After climbing onto a branch, she leaped from one tree to another, then jumped to the ground again and ran through the dense foliage until she was close to where the men were speaking and stopped dead in her tracks. Hidden by leaves and vines and two fallen trees, she quickly scanned the area.
Beyond her hiding spot, she saw two jaguars down.
Wade Patterson. She barely breathed. He was lying on his side in his jaguar form, breathing in and out, his heart rate slow.
Anger welled up inside her, and she fought the idea of attacking the men that instant and risking all the jaguars’ lives.
A female was down also, not a shifter. Not Kat. Both were drugged, their tails twitching slightly. Thank God. Not dead.
And the men—there were two of them. One she didn’t know. The other—she clenched her teeth together. Bill Bettinger, the bastard. Dressed in camo clothes as if he was in the U.S. Army, in combat boots with a billed cap tugged tightly over red curls, he was staring at Wade as if he was trying to figure out what to do with him. He couldn’t take a shifter back to the States, pretending he was a jaguar. He couldn’t leave him here and remove the female from the jungle, knowing Wade had his number.
But if Bettinger killed Wade now, the other man would see Wade turn from a jaguar to a human. Dark hair fell to the hunter’s shoulders, his eyes gray-blue, his clothes a more worn version of what Bettinger was wearing. He looked like bad news.
“The buyer is going to love this,” the human said. “We could sell him both cats. If he kept them for a while at his ranch, the male might breed with the female and then if she had cubs, he could have some more to hunt later. I don’t blame him for feeling there’s more sport in hunting a wild beast of prey rather than a deer.”
Bettinger snorted with disdain. “How are the hunters going to kill the jaguars? Riding ATVs? Or are they going on foot with a bow and arrow? Not much sport if they’re going to gun it down from a protected vehicle.”
She was surprised to hear the pride in Bettinger’s voice when he spoke about jaguars, considering he was selling them out.
The human shrugged. “They see themselves as big-game hunters. Who knows how they take down their prey? As long as the buyer pays us, that’s all that matters. If he doesn’t want them, we’ll just sell off the cats to the highest bidder at any of the dozens of auctions across the U.S. What do I care as long as we get the money for them?”
Bettinger smiled. “To think we could still be in the drug trade, risking our necks.” Then he turned icy-blue eyes from the cats to the man and said, “Mylar, I need you to leave, now. Go see to the dogs.”
“But…”
“Now, damn it. Go!”
The man looked at Bettinger like he was crazy. “What are you going to do?”
“Kill the male. And you if you don’t get your ass out of here.”
“What? You’re only going to take one of them? We could sell both. We could get twice the money.”
Bettinger turned the rifle on Mylar. “He’s rabid. We can’t take him with us. I’m… not… going… to… tell… you… again. Go. Now.”
“How do you know he’s rabid? He looks fine to me.”
Bettinger settled his finger on the rifle trigger, and Mylar looked back at him, his eyes rounded. Then he let out a grunt, turned, and headed in Maya’s direction. She quickly crouched behind the trees, listening to his heavy footfalls as he walked past her fallen tree barrier, headed in the direction of the barking dogs.
Wade’s eyes opened for a fraction of an instant, widening when he saw her through the fallen trees. He looked groggy. His eyelids dropped into narrow slits. He was too tired to be of any help in this mission. She was on her own.
Bettinger was watching the other man’s progress, waiting until he was out of earshot. She was getting ready to leap from her hiding place before he shot and killed Wade, but she hesitated when Bettinger said, “What the hell are you doing out here?”
Not that Wade could reply to him in his jaguar form.
He kicked Wade in the chest.
The jaguar growled, but he was so out of it that the sound was barely audible.
Maya bared her teeth in silent protest.
