Maya and Connor exchanged worried glances, which didn’t bode well for Kat.
When they had a good fire started to cook the meal, Connor disappeared into the jungle. “Where’s he going?” Kat quickly asked.
“To get us something to eat. It’s easier if we shift so that we can hunt. But he didn’t want to do it in the open, here by the river. He’ll try to find as secluded a spot as he can.”
“What about the other shifter? If he is one. What if he tries to visit with us while Connor’s gone?” Kat knew Connor would be ready to tear into the man, jaguar to jaguar, if he returned and found the man with them. She didn’t want to see that. Not if the other shifter wasn’t a bad guy.
Maya poked at the fire. “If he’s a shifter, he’ll know not to come near us. He’ll know Connor won’t like it. And the guy couldn’t really speak with us unless he shifts. Without a set of clothes…” She shrugged. “So he’ll do what he’s doing now, continue to stalk us and try to learn where we’re going. Although I assume, considering the direction we’re headed, he’ll figure we’re off to the city. If he finds me alone when we split up to our separate rooms for the night in the city, he might approach me then.”
“That’s what you’re hoping?” Kat asked, worried that the man might be a problem. Even if he was a shifter, he might not be anyone Maya would care for.
Maya smiled and squeezed Kat’s hand. “Don’t look so worried. Not only can I take care of myself, but I highly doubt Connor will let me stay in a room of my own alone. He’s really a worrywart when it comes to me. I’m sure we’ll get a room with a bedroom and a foldout couch in a suite-type arrangement. I’ll sleep on the couch, unless you want Connor to.” She smiled as if knowing just what Kat wanted. “Then again, I doubt I’ll have much say about it.”
Kat took a deep breath, then let it out. She had never confided in another woman about her interest in a man before. Certainly, it seemed strange to be talking about this with Connor’s sister. “You’ve always wanted us to be together, so it’s not only Connor who might wish it,” she said smiling.
Maya sighed and pulled on her pants, then a shirt over her damp undergarments. “I didn’t want you to be angry with me for turning you, Kat. You aren’t, are you?”
Kat began to get dressed, too. “For turning me?” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to feel yet. I understand why you did it. Not that you were mean or vindictive or anything. You wanted Connor to have a mate.”
“Not just him. I wanted you to be my sister,” Maya said quickly.
Kat couldn’t help but give her a small smile. “I believe we’re blood sisters now.” She sat before the fire. “What if Connor can’t stay with me for all time? What if he gets tired of me?”
“He won’t.” Maya frowned. “I know he won’t.”
“But cats don’t stay with one mate. They’re… fickle.”
Maya smiled. “We’re human, too. Believe me, he didn’t like it that our father strayed and then abandoned our mother and us. So Connor won’t do that. He’s stuck by my side since we were little, never wanting to leave me. Our mother even left us when we were young adults. We don’t feel the same as the big cats or our parents.”
“Wow.” Although Kat didn’t know why she was so surprised. She had seen enough of that growing up. She picked up a twig and scratched it in the dirt. “What if I can’t stay with one mate? What if with this jaguar gene, I have the uncontrollable urge to stray?”
“All right, for the sake of argument, let’s talk about it. How many boyfriends have you had?”
Kat’s brows rose. She didn’t speak about stuff like that with just anyone, well, with anyone, period. And although Maya was to be her sister, she didn’t know her well enough to tell all. In truth, she hadn’t been with more than four guys, and none had had any desire to set up a homestead until Roger. After bouncing around between foster homes herself, settling down was damned important to her. But she still didn’t feel like exposing her whole past life to a virtual stranger.
Maya shrugged. “If you’ve had a ton of boyfriends, then maybe you would be fickle. But even so, it doesn’t mean that if you found the right man, you couldn’t settle down. The others could have been just a case of experimenting, trying to locate the right guy, testing the waters, so to speak. So how many have you been with?”
Kat’s mouth parted, but she couldn’t say. Would Maya think there was something wrong with her because she had been with so few guys? She wasn’t really outgoing when it came to meeting men.
Switching the focus, she said, “What about you? How many guys have you been with?”
Chapter 19
After finding the scent of the male jaguar on a tree that had a great view of the river where Connor, Kat, and Maya had swum, but not locating the jaguar now, Connor left his pack and his clothes in the jungle near a stream. He shifted and climbed onto a fallen tree in his stocky jaguar form to search for their meal. A giant river otter jerked his head around to see the jaguar, then quickly slipped under the water with his belly exposed, sweeping his tail and legs until he dove under a stack of downed tree trunks in the water and disappeared. Not that Connor had any interest in eating the otter.
Then Connor spied a pirarucu, the air-breathing, carnivorous catfish, one of the most ancient prehistoric fish from two hundred million years ago, that would eat fish, small animals, and birds. It was the largest freshwater fish in the world.
This one Connor estimated to be a couple of hundred pounds and about six feet long, although he had heard of one that had been caught weighing nearly 675 pounds and measuring ten feet in length. From his tree-trunk perch and with his spotted tail slashing the air, Connor watched the catfish swimming through the brown water. He was ready for dinner.
