She snorted and he chuckled, as if he knew what she was thinking.
“Not a prize,” she said.
“For some, no,” he answered. “They don’t know what they’d get with a woman like you.”
She frowned. “What do you mean by that?”
“Maya, if some of the city cats had seen you in action in the Amazon, they’d know you were one hellcat. I mean that in a good way. But some would be afraid to mince words with you. As to another matter, all of us are leaving on flights tomorrow. Your cousins are going to Brazil. David and I are going to Belize. Would you mind if someone stayed with you tonight and took you to the airport in the morning?”
“Me,” David said. “I volunteer to stay and watch over Maya.”
She let out her breath on a sigh. “You’re injured.”
“How about if we both stay with you, Maya?” Wade asked.
She didn’t think he was really asking. No way did he want to leave her alone with his brother. Little did he know that he had no worries there. If she wanted anyone to stay and watch her back, it would be Wade. But she had no intention of feeding into his ego.
She studied Wade. “Don’t like your hotel accommodations?”
“They’re fine. It’s you that I’m worried about,” Wade said.
And this time she heard something different in his voice. Real concern. After he had helped them in the Amazon, she’d assumed he was the kind of guy who would go out on a limb for those in need. But she really didn’t think she needed any jaguar shifter to protect her. She had canines and claws enough for the job if anyone hassled her.
“I… don’t think it’s really necessary,” she said, wanting to see how hard he was going to try to get her
to concede.
“You know what happened last time,” Wade said.
“We were in the jungle. And the men were after Kat.”
Wade glanced in the rearview mirror. “Yeah. And she had you and your brother to protect her. But that hadn’t been enough. You, on the other hand, are alone.”
She still didn’t think anyone was going to follow them home from the club.
“Maybe your cousins could stay also, if they want to. It’s a long drive back to Houston from your place,” Wade said.
She shook her head. How had she gone from planning a night alone before she left on her trip to having a houseful of male guests? She did rather like the idea. She could get to know her cousins a little better.
And having them there would make her feel less self-conscious about having two males staying with her who were not related and who she didn’t know
very well.
“Slumber party,” she said. “Okay. I can fix us something to eat after I bandage up David. What happened to you exactly? All I saw was the bottle hitting and you ducking too late.”
“The guy wielding it was that redheaded guy.”
She stiffened. She hadn’t liked Bill Bettinger from the beginning.
“He didn’t like that my brother was protecting my interests,” Wade added.
She harrumphed. “If only he knew the real situation. We’ve only just met. Now that I know that there are others of our kind nearby, I can make some more shifter friends.”
David winced as she applied more pressure to
his wound.
“Here I thought we were nearly old friends, me watching your back in the Amazon…” Wade reminded her.
“Just my back,” she said.
He cast a wicked smile over the backseat that
said otherwise.
“So what’s going on in Belize, and how do you know my cousins?” she asked.
Wade turned onto another road. “The reason I know your cousins is that we belong to the Service.”
She considered David’s jagged wound and was relieved to see his healing genetics were beginning to take hold. The bleeding had nearly stopped. “You mean you work for one of the branches of the military, like Candy said?”
“Not exactly. We’ve done a number of extractions over the years, but we’re not part of the government.”
“Extractions of what?”
“People. Shifters like ourselves who get into trouble. City cats who aren’t prepared to face the dangers in the jungle. The Service is more like our own special government, a body that was started years ago to police jaguar shifters and attempt to protect our jaguar cousins who don’t shape-shift. We’re in service to the organization, so cryptically we’re in the Service.”
“Jaguar police force,” she said. No wonder Wade had been so good at tracking Kat and her brother when they were in the rainforest—he was a first-class act.
Then what about Wade was true? Maya frowned. “You aren’t a respectable businessman in Pensacola, Florida—a computer programmer during the day and a game-design hobbyist at night?”
He shook his head.
“Your cover?”
“I would have told Kat eventually, but not in an email. We were supposed to hook up.”
“But you really do live in Pensacola?”
“Yes.”
“You had pictures of yourself on Facebook, Twitter, and a number of other networking sites. That’s how I recognized you. So that was all you.”
“Yeah.”
She asked David, “What do you do for a living? Are you with this agency, too?”
“Yeah. But it’s not called the Agency.”
“Four main branches exist,” Wade explained. “The Enforcers, who police shifters, ensuring everyone abides by some rules. The Guardians, who protect our people, secrets, and real jaguars. The Avengers, who take out the trash. They go after the hard-core criminals that we have no hope of rehabilitating. Then there’s the Special Forces unit that David and I belong to. Your cousins, also. I saw them on a mission in South America. Another extraction.”
“How come Connor and I never knew about any
of this?”
“Your parents—”
“Mother,” Maya corrected. Except for donating the sperm, her father hadn’t taken part in their lives.
“Your mother, then, must have kept you isolated from our kind and stuck to the old ways. My father was like that, too. Not until David and I began raising hell on our own did we learn about the Service.”
“What about your mom?”
He shook his head. “She died when my brother and I were sixteen. A man involved in the exotic-animals markets trade killed her. She’d fought him tooth and claw, attempting to free herself. We guessed he thought she wasn’t worth the battle and terminated her.”
“I’m so sorry, Wade.”
“Yeah, well, Dad was in his own world then. Without his heavy hand, David and I cut loose. We got into trouble and learned all about the Service. We were lucky that one of the Enforcers thought we
were salvageable.”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine you did anything that bad.”
“Don’t tell her all the stuff we did, and I won’t, either,” David said.
She smiled, intending to learn what she could later. “So you guys are…?”
“Part of a Special Forces unit called the Golden Claw JAG Elite Force. We do a little of everything.”
She thought the organization sounded like an admirable cause and important for their kind.
“It sounded too dangerous for me to join. But… we weren’t given much of a choice.” David was smiling when he said it.
She shook her head and wondered how often Wade and his brother had faced danger on their jobs. And off their jobs. She and her brother had certainly encountered trouble from time to time while visiting the rainforest over the years.
“What about the man who murdered your mother? Did they ever catch him?”
“No.” Wade glanced out the window, and she suspected that wasn’t the end of it.