But something slammed into the back of her head. A sharp, blinding pain shrieked through her skull. She fell forward and landed on her hands, thinking for a flash of a second that she was a dead woman before a black void swallowed her whole.
When she came to minutes later, Kathleen hurt everywhere—her arm, her leg, her head. Her hands were tied with rope and bound to a metal pole that was holding up the top of the canvas tent. The stench of blood surrounded her as her five Army teammates lay on the dirt floor, limbs twisted, clothes bloodied, all dead. Carlos Gonzales would keep her for last—the Trojan horse that had brought the enemy to his camp. From everything she’d read about the drug lord, she knew he would not kill her quickly.
But he must have left the camp after she saw him running for cover, or she was certain he would be standing over her, gloating over killing her team members while she was at his mercy.
The mission to take down the bastard was a bust. It was too late for the others in her team. Too late for her.
Her thigh and arm burned where the bullets had bitten into them. Yet her skin chilled. She twisted her hands to free herself from the ropes binding her. Blinding pain shot through her leg, arm, and head. Her vision blurred with the blood loss and from the excruciating pain, and she knew if she didn’t stop the bleeding, she wouldn’t make it. Three of Gonzales’s men remained in the tent with her, guarding her. One smiled with half-rotted teeth, clearly amused at her futile attempt to free herself.
A shower of bullets popped again and again in the Amazon jungle, farther from the drug warlord’s compound. Rat-ta-tat-tat. Men swore in Spanish, some screaming in pain, others shouting orders.
Her heart raced with renewed hope. A rescue attempt? For her? Well, for the team, but no one else was alive and whoever it was probably didn’t know that. But… who were they?
“Captain McKnight?” someone shouted from somewhere far away, like he was on the other side of the planet.
“Here!” she croaked, her throat parched and hoarse.
Callahan? She thought. But the major hadn’t been on this mission. He had been responsible for it, but she thought he had stayed behind the scenes.
Then silence. Callahan?
No one approached the tent, and the three men guarding her exited to see what was happening. “Jaguar!” one of the men shouted, terror in his voice.
Jaguar? No feral cat with any sense would come here in the middle of a shoot-out. Maybe she hadn’t heard the man right.
She twisted to free her wrists from the rope. Not making any progress, she stretched out her uninjured leg so that the toe of her hiking boot could hook onto the hilt of a sheathed dagger of the dead man lying closest to her.
Weapons fired. She stopped and stared in the direction of the tent flap. Outside, screams and curses ensued. Fierce growling mixed with the men’s terrified voices. Then silence.
Kathleen envisioned a vicious jaguar bounding into the tent and finishing her off, too. She struggled again to free herself. Then she heard movement outside, not sure what was happening.
With her skin perspiring and her wounds bleeding, the only thing keeping her conscious was the pain and the fear of what was coming next.
Footfalls hurried toward the tent. Kathleen braced for whoever it was—one of her captors or a rescuer—praying he was her rescuer.
His chest and feet bare, a man wearing a pair of jungle-green camouflage pants and carrying an assault rifle at the ready stopped in the entryway and stared at her, his mouth grim. His hair was short and blond but not cut in the military style. His face was angular and handsome, his torso bronzed and well sculpted. He didn’t look like he could be one of Gonzales’s men, yet he wasn’t one of her men, either. His hair was too shaggy, and his face sported a shadow of blond stubble.
Even the pants he was wearing didn’t fit. The waistband was slung low on his lean hips, the pant legs too short for his long legs, as though he had borrowed them in a hurry from a much shorter man. His gaze searched the tent, ensuring no one was a threat, then again fastened on hers, and for an instant his eyes reminded her of the golden eyes of a feral beast.
The female captain’s eyes shut and Connor raced across the tent. He grabbed a knife from one of Gonzales’s dead soldiers and cut a much cleaner shirt off a dead American soldier. Then Connor sliced through the rope tied around the captain’s wrists. He quickly worked to bind her wounds to stem the bleeding. Her blue eyes opened briefly, but she was drifting off, her gaze attempting to focus on him, her lips parted as if to speak. He could tell she was having a devil of a time staying conscious.
Despite everything, she smelled like a bit of fairy heaven, a sweet flowery fragrance that forced him to take another deep breath, despite his attempt at staying neutral. Her sensual feminine smell assaulted his senses, irritating him at being cursed with his jaguar senses at this particular moment. His pheromones kicked up a notch, triggered by the firestorm of sensations he was experiencing.
“Stay awake,” he ordered, trying to concentrate on keeping her alive until help could come for her and struggling to get his focus back on what was important and off his own primitive jaguar need to find a mate and procreate.
“American,” she whispered, her eyes heavily lidded. She closed them.
He snapped, “Captain, stay… awake!”
“Easy for you to say,” she said, sounding waspish, but as weak as she was, she didn’t have the bite to her words.
He smiled darkly and continued to bind her wounds.
“Who are you? What… ah,” she grimaced, reaching out to touch him, “are you doing here?”
“Connor Anderson’s the name, and I’m vacationing in the area. Save your strength.” As soon as he said his last name, he wondered why he had given her that much information.
“I’m… trying… to… stay… awake,” she growled, but again the softly irritated tone didn’t have the effect he imagined she was going for.
“Where is your rendezvous point?”
If he could take her to where her men would pick up the Army team, she might have a chance. The sound of men crashing through the trees made Connor rise quickly, grab a rifle, and slip out the back of the tent, intending to ambush Gonzales’s men before they knew what had hit them.
“Connor,” the captain whispered, and it killed him to have to leave her behind, even for just the moment.
But he couldn’t protect her if armed men greatly outnumbered him. Hidden in the thick vegetation, Connor saw U.S. Army men scouring the campsite, and he assumed they were coming to rescue the captain. He tossed the rifle and borrowed camouflaged pants and shifted, then waited in the mesh of trees until he heard one of the men speaking: “Hell, Kathleen.”
Kat.
The woman’s rescue was now out of Connor’s hands. So why the hell wasn’t he relieved?
Chapter 1
A Year Later in the Colombian Amazon Rain Forest
Thick black lines, forming rosettes with black spots dotting their centers, covered his golden body as Connor Anderson prowled through the Amazon as a jaguar, searching for his sister, Maya. He was certain the sound of her deep, throaty growl somewhere in the dark jungle had been a stern warning to something that had threatened her.
He knew that if he let her out of his sight for even a moment, she would be in trouble. As usual, she hadn’t heeded his words about staying nearby while he went fishing.
Jaguars normally were solitary animals that only met up with one another when they were looking for a mate, or when a female was with her cubs until they were old enough to be on their own. But Connor and his sister stayed together. They needed to prowl the Amazon forest and swamps from time to time in their jaguar form to satisfy the urge to shift in their natural environment. But they didn’t feel the necessity to run alone. In fact, quite the opposite.