“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.