“This won’t do.” Bettinger raised his rifle to shoot Wade somewhere less vital, but he had to know that wouldn’t trigger the shift. Only a kill would. “Maybe if I shoot you somewhere that’ll hurt but won’t be fatal, you’ll want to talk? Tell me why you’re here? I don’t believe in coincidences. You must be in the Service. You and your brother. The other guys, too, that you were with at the club? Hell. Forget wounding you. Too bad for you that you weren’t better at your job. I thought the Service only hired the best.”
His finger moved to the trigger again as Maya roared and leaped for the kill.
Chapter 13
A shot rang out. A thunk sounded as the bullet hit something. Ignoring the gunshot, Maya didn’t take her focus off Bettinger. She slammed against him with her huge jaguar paws planted on his chest. He fell back with a strangled cry. Eyes wide, his expression was full of disbelief and fear. Jaguars in the wild didn’t stick together, unless they were a mother and her cubs. Then she’d protect them with her life. Full-grown jaguars? No way. So he hadn’t anticipated another jaguar’s attack.
Flat on his back, he smelled her and his lips parted in shock. He knew who she was.
“Let me shift,” he begged as she stood on top of him, pinning him down. “Give me a chance.”
A growl rumbled in her throat. Like he was going to give Wade a chance? And the female cat? The jaguar wasn’t going to be allowed to live, but hunted to the death on someone’s ranch.
And if Maya gave the bastard a chance, if she allowed him to shift to fight her that way, he’d be bigger and could easily kill her instead.
Bettinger knew Maya planned to eliminate him. She didn’t have any choice. If she let him up, he’d fatally shoot Wade and her. They knew he was involved now, and he couldn’t risk letting them live.
She growled softly, her face close to his, smelling his fear but unable to decide what to do with him. Killing humans who were out to murder them had to be done with finesse. If she terminated Bettinger in a jaguar way, crushing the head with her powerful jaws, investigators would know a jaguar had killed him. Then hunters would descend on the area to destroy the jaguar, which could mean any that they came across. They were all the same, after all.
“Hey!” a man shouted from behind her.
Her skin prickled with fear. Hell, the other man had come back.
“Shoot her!” Bettinger shouted, panic driving his words.
That’s when she felt Bettinger pull a gun from a holster at his side, realizing he’d only pretended to be panicked to distract her. She didn’t hesitate this time. It was kill or be killed.
And she had two killers to contend with now.
She swiped at Bettinger’s head with a powerful slash of her paw. He dropped the gun, his head turned hard to the right, his neck broken, his eyes staring but unseeing.
She whipped around to target the other man, the hunter who was ready with a rifle aimed at her. Wade growled softly, and Mylar turned as if afraid the other jaguar—the rabid one—was ready to eat him alive. He wasn’t. Poor Wade was struggling to lift his head off the leaf-littered ground.
But his action had given her the precious time she needed to take care of the other man.
She leaped, trying out Kat’s unusual way of landing on the prey’s head, and it worked. When her body slammed onto his head, he dropped like a rock and hit the ground hard. His neck was broken. She sniffed Mylar for any sign of a breath, listened for a heartbeat. Nothing.
Now what was she to do? Lion Mane was most likely still in the area, and maybe even more of the men who were working with these bastards were around.
Wade was too drugged to leave the area under his own speed
, and she couldn’t move a cat as big as he was all on her own. The female couldn’t be left alone like this, either. Not in the lethargic condition she was in.
Wade opened his eyes again, looking at her. If she could find his brother, David could help. She had no idea where he was but suspected he might be following Lion Mane and the others.
She stood as still as a spotted statue. Not even her tail was swishing as she considered her options in the shadowed jungle, listening for any sounds that would indicate men were approaching. Her heart was pumping hard and her body felt overheated. Unable to sweat like a human could, she began to pant, the only way for a cat to cool off.
She moved in close to Wade and bent down to nuzzle his cheek. She licked it, trying to get him to stand and shake off the drug. He sat up and shifted into one gorgeous naked hunk of a human male.
