He smiled. “We live near lakes and national forests or state forests in eastern Texas and enjoy visiting them in the middle of the night when we need to. We just come down here a couple of times a year to be one with the jungle like the jaguars are. But until we sort things out with your abilities, we’ll stay closer to home.”
“We can’t fly, can we?” Kat asked, looking as though she thought that was a really bad idea but still wished they could do it. The sooner they could get home, the better.
Connor took a deep breath. “Maybe we could charter a boat. I don’t see any other way around this. We’ve never had a problem with flying, but if you had to shift, I doubt you could do so in one of the lavatories. They’re pretty small. And then what if you weren’t able to shift back for several hours? We’d be in trouble.” He could just envision poor Kat, her tail in the commode, her paws up on the sink, fighting the urge to growl or roar in her distress, and the flight attendants pounding on the door when the line for the other bathroom grew too long.
“Maybe we could travel cross-country,” Maya said. “I know it can be dangerous…”
“And take forever,” Connor reminded her with a hard look. Though he wouldn’t have wanted Maya to turn Kat at any time, he wished she had done so at their home. Not here.
Maya let out her breath hard. “All right, so we have to charter a boat.”
Smugglers and pirates could be a problem, and Maya became deathly ill in a rocking boat.
“Or… what if we could take a short flight to somewhere north of here, maybe Belize or Costa Rica, stop, maybe stay overnight, then take another short flight the next day?” Kat said.
Connor shook his head. “We’ve done that. Even with the extra stops, it was still seven hours for one flight.”
“Cancún?” Maya asked, sounding hopeful.
That was where they had planned on going originally before Maya messed up their plans by scratching Kat.
“We checked the schedules. It’s about nine hours if we can get a flight out. And then it’s another six hours if we could still get the one flight to Houston after that,” Maya said.
“I’m all for it, if we can make some stops like that,” Kat said. “Though who knows if I can make it even that long on a flight. Then again, I might not change again until the next full moon.”
Connor and Maya shared looks. Shifting had nothing to do with the full moon. That was werewolf lore. The problem was not having any idea when Kat might have the uncontrollable urge to shift.
Much later that night, after traveling for miles in the jungle, they set up hammocks in a tree. Early the next morning, they began the long journey all over again. They saw another tribe in the Amazon while they were trekking through it, but like the one that had adopted them, this one just watched them, half-hidden in the shadowed foliage and not making any effort to greet or deter them. Connor hoped word had not spread to the farthest outreaches about the jaguar god and his harem.
They had traveled for miles already, and Kat was keeping up with the steady pace. He assumed that was in part because she’d had to be physically fit while in the military. But even so, he could tell she was weary by the way her shoulders slumped, and she was breathing too hard.
“Kat,” he said, catching up to her. “Let me take your bag.” He had already offered several times, but this time he wasn’t going to be dissuaded.
She looked up at him, her face tired. “No. We always carry our own weight in the military.”
“You’ve been sick,” he said firmly. “Let me take your bag.” This time he was insistent.
Maya had stopped and was watching them.
Kat sighed and handed over her backpack. “At the risk of sounding like a whiney child bored with traveling, will we be stopping soon?”
He smiled. “You have been anything but. Another two hours, though I believe Maya had an idea.”
Maya’s expression brightened. “We can stop and swim with the pink dolphins?”
“The river’s only a couple of miles from here. We can swim for a while, get something to eat, and continue on our way. That will give us a much-needed break.”
Kat’s spine straightened, and she even gave him an elusive smile. “What are we waiting for?”
Chapter 18
When Connor, Maya, and Kat reached the river, Kat began pulling off her shirt and boots and pants, eager to swim, to cool off a bit, and to wash off some of the sweat. Under the broad canopy in the thick of the jungle, the temperature was around eighty degrees and muggy without a breeze. Out in the sun, it was closer to one hundred, but a humid breeze swept across the river. Kat’s wary gaze examined the jungle. They had company, she thought uneasily.
She sensed more than saw that they were being watched. Were her jaguar senses making her more aware of her surroundings? She wasn’t sure.
“I don’t think we’re alone,” she said to Maya and Connor as she waded into the river. She was wearing just her leopard bra and panties, but they looked enough like a bikini bathing suit that she felt comfortable in them even if they had an audience. As long as they weren’t being watched by drug runners.
“You’re right, Kat,” Maya said. “I’m sure they’re hunters from another tribe. They’ve been following us for miles, ever since we left the other tribe’s territory.”
“Do you think they know about us?” Kat asked. She knew the jaguar-shifters had to remain a secret to society in general, and she didn’t feel comfortable that some tribes in the Amazon knew what they were. The information could prove disastrous in the wrong hands if anyone believed the natives’ tales.
She wasn’t at ease with what she was, either. Concern about having a sudden urge to shift had plagued her all day. Nothing had come of it, but she still had been anxious. What if this group of natives didn’t know about Kat, Connor, and Maya’s jaguar-shifter traits but all of a sudden saw Kat ditching her clothes and turning into a jaguar?
Would they revere her or want to kill her? And Maya and Connor, too?
She also couldn’t get used to the way her senses were so attuned. It was unnerving to be hearing so many more sounds than she could before, seeing the slightest movements that she wouldn’t have noticed before, and smelling the jungle in a new way. The jungle was even richer than she had noticed earlier—full of scents she couldn’t even begin to recognize, but she figured Maya and Connor could. They had been coming here for a long time as shifters, and they had learned from birth how to identify odors that her human nose couldn’t yet.
Connor had already stripped to a pair of boxers and joined Kat in the river. He ran his hand over her arm in a soothing caress. “I’m not sure if they realize what we are. Maybe like the others, they do know what we are like. Or they’re just curious about who we are and why we’re traveling through their land. We don’t have a guide, and we’re not hunting or gathering information or doing anything except moving through their territory, so they have to wonder what we’re up to.”
Wearing just a black bra and bikini panties, Maya joined them, then swam deeper into the river.
Kat knew that the freshwater dolphins swam there, but so did the piranha. She tried not to think of that. People didn’t get bitten by them all that often, she didn’t think, and she wasn’t bleeding anywhere, so she felt she should be safe enough. Even tourists were taken on excursions to swim with the Amazon River dolphins. She had seen numerous pictures of gray-haired grandmas floating with orange preservers strapped around their chests while reaching out to pet the pink dolphins, their noses up in the air as if delighted to see the human tourists.