***
Wade Patterson shook his head as he pulled off onto the dirt road and followed the carload of Gonzales’s men, keeping far enough back that they weren’t even aware of him. Not when they had eyes only for catching up to Kathleen McKnight and her party.
He hadn’t had this much excitement visiting Colombia in eons.
Here he had thought he would take Kat for his own mate if she was agreeable, but the other jaguar had beat him to it. Damn that he had missed his flight to Colombia, missed meeting her in Santa Marta, then lost her in the jungle completely.
He knew of the jaguars in the area, which was what had gotten her to come there in the first place, but he hadn’t realized they were shifters. Even if he had, the two that had been living there were obviously mated. So why did the female the male had been with allow him to have another?
He snorted. To him, it didn’t matter that they were jaguar-shifters—the male jaguar half of their kind possibly needing to mate with several females. He wanted only one. So it really pissed him off that this Connor Anderson had started a damn harem. There weren’t enough jaguar-shifters to go around. Wade was still of the opinion that he could get Kat away from the other man and give her exclusivity so she wouldn’t have to share when the guy she had taken up with divided his affections with the other woman. Hell, Connor might decide to go for a third shifter female if he could locate one.
Wade was certain that when Kat realized how much better he could be for her, she would give the other guy up. Besides, Wade lived in Florida like she did. So they could compromise and settle in one place or the other. He was fine with her choosing. He just had to convince her to go with him and leave Connor.
He wondered who had turned her. But she didn’t seem to mind that she was one of their kind now. That was one thing that had bothered him. That if he had turned her, she might have hated him for it. He hadn’t planned to turn her right away. He wanted her to get to know him first and to ease her into learning something of the truth about him before he changed her. Although he wasn’t sure how he would have done so without making a total muddle of it.
He’d thought he’d just see how well she did in the jungle, maybe date her back in Florida for a while, then return here to the Amazon when they were really a couple. If it had worked out for him.
He’d never thought this Connor person would take her for his own.
The shifting seemed to be the big problem for her as she didn’t seem to have a lot of control over it. He assumed the man and woman intended to take her home on a flight out of Bogotá, but he wondered how they would manage.
He parked the rental car behind Gonzales’s men’s car, got out, and slashed the tires. If any of them made it out alive once they’d faced the jaguars, they weren’t going anywhere.
He wondered why they were after Kathleen. He had tried to surreptitiously hear the scuttlebutt and had managed to learn that Gonzales himself wanted her. Alive, not dead.
Everyone knew who he was—drug lord—and that getting on his shit list was bad news.
But Wade hadn’t been able to ascertain the reason for Gonzales’s interest in taking Kathleen hostage. Wade returned to his vehicle, stripped out of his clothes, and shifted. Then with his nose up and ears perked, he breathed in the air and listened for the sound of where any of them had gone. But particularly where Kathleen had gone.
***
The air was hot and muggy and still, the bugs and birds as noisy as ever. Maya stood near Kat as they heard the men moving around in the jungle. Kat was glad for Maya’s assistance. Even though she felt she could take down the men, Kat wanted to do it right without causing trouble for the jaguar kind. If she had to do it without any supervision, she would just take one bite and that would be the end of the man’s plan to ever hurt anyone again.
The men were drawing closer, and Maya started moving away from the sound of them. Kat frowned. They had to take care of them. Connor couldn’t do this on his own. Maya couldn’t believe that Kat was only a liability and wouldn’t be able to help.
Maya grunted at her. Kat gave her a disgruntled look back, then reluctantly followed her. Maya made a wide circle around the men, keeping them within earshot but out of sight, and Kat realized then what she was doing. Laying an ambush. She and Maya couldn’t confront the men head-on. They were armed and dangerous. They had to sneak up on them. It didn’t seem as heroic that way, but these men didn’t play by any gentlemanly rules of warfare.
Then they saw the first of the men alone, vulnerable, as vulnerable as an armed murderous man could be. Maya ran up behind him, silent as a cloud drifting across the sky, a dark, angry spotted cloud.
But as soon as she leaped at her target, another man moved into Kat’s vision. She didn’t hesitate. The man raised his weapon to shoot Maya. Panicked and needing to save her jaguar sister, Kat jumped high, not expecting to leap quite that distance, and nearly went too far. She landed on his head with her full jaguar body weight, heard a crack, and thought it was his spine. He went down silently, except for a thud that only Maya and she could hear with their enhanced hearing.
Standing next to her own dead prey, Maya looked over at Kat, smiled in a jaguar’s way, then joined her. She listened to the man’s heart, but Kat had already done so. His head was turned at an odd angle, and she seemed to have broken his neck with the weight of her body. She didn’t think that was a jaguar’s way to kill its prey, but she was just learning after all.
She would have to practice jumping to learn how high and how far she could go to hit her intended target spot on.
They heard someone else rustling through the brush, and Kat knew the man or men would soon find the two dead men and raise the alarm. Maya quickly moved into the trees, making enough noise to draw the man’s attention, even though the cats normally moved silently. Kat waited for the man to follow her, to see if he was friend or foe. He didn’t call out, though.