“Go,” he said, his voice dark, deep, and… sleepy.
She shook her head and nudged at him to climb a tree. He struggled to get into one, and it was almost painful watching him climb the liana—a drainpipe-thick vine-like plant—slipping and scrambling for purchase and pausing to catch his breath, as if every movement was the most wearing. When he reached the first branch off the ground, he shifted back into his jaguar form. Couldn’t he have jumped up there more easily as a cat? Was he too out of it to be thinking clearly?
Now what to do with the female jaguar? Maya tore a liana with her teeth and dragged the plant over to the sleeping jaguar, allowing the water dripping from inside the plant to fall on her face. The liana was a common source of water for survival, pure and cleansed as it was filtered by the plant. If Maya could revive the cat enough, she’d have another reason to revere the life-giving source.
Wake up, she pleaded in her jaguar brain. If she could just get the jaguar to wake enough, she could attempt to move her away from the area where the dead men were lying. The dead men. She needed to deal with them, too. The female jaguar’s tongue licked at the water droplets on her face, but she didn’t sit up.
Wade was watching her, his head resting on the branch as if he couldn’t lift it.
Maya jumped onto the branch next to him, and they stayed there until he seemed to be able to gather more strength and leaped to another tree farther from where she’d killed the men.
Then she had another horrible thought. What if Connor and Kat came to her cottage and found her gone? What if they both came looking for her here?
She had to get Wade to her cottage before they came for her and got caught in the crossfire. If Lion Mane came, he’d know just who she was, and he’d smell Wade’s scent, too.
***
Connor and Kat always rendezvoused with Maya at her cottage at night, but he and Kat had taken a little more time than usual so he was late arriving at Maya’s place.
He knocked on her front door. “Maya?”
At first he was thought she was with Wade, but he heard no sounds coming from inside her room. He didn’t think Wade had come back for her since that night he’d visited her. She had never told Connor that Wade had been with her, but Connor knew, just from her blushes and Wade’s scent on her deck.
He’d also seen the way she’d watched for Wade when they were exploring the rainforest, looking for any signs that he was nearby. A couple of times, Connor had thought Wade was following them, watching their backs, being protective like he’d been when they were in the Amazon.
Connor paced in front of the door, then knocked again. “Maya!”
When there was still no response, he went around to her deck. He smelled that she’d been here recently, but the trail led down into the jungle. He opened the door to her cottage and quickly searched the place.
Maya wasn’t there. She had obviously decided to take a run through the jungle by herself while he and Kat had been busy making love. Again. He wasn’t happy about Maya exploring the jungle on her own. He understood Maya’s restlessness and the fact that she probably was feeling like a third wheel. And that being this close to the jungle pulled on their wild-cat urges.
Back at his cottage, he found Kat straightening up their bed and said, “Stay here and wait for Maya to return, Kat. I’m going to look for her.”
“She’s gone again?”
“Yeah, like last night. I’ll be right back.”
“Can’t I come with you this time?” Kat asked.
“No. I don’t want to worry about you being out there if she’s gotten herself into trouble. Stay here and I’ll return soon.”
He kissed her and hugged her tight, knowing she didn’t want to be left alone. Last night, Maya hadn’t been far from the cottages. He hoped he’d find the same thing tonight.
Returning to Maya’s deck, he removed his clothes and shifted in a blur of tanned skin to golden fur, nails to claws, and much bigger teeth. Then he leaped from the deck and took off to find her most recent trail. She’d been exploring the jungle in a happy-go-lucky way as they usually did, carving her nails into a tree, rubbing off strands of fur on another, but then her path and the scent she left changed.
That had him worried. Dogs were barking somewhere in the distance as he moved a mile away from the cottages.
Then he smelled Wade and the other female jaguar. What the hell?
And the odor of men. Two of them.
He could tell from Maya’s scent that she was terrified. The men had to be hunting the jaguars. Connor was trying to keep a clear head where Maya was concerned, but his blood was racing through his veins, his heart pumping hard as he feared for Maya’s safety.
