She wanted to hunt, wanted to climb a tree, wanted to swim. But when she heard men coming toward her, all she thought of was self-preservation. She leaped into a tree and hid in the dense foliage, her golden coat with its black rosettes making her blend into the dappled shade of her surroundings.
A monkey screeched and Kat shot up in bed. Staring into the darkness, she could see Connor asleep on Maya’s bed while his sister slept soundly in the hammock on the porch.
Kat’s stomach rumbled. She had missed the meal again. She sighed. They must have let her sleep instead. But now she was starving. Had they left anything for her to eat?
She stared through the netting at Connor, his face so peaceful in sleep and almost angelic. The way he had kissed her at the falls hadn’t been the least bit angelic. She knew then that he had been fighting his own demons regarding seeing more of her.
She sighed. He was a master of mixed messages, but she was ready to take their relationship further.
Looking for the lantern and thinking it should be turned off since everyone was asleep, she glanced around the hut. But it wasn’t lit. She frowned. Why was the hut so well lit when… it wasn’t. Really. The night was still dark. So why could she see so well? Another hallucination?
She groaned, lay back down, and closed her eyes.
She couldn’t stop having the unbelievable dreams that had haunted her throughout the night. She thought maybe she’d been affected by the strange foods she had been eating, like the white meat of the tail of a crocodile—better that she ate him than he ate her—that tasted like a combination of chicken and white fish. Or the tapir she had eaten that tasted somewhat like beef. Or the plantain that tasted like a cross between potato chips and a banana.
Maybe her strange dreams were a residue from the fevers she’d had. Or something about the atmosphere of the jungle itself—the earthy wet smells and the constant animal noises that penetrated her dreams.
Maybe she wasn’t even awake.
She closed her eyes and drifted off again. Thunder boomed overhead and the rains began again. Streaks of lightning flashed way above the tree canopy, a distant light flickering like an on-off switch that was broken.
But when the dream took hold again, the sensations were so real that she couldn’t wake herself from it, no matter how much she tried. So she quit trying and gave in to it.
One minute, she was struggling to get out of her buttoned shirt and panties, and the next, she was prowling the floor as a jaguar. Her cat claws were retracted, her paws silent as she padded along the wooden boards. Her body felt more muscled, stronger, heavier.
She yawned, curling a long pink tongue out of her mouth, and licked her lips, her mouth huge compared to her human mouth. And teeth. She ran her tongue over her pointed canines. Wicked.
And unreal.
Her stomach rumbled, which was part of what had disturbed her sleep. She was ravenous. But restless, too. She didn’t feel… right. She had to move, test her muscles, experience walking as a jaguar. To sense her surroundings in a new form. To see and hear and taste and smell.
She wanted to run free among the rest of the jungle inhabitants, just as feral and at home with the environment. To stalk and swim. To enjoy the sensation of being at the top of the food chain.
Yet some part of her resisted. She wasn’t a jaguar. She was just experiencing a very vivid dream.
She poked her nose at the screen door, opening it, and then moved onto the porch, staring for a moment at a sleeping Maya. Then she pushed through the second screen door on the covered porch and did what a jaguar might do—skipped the steps and leaped for the ground. She half expected to run into Connor’s two jaguar pets roaming around at the base of the hut. Maybe she would find them as she explored the jungle. She would like that. The three of them running and swimming together while they served as her jaguar tour guides. They would know the best eating spots, the best climbing trees, the most interesting places to explore.
At a walk, she investigated the jungle, going farther and farther from the hut, deeper and deeper into the tangled mesh of vines and tree roots. She felt strange exploring on four paws instead of walking upright on two feet. Being closer to the ground, her eye level gave her a much lower perspective. She couldn’t get used to breathing in all the smells that were so much more pronounced—the sweet scent of flowers, the earthy smell of wet ground, the fish in the nearby river. She wasn’t bothered by bugs and heard all kinds of sounds that she hadn’t heard before. And she was seeing at night, although it didn’t look like night to her exactly.
With all the moving she had done growing up and in the military, she had never felt at home. Now she felt at home in the Amazon when before she’d felt like an outsider, strictly a visitor.
She kept moving, hunger propelling her forward, making her search for something to eat. Then she found a river and waded in. She kept her chin up and listened as she swept the muddy river bottom with her large paws, listening to the fish swimming about. She spied one and dove in to get it. She seized it in her powerful jaws and pulled the struggling fish out of the water, then carried it to shore. This was so much easier than the one time she had gone fishing with a bunch of Army guys and managed to pull up everything—from old fishing lines and sinkers to a grungy sneaker—but never a fish.
Not even giving a thought to how she should prepare the fish, she ate it, no cooking, just raw. And loved it.
Shouldn’t she have been worried about not cooking it first? That was why she knew it was a dream. She would never have eaten raw fish.
Her appetite appeased, she continued to explore, sending a spider monkey screaming for cover. She would not eat a monkey, although she knew the natives did and so did jaguars. That had to mean she really wasn’t a big feral cat. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have any qualms about it. Right?
A blue-and-red macaw poked its head out of a hole in a tree, saw her, and instantly disappeared back into the tree. She wouldn’t have eaten him, either.
She took deep breaths, smelling smells all over the place, on trees and on the ground, littering leaves and vines and mud. She swam across a number of water obstacles, not afraid of anything, ready to take on a caiman or an anaconda if it dared to bother her. She had never felt so alive in her life. Fiercely independent. Attuned to nature, one with it.
But she was getting tired again. Time to return to bed, end the dream, and sleep. But when she turned around and saw the rushing river before her, she wasn’t sure how she could get back to the hut. How long had she traveled? How far? In what direction exactly? How many waterways had she crossed? Where was she now?
She was lost in the jungle… again.
Chapter 11
Connor had become accustomed to Kat’s breathing, her soft sighs, and her moans when she was feverish. But he had been so tired after taking care of her for several days and hunting when he could that he had finally slept deeply for the first time since she had wandered into their lives.
And now he heard nothing. A sudden rush of panic raced through him. He sat up quickly in bed and stared at where she should have been, screened by the netting like a fairy princess tucked away, but he could see the bed was empty. He hurried to climb off the mattress and rushed onto the porch.
Maya was sleeping soundly in the hammock. He quickly woke her and asked, “Did you hear Kat leave?”
Had she left the hut to relieve herself? That’s all he could think of. She had never left the hut before on her own. But now that she was able to, she could very well have needed a private moment to herself.