Then she saw him trying to move quietly through the jungle, but he just wasn’t able. Maya was still making noise but hidden in the brush. Kat leaped onto an overhead branch, thinking she might do a better job taking him down in a jaguar way if she pounced from a branch rather than leaping from the ground.
She jumped down on top of him and landed on his head like the other, but this man cried out before he was silenced. When he fell to the ground, she thought she had killed him in the same way as the first man. Maybe that would be her special technique, since she couldn’t seem to master any other in quick order.
The man’s cry brought others running, though. Great! How many were there?
Then the oddest thing happened. Men were shouting to their fallen comrade, fallen dead comrade, tromping at a rapid pace to reach him, but they never arrived. Maya rejoined her, urging her to take cover. Kat hadn’t quite gotten the notion that they ambushed and stalked rather than facing their foe in a frontal assault. That’s how she had been trained in the Army. She would have to practice with Maya and Connor, like they probably did when they were cubs, tackling and taking each other down in an ambush.
She had a lot to learn. She jumped into a tree, and Maya leaped onto the same branch beside her. She licked Kat’s face, saying in a jaguar-shifter’s way that she had done all right.
They heard no one coming, and Kat felt antsy, wanting to look for Connor, to make sure he was all right. She kept telling herself that no gunshots had been fired, so the only way one of the men could have wounded Connor was if he’d drawn a knife. But she didn’t think anyone would be foolish enough to chance fighting a jaguar with a puny knife.
Then Connor materialized out of the ferns, saw her and Maya in the tree, and grunted. It was time to get on their way. All the bad men were dead. What would Gonzales think about that? This time he would know for sure his men had come across Kat and died at the hands of her and her companions. But he would probably wonder how that had happened. No bullets fired. No knife wounds. Only two women and one man to fight off all his men. And all his men were dead.
>
They returned to the tree where their backpacks rested, and Connor climbed and shifted. He tossed down Maya and Kat’s bags, then proceeded to get dressed.
Maya shifted also and dressed. Kat just stood there, panting as a jaguar, wishing she could shift, too, and get dressed.
She groaned, waiting for Connor and Maya to join her, and then they all ran back to their rental car. Kat smelled the scent of the male jaguar that had followed them before. She glanced at Connor. He didn’t look happy.
When they were in the car and on the road, Maya pulled some clothes out of Kat’s bag and tossed them to the backseat for Kat when she managed to turn back into a human. She might have gotten away with being a jaguar in a small village, but she didn’t imagine she could do so in the city of Bogotá.
“How did Kat do?” Connor asked.
Maya smiled at her brother. “She’s a great hunter. And you know what? She has a new technique we could learn from.”
Kat stared at her in disbelief. Maya thought her “technique” was worth sharing?
“Oh?” He cast a look back over his shoulder at Kat, his eyes sparkling with amusement and pride.
“Yep. Works like a charm. Without fail. But I’ll let her tell you about it later.”
Three hours later, Kat finally had the urge to shift. What had taken her so long? At least she was glad she had been a help to Maya and Connor with Gonzales’s thugs. But she was glad to be in her human form again, able to communicate, too. Maya had dozed off in the front passenger seat, and Connor was staring at the road, half-asleep himself, she thought.
“Connor,” she said quietly, not wanting to startle him and cause an accident.
He glanced back at her, his expression one of relief.
“Yeah, I’m back.” She pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “Are we almost there?” She thought they were because more urban sprawl existed now as they grew closer to the city.
“Half an hour. We’ll get a room, and then it’ll be another four hours before we check in for our midnight flight.”
“I’m not interested in him,” Kat said.
Connor nodded. “I know. But it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want you.”
“Did you see him? How do you know he doesn’t want Maya and not me?”
“I saw him. If looks could kill, he would have eaten me alive. But instead, he acted as a part of our jaguar team and took out two of the men, while I brought down the other two. I might actually have liked him if it wasn’t for the fact that he wants you.”
“But what if he might be right for Maya?”
Connor’s dark look made her think he knew what he was talking about. She sighed. “All right. But you have to know he means nothing to me.”
But Connor still didn’t look really sure of himself, and that surprised her, considering how much he always seemed in charge. Cats were fickle, she reminded herself. Maybe he thought she’d be like one of his parents, loving and then leaving him far behind.
***
When they arrived in the city, they stayed at a classy hotel close to El Dorado International Airport. Connor paid for a suite with an adjoining room that Maya could have. That would give them all privacy and easy access in case they had any more trouble. They all ordered room service, ate fried cheese arepas and shish kebabs and then a dessert of crema de arroz, sweet rice with milk and coconut, in Maya’s room. Then Connor and Kat left Maya to shower and rest up until their late-night flight.
But Connor had other plans for Kat. He took her down to the lobby, which was brilliantly lit with floral-shaped chandeliers, expansive eggshell tile floors, and white marble walls. Pine and bleach cleaners filled his nostrils as he walked Kat past a winding marble staircase leading to a bar that overlooked an Olympic-sized pool, the aqua water inviting.