He moved through the jungle, smelling the ground and low tree branches, sniffing the air. Unable to contain himself, he roared for Maya.
She immediately responded, her jaguar’s roar sounding like music to his ears.
He’d covered another mile from when he heard her roar and discovered two dead men with Maya’s scent all over them. He looked more closely at a place on the ground where a jaguar had lain, his body pressing the grasses down into a mat, and smelled the scent—Wade Patterson’s. A female jaguar was still sleeping on the ground nearby.
His heart hammered his ribs. Where the hell was Maya? And Wade?
***
Maya had been so relieved to hear Connor’s roar that she let him know just where she and Wade were hiding. Her brother would help get Wade to the resort, and then she could assist Connor in moving the dead men and hiding the jaguar female until she revived enough to take care of herself.
Everything would be all right.
Before she could tell Connor where they were again—she thought he probably had been sidetracked as he checked out the dead men—she saw him staring up at her and Wade as they sat on the tree branch together above him. Well, Wade was reclining, unable to sit. Tension filled every one of Maya’s muscles as she worried about her brother’s reaction.
Connor just waited, as if he was thinking she should come with him now. Connor grunted at her. She licked Wade’s cheek, although Wade didn’t take his eyes off Connor. The two jaguars were ready to do battle. If only Connor knew how unable Wade was to fight in his current condition.
She jumped off the tree branch and landed next to Connor. He nudged her as if telling her to return to her cottage, but she nudged at him to go with her instead. He followed her, and she led him back to Mylar and then pawed at the gun that the man had used to tranquilize Wade and the other cat. She waited for Connor to get it. She moved away from the dead man and pawed at the earth where Wade had been sleeping.
Connor sniffed at the ground, then stared at her.
He got it. Wade was not in any shape to help himself. She bolted back to the tree where Wade still waited for them, too drugged to move.
This time when Connor joined them, he shifted and folded his arms across his chest, looking up at Wade. “I take it you’re too tired to move much at all.”
Wade bowed his head.
<
br /> Connor shook his. “I can’t carry you. What do you want to do? Stay here until you’re more yourself?”
Maya grunted at him.
Connor looked down at her, scowling. “You aren’t staying out here with him all night. What if more men return to hunt down the cat that killed those men?”
They just might. That’s what she was worried sick about! Lion Mane was still unaccounted for. She wasn’t leaving a drowsy big cat out here to fend for himself. And Connor needed her help disposing of the dead men and helping the female cat to find shelter until she could safely leave the area.
“Maya,” Connor said, exasperated. “You’ve got to come with me.”
Maya glanced in the direction of the resort. She wasn’t leaving Wade no matter what Connor wanted.
“Hell, Maya. All right, stay with him. I’ll get us some clothes and we can carry him back to your place. Don’t get caught.”
She licked his hand, then jumped into the tree. He watched her for a moment, gave Wade a growly look, then shifted and tore off through the jungle.
She’d known her brother would come up with a solution. With tension filling every muscle, she reclined on the branch with Wade, hoping that they didn’t encounter more trackers, the hunters, or any other humans. Or that anyone would find the dead bodies.
She thought they were relatively safe up in the well-shielded tree, but Wade appeared anxious, despite being so lethargic. He kept lifting his head, trying to turn, his tail twitching. She was apprehensive, too, and jumped down from the tree. Pacing between the two dead men, she wanted to move them to their final resting place, a nearby river. The crocodiles and piranhas filling the river ought to take care of the spoils of war.
Two rivers converged not too far south of here. She’d drag Bettinger, the shifter, there first. She gently bit into the gun belt strapped diagonally across Bettinger’s chest and began to drag him over the rainforest floor. She was pissed off at the man for being one of their kind and leading hunters to jaguars. Not to mention that he’d planned to kill both Wade and her.