Maya cast him a slip of a smile. “He did make mincemeat of the turtle. Well, turtle soup. He returned as a jaguar that night, once the park was closed and no one was about, so he could hunt the turtle that could have taken my toe off.”
“So he ended up being gallant after all,” Kat said, backing Connor up, which he thoroughly appreciated, until Maya spoke again.
“Right,” Maya said in a sarcastic way. “He hunted the turtle because he didn’t want to swim in the lake as a human with the turtle hunting him the next time.”
Kat laughed.
Connor loved the way she laughed, loved that she didn’t seem to mind that at least once in his life he hadn’t been perfectly heroic.
Maya said, “Then there was the time—”
“Enough, Maya, or I’ll tell about all your foibles.”
Maya laughed. But Kat looked back at him, grinning, and he was sure she was dying to know what else he had done.
They trudged through the jungle for hours, taking breaks to sip water because of the heat and humidity, and even Maya looked done in. She finally stopped in front of Kat, turned, and said, “As much as I wanted to keep going until we reached the city, I can’t make it.”
Kat looked worried that Maya might be ill but at the same time relieved that they could stop.
Connor had wanted to spend the night with Kat in a room of their own more than anything in the world, but he couldn’t push the women any further. Maya was right about stopping for a while. “We’ll make camp here and set up the hammocks in this tree.”
Maya dropped her backpack on the ground as Connor ditched his and Kat’s and began to set up a hammock off the ground. Before long, they were lounging in the hammocks, covered in netting, their backpacks secured in the tree.
“Do you think the natives are still following us?” Kat asked, fanning herself with a broad leaf, although it was cooler now than it had been earlier in the day.
“Yes,” Connor said.
“And the jaguar?”
“Yes,” Connor said in the affirmative again.
“He’s going to have a hard time following us in the city, wearing a jaguar skin,” Kat said, shifting in her hammock.
“Unless he’s got provisions somewhere outside the city, I agree.”
“He has to be a shifter, doesn’t he?” Kat asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure he is.” Connor knew at this point that the jaguar couldn’t be anything other than a shifter or he wouldn’t be following them.
“Then if he is and he’s been following us as a jaguar all this time, he must have a place outside the city where he can sneak in and shift and dress. Maybe we should try to meet up with him, talk to him, see if he… well, just find out what he wants,” Kat said.
“No.” If the man was Wade Patterson, he had lured Kat to the Amazon under false pretenses. He had to know that Connor and his sister were shifters, but he thought they were a mated pair, not siblings, so he hadn’t approached them.
“Sleep, you two,” Maya grumbled. “How’s a girl going to get her beauty rest?”
Connor grunted under his breath. He knew Maya wanted to meet the man. But she had to know the reservations he harbored.
Much later that night, he heard gunshots deep in the jungle and instantly realized two things—he had fallen soundly asleep, and Kat wasn’t in her hammock.
Chapter 20
As soon as the gun blasts reverberated in a muffled way through the rain forest, Kat scrambled into a tree, her heart leaping with her jump as she secured a perch on a branch higher up.
She was a jaguar again, although until the shots had been fired, she hadn’t realized she had shifted or that she’d been running through the jungle all alone. She groaned. Connor’s words came back to haunt her. They would keep their human sensibilities while in human form, and that meant, damn it, she would still sleepwalk when she was overwrought or exhausted beyond measure.
Peering through the branches of the tree, watching for any movement, she listened, her ears twitching back and forth like antennae, attempting to figure out where the gunshots had come from and how close they had been. No one would be foolish enough to travel through the rain forest in the dead of night so she assumed someone had set up a camp somewhere and something had slithered into it—maybe a poisonous snake, an anaconda, or a wild boar.
Her pounding heart began to slow, and she took a deep sniff. Unwashed bodies, sweat, wood smoke from a campfire, and the scent of recently fired gunpowder lingered in the humid air.
But which direction were the smells coming from?
She let out her breath. If the gunshots had awakened Connor and Maya, they would be frantic about her. Should she roar to get their attention? She would no doubt scare whoever had been firing a weapon, but she was sure they were too far away to venture into the woods in the dark to search her out. They would never reach her in time before she could vacate the tree, and if they ran into her, she would be a deadly adversary, since they wouldn’t be able to see her.
She opened her jaws to roar and alert Connor and Maya where she was, then hesitated. What if the jaguar-shifter who had been following them found her instead?
Not a good idea.
Hoping Connor and Maya wouldn’t be too worried about her and that she could make her way back to their campsite all on her own, she leaped from the tree and landed on the ground. She poked her nose at the earth, attempting to find the scent trail she’d left with her footsteps. She caught the scent, smiled in her jaguar way, thrilled that she was getting the hang of this, and headed back the way she’d come.
Until something big pushed aside the thick foliage nearby. And she froze.
His heartbeat quickening, Connor saw Kat’s shirt hanging half off her hammock, her bra clinging to one branch, her jeans on another, shoes on the ground, panties right next to them.
Cursing himself for not watching her better, he jerked off his clothes and shifted. As a cat, his sister was right behind him. They both sniffed the ground and lifted their heads, taking a good whiff of the earthy smells of the jungle and Kat’s sweet jaguar scent. They searched for any signs as to which way she’d taken off. Hell, how long had she been gone before the gunfire had awakened them?
He prayed she wasn’t the cause of the gunshots having been fired.
He and Maya split up, searching for any signs of Kat and trying to locate the scent of her footfalls. After what seemed like nearly a quarter of an hour, he discovered Kat had raked a tree with her nails. He grunted for Maya to join him. She loped through the thick vegetation and smelled the tree. They both looked up, hoping Kat would be reclining on the branch, maybe asleep. No such luck.
Hurried, they began to sniff the ground again, moving in every direction away from the tree to pick up her trail.
Another quarter hour had passed when Maya grunted to get Connor’s attention. He raced to see what she’d discovered. Pug marks of Kat’s front paws were imprinted in the muddy earth. The fresh impressions indicated she had come this way recently.
But now he was catching the odor of men, of a campfire, of the shots recently fired.
He swung his head around as another smell assaulted him. A male jaguar’s urine sprayed on a tree.
Connor’s blood ran cold as he continued to follow Kat’s trail, glad that the male jaguar must have passed this way before Kat had. He didn’t appear to be tracking her… yet.
And then more gunshots rang out.
Damn! Connor ran in the direction of the gunfire, ready to kill any bastard who might be shooting at his mate.