The place was ultra-elegant, but he preferred the jungle—the plants, the earthy and sweet floral fragrances, and the closed-in leafy cover—to this stark white openness with hard floors and pungent cleanser smells that left him feeling vulnerable and exposed.
Attempting to shake off the feeling that they were being watched, he led Kat to a bank of computers near the massive floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the pool so they could use the hotel’s pay-by-the-minute Internet service. Connor paid for the service, then motioned Kat to the chair while he pulled up another. “Let me see your emails from this Wade Patterson.”
Sighing, Kat signed on to the Internet to show Connor her emails, and after an hour of researching and showing Connor all that she had said she knew about Wade, Kat received an email from him.
Startled, she stared at the subject line: Sorry I Missed You!
Connor swore beneath his breath. “Open it.”
She felt uneasy as she did and read:
Dear Kathleen, I’m sorry I missed you in the city. I learned you had reservations at the resort near where the jaguar sightings had occurred, but they said you hadn’t arrived. Please email me as soon as you get this message. I have to know that you are all right. Wade
Surprised to read the email, Kat looked at Connor. He frowned at her. “His message sounds as though he knows you’re here, Kat. He hadn’t emailed you, not once while you were in the jungle or traveling with us to reach Bogotá, but now that you’re here, reading your emails for the first time, he writes to you? Coincidence or something else? He’s followed us here.”
A chill crawled up her spine. She looked around the lobby but didn’t see anyone who looked like the man in the photos on Facebook. “Do you want me to respond? Ask him if he’s a jaguar or works for Gonzales?” Kat asked.
Connor stood, placed his hands on her shoulders, and rubbed them, helping to massage the tension from them. “Ask him how you missed him in the city.”
She emailed Wade, and the reply was immediate.
Kathleen, thank God you are all right. I was so worried about you. My flight was delayed a day, but by then you were already out of phone or email contact. Where are you now? Wade
She looked up at Connor. “What should I say?”
“Tell him you’re engaged to be married and your fiancé wouldn’t like you meeting someone on the sly in Colombia like this.”
“I can’t say that! He’ll wonder why I said I’d meet him in the first place.”
“You weren’t engaged at the time.”
She folded her arms. “I’m not engaged now, either. Don’t you remember what Maya said? You have to do it right.”
Connor grinned at her.
“Besides, if I said I was engaged, he’d wonder how that had happened when I’ve been out of touch with the world all this time.”
Before she could type a response, Wade typed back:
Kathleen, I need to see you. I felt awful about missing you at the city. I want to get together with you before you leave. Wade
He sounded desperate.
“Tell him you’re engaged, Kat,” Connor said firmly.
She let out her breath in exasperation. “We are not engaged.”
“Tell him you have a lover who won’t permit you to see him, then.”
She smiled at Connor and shook her head.
“Fine. Tell him good-bye then, so your lover can prove to you that what he says is the truth.”
She chuckled. “Fine. I like challenges.”
She typed in:
Sorry, Wade, but I’ve started seeing someone, and so we’ll have to figure it was fate that we didn’t meet. Good luck with all you do. Bye. Kathleen
She logged off her email and shut down the connection. “Okay, lover boy?” she asked, offering her hand.
“You’re engaged to me,” he said, taking her hand and moving her through the lobby. “We’re getting married.”
She chuckled. “You called me stubborn.”
He looked down at her. “You are, about this marriage deal.”
That’s when she saw one of the men who had come to her rescue the year before in the Amazon. She recognized that hard, square jaw, those lean features and
riveting blue eyes, and the scar from an earlier fight that cut in a straight line across his smooth, tanned cheek. Only he wasn’t wearing camouflage this time. He was trying to blend in with jeans and a black T-shirt and a baseball cap, the bill shadowing his face.
What was an Army sergeant doing here? At this particular hotel? She didn’t like coincidences. He glanced at her and quickly looked away. He was talking into a phone. Something wasn’t right.
“I need to talk to someone,” she said, pulling Connor in the direction of the sergeant.
“Who, Wade? You saw him?” Connor’s voice was rough with agitation.
“No, someone in the Army. Someone who helped rescue me from the jungle.”
“What is he doing here?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
Caught, the man couldn’t very well escape without looking really obvious. He made a mock salute to Kat.
“What are you doing down here?” she asked, her voice sharp.
Chapter 28
The sergeant looked at Connor as if he was a man to fear. If Sergeant Stratton knew anything about Connor, he would be right.
“Sergeant?” Kat said again, trying to get him to answer her question. “Why are you here?” She knew his being in Bogotá at the same hotel where she was staying, when Gonzales’s men had been chasing her for some time, wasn’t just happenstance.
His gaze shifted from Connor to her.
“Answer the lady,” Connor growled, taking a step forward.
The sergeant evidently wasn’t supposed to have been caught in the open like this and hadn’t been briefed on what to say if he was. He probably hadn’t believed they’d leave the hotel room this soon to come down to the lobby.
Sergeant Stratton backed up against the wall. “He’s a special operative, isn’t he?”
Kat glanced at Connor and nearly smiled at the thought. Yeah, he was special, the most unique kind of operative she could ever have found.
“We heard you were down here,” the sergeant finally said.