He leaped into the water and pounced on the pirarucu, which swiftly continued downstream and slipped out of Connor’s grasp. Connor waded after the catfish, ears perked, whiskers and tail twitching, muscles bunching as he readied himself for another try. He leaped again, his claws raking down the carnivore’s tough scaled skin, which was capable of protecting it from caiman, freshwater dolphins, and other predatory fish. But not jaguars. The scales of the catfish were sandpaper rough, so much so that the natives used the three-and-a-half-inch scales as sandpaper and a scraping tool.
The catfish slid away from Connor’s grasp again, turned, and headed upstream this time. The water Connor was wading in was jaguar-shoulder deep. He jumped straight out of the water again and leaped for the fish, his head submerging when he landed on his prey so he could get a grip with his teeth. The pirarucu wriggled free again, its tail waving in the water like a giant paddle and propelling it forward.
Connor stalked the Jurassic-era catfish again, wading through the water, eyeing the movement of the fish, and calculating his best timing for an ambush. He jumped straight out of the water, landed on his prey’s back, grabbing its head this time, and held it under the water.
The catfish struggled, and the fish’s tail slapped the water once, twice, and then it grew still. Connor released his hold on the fish, ready to grab it again, but the pirarucu was no longer moving. Now for the difficult part—getting it back to the campfire.
He would drag it back nearer the campfire so he could make sure the women were okay, and then he would return for his backpack and clothes, and shift.
***
When Kat asked if Maya had had a lot of male friends, Maya grinned, and Kat was relieved that she hadn’t taken offense.
“Not enough boyfriends for me,” Maya said. “But you see, I really have a terrible time getting close to men. I’m like Connor, worried I might become attached to someone and then have to turn the person. What if it didn’t work out? So I meet men far from home, stay with them for a few hours, and leave them. They prefer it that way anyway. No strings attached. No whining woman who wants to get married and have babies.”
Kat didn’t think of herself as a whining woman, but she did want to get married and have a couple of
children someday. “But you do, don’t you, Maya? You want to have babies.”
Maya looked into the fire. “Yeah, I do.”
“So, what have you done to locate others like yourselves?”
Maya shook her head. “We’ve searched some out here and in Mexico and Belize, but we haven’t found any who are shifters. Just regular jaguars.”
“What about social networking sites?”
Her expression a little surprised, eyes wider than normal, brows raised, Maya glanced at her. “Like…?”
“You know, Facebook, Myspace, other networking sites.”
“Hmm,” Maya said, calculation in her golden eyes. “We have our garden nursery on a website, and we’re on Facebook, but we use it strictly for business.”
“Do you ever talk about your hobbies? Take pictures of the wildlife in the Amazon? Share pictures of yourselves as jaguars? You could show you support their cause. Have a blog about them. Provide subtle hints about being shifters. Something maybe only another shifter would recognize.” Not that Kat would know how to find a secret society of jaguars, but surely Maya and Connor would know how to do it. “Heck, you can scare up just about anything on Twitter.”
“Connor would say no, that it’s too risky.” But Maya looked hopeful that Kat would be in her corner on this.
Kat smiled. “I have a website and blog that I share pictures and stories on. But there’s no real focus to it. Maybe when we reach your home, we can come up with something that even Connor wouldn’t mind.”
“What wouldn’t Connor mind now?” he asked, stalking into their makeshift camp for lunch with nothing to show for his hunting expedition, his hair wet, his shirt open, and water droplets cascading down his well-toned hot body, his voice as dark as his expression.
“Did you locate him?” Maya asked, not even mentioning the lack of food for the meal.
Kat frowned. Him? She thought he was scaring up their food.
“I was fishing,” he said, not looking Kat’s way, his clothes sticking to his damp skin.
“Yeah, and I know damn well you went in search of the jaguar also. So did you find any sign of him?”
“Yeah, Maya. He’d been watching us from one of the trees close to the river when we were swimming. But he moved off, probably as soon as we came into shore.” He glanced at Kat. “So what wouldn’t Connor mind?”
She had forgotten what she and Maya had been talking about until she saw Maya glance her way with a worried expression that said, “The ball’s in your court—you deal with him.”
Leaving Kat and his sister alone in the jungle near the river, even to go fishing, was difficult enough. But Connor had had to search for the jaguar to learn what he could about him. At least now, Connor had picked up the other jaguar’s scent and would know him if he ran across the cat if he was in human form later.
But now Kat and his sister were up to something he assumed was related to Maya’s idea of trying to secure a mate for herself with Kat’s help. And that could get both women into a lot of trouble.
Back stiff and not looking in the least bit intimidated, Kat lifted her chin. “We thought we might do a little social networking to see if we could locate another cat-shifter.”
He shook his head and motioned to the jungle. “I left dinner back there because I wanted to be close enough that if you had any trouble, I could be here quickly. I’ll go cut it up and bring it to the fire.”
“What did you get?” Maya asked, following him as Kat hurried to join them.
“Pirarucu,” he said, then added for Kat’s benefit in the event she had never heard of it, “one mother of a catfish.”
“Good, I’m starving,” Kat said. “I could eat the whole thing.”
