Maya carried her bag out to the vehicle. “Connor, I’ll get her in the car. Can you get your bags? I couldn’t manage all of them.”
One was Kat’s. She was glad Maya hadn’t let it slip that Kat’s bag was still here, if she was to have gone with her brother to Santa Marta.
Connor gave Kat a look like he was hoping she would climb into the car and let him take care of this. She just raised her brows a little but wouldn’t move.
“All right,” he said to her, as if he was saying it to Maya.
Maya threw her bag in the trunk and then scratched Kat’s head between the ears.
Kat purred and rubbed her head against Maya’s leg. She hadn’t thought she would like such a thing, but it felt good. Maya seemed to understand Kat’s need to stay with them until they were in the clear.
The policemen still didn’t move from the porch. Connor entered the cottage and left it posthaste with the two bags in hand. “The place is all yours,” Connor said to the policemen, not waiting for their response as he stalked toward the rental vehicle. He gave Kat a look that said, “The show is over. Get into the car.”
She smiled but wouldn’t budge. Not until he deposited the bags in the trunk and closed it. Then she sauntered over to the open door to the backseat and jumped in. Maya shut the door and climbed into the front passenger seat.
Connor sat in the driver’s seat, pulled his door shut with a hard slam, and let his breath out. “When you growled low, Kat, I thought you were ready to bite me.”
Maya chuckled. “You know she was.”
Kat curled up on the backseat and sighed. Yeah, she had been ready all right. Just a nip to get him to move out of her way.
Then she frowned. Connor had thrown her bag in the trunk. What if she shifted? All her clothes were in the bag.
“Find a drive-through so we can get breakfast burritos, okay?” Maya said. “Kat and I are starving.”
“Sure thing.” Still holding on to the steering wheel, Connor stretched his arms.
“Did the policemen go inside the cottage?” Maya asked.
“Finally, as we were pulling away. I watched out the rearview mirror. They waited until we moved off, then finally went inside. Then they came out just as quickly when they didn’t find any dead bodies or anything,” Connor said.
Maya laughed.
After a few minutes, he stopped at a restaurant, no drive-through, and went inside to get them some food to eat on the road.
Kat stood and watched out the open windows, alert, wary.
Maya smiled. “You’re drawing a crowd.”
But Kat didn’t care about that. She worried that they’d been followed. Then she worried about shifting and having no clothes to slip into. She poked her head over the front seat and nudged Maya’s cheek.
Maya frowned. “What?”
Kat made a disgruntled sound. How could she tell her friend what she needed?
“Do you have to go to the bathroom?”
Kat shook her head.
“All right.”
Before Maya could say another word, Kat nipped Maya’s pale blue shirtsleeve and gave a gentle tug.
Maya opened her mouth, closed it, then turned to look at the restaurant. “The keys. You want your clothes out of the trunk so when you shift you can get dressed, but Connor’s got the keys.” She turned back to observe Kat quickly, her eyes big. “You’re not going to shift, are you?”
Kat shook her head. What a disaster that would be. Shifting in broad daylight as people in the area stared at her. She couldn’t even get on the floor to shift, if she decided she had to, because the room between the front seats and the backseat was too narrow. So she would be standing on the backseat, one second a jaguar, the next, one naked woman.
“Okay. As soon as Connor brings us our food, I’ll have him get your bag. I’ll fish out whatever you want to wear for when you need to shift.”
That would work. On the road, she wouldn’t have any spectators. Kat nodded, then began looking out the window again. She saw groups of kids pointing at her, their mouths curved up and huge brown eyes indicating their awe. Adults, too, were staring at her with mixed expressions of fear and excitement.
What if she jumped out the window? And ate one of them? But the day was already warm and they had to leave the car windows open while Connor bought the food. She sighed and glanced around again at the cars driving by. One caught her eye. It was dirty and dusty, black, an off-the-road kind of vehicle, big tires, dark-tinted windows, ominous.
A shiver slid up her spine and her fur stood on end.
Maya was observing her, probably worried Kat might all of a sudden shift, even though she had indicated she wouldn’t. But after Kat had proven she couldn’t control her shifting, Maya probably didn’t trust her.
When the fur on the nape of her neck stood and her ears perked up, Maya looked to see what had caught Kat’s attention.
Maya’s lower lip parted. “He was following us before, wasn’t he?” she asked.
Kat grunted in a yes reply.
“Great.”
Connor headed out of the restaurant, two bags in hand. As much as the bags were bulging, she assumed he had bought enough for a small army.
As soon as he opened his car door, Maya reached for the bags. “Kat needs her backpack out of the trunk of the car.”
His gaze swiveled to catch Kat’s eye in the backseat.
“She doesn’t feel the urge to shift yet, but she needs her clothes for when she does.”
He relaxed and handed Maya the bags of food, then headed for the trunk.
Kat watched the black vehicle drive off slowly.
“He’s going to follow us. Bet my savings,” Maya warned.
Kat thought so, too.
Connor slammed the trunk, then shoved Kat’s bag into the backseat and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“We have a stalker,” Maya said, setting out some of the burritos and letting Kat pick the ones she wanted. Then Maya opened the wrappers around the two that Kat had nudged with her nose.
As soon as Maya handed the first to Kat and she was able to grasp it with her teeth and began chewing it, the children watching her began to laugh. A jaguar who loved burritos. Yep.
Connor pulled onto the road and headed for their destination. “Where’s the vehicle, Maya?”
“He drove off that way. Both Kat and I remember seeing him before.”
“When you see him again, point him out to me. Okay?”
“Will do.”
As they drove, Kat licked her chops, eyed the burritos Maya and Connor hadn’t eaten, and then nudged Maya with her nose.
Maya looked back at her. “What’s wrong, Kat?”
Kat sighed, hating this part of being a jaguar-shifter where she had such a time communicating with Maya and Connor. She poked her nose at two more burritos. Maya laughed. “That problem I can fix.” She unwrapped the burritos and then fed them one at a time to Kat.
Connor shook his head. “They were supposed to last us through lunchtime.”
Maya glanced at him and looked like she was ready to scold him, when he suddenly said, “We’ve got company.”
Chapter 27
The vehicle behind them was quickly closing in on them, like a jaguar canvassing its prey. Connor expected it to be the one that Kat and Maya had seen in the village, but when Maya looked in the side mirror, she shook her head. “That’s not the one that was following us before.”
Kat turned around and looked out the back window and growled softly.
Connor was beginning to wonder if Kat was stuck in her jaguar form now.
“I was only kidding about the burritos,” he told Kat. “You can eat all that you want.” He gave Maya a look of scolding back. He had been teasing, but then he had caught sight of the vehicle following them and speeding to catch up to them, and he couldn’t think of anything else.