they?

  She’d closed her eyes, but she wasn’t sleeping. She hadn’t pulled away from him, giving him her back. That meant something. Didn’t it?

  He could ask. And she could say no.

  He could kiss her, and when she got ready to slap him, he’d tell her it was a good-night kiss. And it would be. Unless she wanted more.

  He could get lucky and she’d kiss him back.

  Somehow it didn’t seem right to go to bed with a woman and not at least kiss her good night.