“How big this time?” Maya asked, grinning. She knew as well as he did that Kat wouldn’t be able to eat even a tiny fraction of it.
But they would cook it and leave it for the natives who were following them. Maybe even the jaguar, if he cared to eat the remains, although Connor wasn’t feeling magnanimous about giving him a free meal.
“Wow,” Kat said when she saw the giant fish lying in the dappled shade of the trees. “That’s a catfish?”
“Leftover from prehistoric times,” Maya said. “I think that’s the biggest one you’ve ever hunted, Connor.”
Kat looked at the fish with such awe that Connor smiled. Then she looked up at him with such disbelief that his smile broadened.
“Wow,” she said. “How could you have managed such a huge fish? Why even in your jaguar form, it was bigger than you.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Connor admitted, not knowing why, when he normally wouldn’t have acknowledged to a woman—any woman—that he had struggled to handle any task. “But in the end, my teeth are much bigger.”
“And we’re persistent,” Maya said, “if we want to eat.”
“I fished when I had turned into a jaguar that one time, but I didn’t go after anything this huge. The fish I pulled out was… little. I don’t think I would have tried to hunt something half as big as this,” Kat said, still sounding astounded.
“No need to. You were hungry, caught what you needed, and that was that,” Maya said. “So, do we all carry him back to the campfire or carve him up here?”
“Let’s carry him to the campfire. We can skin him there,” Kat said. “I was hungry but if I could freeze the rest of him, this would have kept me in meat the rest of the year. What will we do with what we can’t eat?”
Connor took the most weight as they all three carried the catfish to the campfire, where they set about skinning him. “The natives who are following us will have a feast.” Then he looked up at Kat. “About the networking sites for meeting those of our kind… we have to be careful that no one ever learns what we are. I heard you mention Facebook and Twitter. Any open forum like that could mean real trouble for us.”
“Couldn’t we disguise it enough? I don’t mean to say that we would have a jaguar lover’s dating site or anything.”
He couldn’t help smiling at that. Maya chuckled.
For the first time, he felt real relief. Kat was accepting them as family, ready to help Maya find a mate. Although that could be a dangerous venture, he appreciated that she wanted to assist his sister. And of course, Maya was beaming with enthusiasm. But he was still against doing anything like that on the Internet.
Wondering about the jaguar following them and if he had some connection to Kat, Connor asked, “Do you have any correspondence from that Wade Patterson?”
“Several emails.” Kat let out her breath. “Why do you ask?”
“He comes here to the Amazon on trips. Contacted you because you were writing about jaguars and interested in locating me, a man who has a pet jaguar.”
“You don’t think he’s a shifter, do you? The jaguar following us?”
Connor stabbed at another chunk of fish. “An American had corresponded with a woman who was interested in jaguars, lured her into the Amazon, and intended to show her the jaguar cats and get her in touch with me? How? The jaguars don’t make regular appearances for anyone’s sake. And I don’t recall ever having smelled another male shifter in the area.”
Kat let out her breath. “I don’t think he’s a bad guy.”
“What if this Wade Patterson was planning on selling you off as a hostage? Taking advantage of you himself? What if he is a shifter and thought since you’re so fascinated with jaguars, he would turn you himself?”
But then why not meet her in Florida first? Get to know her better, then turn her there?
Unsettled, Connor fisted his hand around the knife as he continued to carve up the fish.
“What if this Wade Patterson is the one following us now? Angry that he had missed his opportunity, that another shifter was claiming you instead? And here I was one of the same jaguars that Wade had enticed you to come to the jungle to see.”
Now that would be ironic and would serve Wade right for luring her here in the first place with dishonorable intention
s.
“I don’t know,” Kat said, looking thoughtful and frowning as she stared into the fire.
Connor would find out all about the man as soon as they had the chance to read over her emails. Then he would look into the man’s background in Florida. But he had one other thought that had bothered him, too. “What if he’s one of Gonzales’s lackeys?”
She chewed on her bottom lip, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. Wouldn’t he have already relayed where we were to Gonzales? I don’t think we’d be hiking free out here if he worked for the drug lord.”
Connor had to agree with that and nodded stiffly.
After cooking and eating as much as they could of the catfish, Connor called out to the natives he was sure were hidden from their sight, motioned to the fish in a gesture of giving, and then situated his backpack over his shoulders and grabbed Kat’s, too.
“I can carry my own weight,” she said, “now that I’ve had a nice rest.” She looked determined as she reached out her hand to seize the strap of her bag.
He shook his head, not about to allow her to carry the pack. “We have a long hike ahead of us. Besides, we’re on our first date. Remember? I wouldn’t think of letting you carry your own backpack while we’re on a date.”
“In an environment like this, everyone has to carry their own weight. And really, I am better,” she said as Maya looked at her, appearing concerned Kat might not make it, either.
“We can set up camp along the way if we need to,” Maya said. “Hell, I might not be able to make it to the city before it gets dark. And I haven’t been recovering from being so sick. Appreciate Connor’s gallantry. He doesn’t often offer it.”
“Oh?” Kat said, sounding like either she didn’t think Connor could ever have been anything but gallant, or maybe she was fishing for a story.