“What do we do?” Maya asked.
“They’re getting ready to ram us. No, wait. One of them is leaning out of his vehicle’s window and getting ready to shoot at our car.”
“Then I’ll shoot back.”
“No. If you lean out of the car window, you’ll be a target, Maya.”
“We need to pull off the road and confront them. There,” Maya said, pointing to a dirt road leading into the trees.
Showtime.
“Should I shift?”
“Get the gun ready.”
They barely made the turn at the rate of speed Connor was driving, taking a couple of tree branches with them, and he sped up even faster.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to shift?”
“It’ll be hard for you to do so in the front seat.”
“I’ll climb into the back with Kat.”
“Okay, leave the rifle on the front seat. You get in the back and shift. I’ll park, let you out, and you take off into the jungle. I’ll grab our bags and the gun, and split off from you.”
“Then shift,” Maya said, climbing over the seat back.
“Then shift. After I hide our gear.” He didn’t like any scenario he could come up with. What if Kat suddenly shifted? She’d be naked and without any resources. He changed his mind. “Kat, you’ll come with me. I want you up in the tree with our gear, protecting it.”
Maya gave him a knowing look.
He couldn’t tell what Kat was thinking. He would just have to play it by ear.
He pulled the car off the dirt road and ran over a ton of ferns and shrubs, then jumped out to open the back car door to let the women out because Maya had already shifted. Maya had packed her clothes in Kat’s bag, he supposed, as he saw none in the car.
Then he started gathering backpacks as Maya and Kat waited, their tails twitching. After shutting the trunk, he ran with the bags, searching for a perfect climbing tree. He soon spied one and figured the men following them wouldn’t suspect that any of them would hide in a tree. Then he hauled up two of the bags, returning for his and the rifle after that, and then motioned to the tree because he intended to shift and leave Kat there.
A vehicle rumbled down the road, tires spinning on dirt, men’s loud, boisterous voices hollering out the window, trying to scare their prey into panicking.
Then the vehicle stopped, and Connor knew that the men had reached the rental vehicle.
The engine cut, and doors opened and closed. The men were hollering for them to come out from wherever they were.
Connor glanced at Kat and motioned to the tree. She shook her head.
Maya nudged at her to come with her.
Connor didn’t like it, but he knew Maya would show Kat the jaguar way while he stowed the rest of his gear and shifted. He fully intended to take down as many of the men as possible before Kat had to face any of them.
Wade Patterson shook his head as he pulled off onto the dirt road and followed the carload of Gonzales’s men, keeping far enough back that they weren’t even aware of him. Not when they had eyes only for catching up to Kathleen McKnight and her party.
He hadn’t had this much excitement visiting Colombia in eons.
Here he had thought he would take Kat for his own mate if she was agreeable, but the other jaguar had beat him to it. Damn that he had missed his flight to Colombia, missed meeting her in Santa Marta, then lost her in the jungle completely.
He knew of the jaguars in the area, which was what had gotten her to come there in the first place, but he hadn’t realized they were shifters. Even if he had, the two that had been living there were obviously mated. So why did the female the male had been with allow him to have another?
He snorted. To him, it didn’t matter that they were jaguar-shifters—the male jaguar half of their kind possibly needing to mate with several females. He wanted only one. So it really pissed him off that this Connor Anderson had started a damn harem. There weren’t enough jaguar-shifters to go around. Wade was still of the opinion that he could get Kat away from the other man and give her exclusivity so she wouldn’t have to share when the guy she had taken up with divided his affections with the other woman. Hell, Connor might decide to go for a third shifter female if he could locate one.
Wade was certain that when Kat realized how much better he could be for her, she would give the other guy up. Besides, Wade lived in Florida like she did. So they could compromise and settle in one place or the other. He was fine with her choosing. He just had to convince her to go with him and leave Connor.
He wondered who had turned her. But she didn’t seem to mind that she was one of their kind now. That was one thing that had bothered him. That if he had turned her, she might have hated him for it. He hadn’t planned to turn her right away. He wanted her to get to know him first and to ease her into learning something of the truth about him before he changed her. Although he wasn’t sure how he would have done so without making a total muddle of it.
He’d thought he’d just see how well she did in the jungle, maybe date her back in Florida for a while, then return here to the Amazon when they were really a couple. If it had worked out for him.
He’d never thought this Connor person would take her for his own.
The shifting seemed to be the big problem for her as she didn’t seem to have a lot of control over it. He assumed the man and woman intended to take her home on a flight out of Bogotá, but he wondered how they would manage.
He parked the rental car behind Gonzales’s men’s car, got out, and slashed the tires. If any of them made it out alive once they’d faced the jaguars, they weren’t going anywhere.
He wondered why they were after Kathleen. He had tried to surreptitiously hear the scuttlebutt and had managed to learn that Gonzales himself wanted her. Alive, not dead.
Everyone knew who he was—drug lord—and that getting on his shit list was bad news.
But Wade hadn’t been able to ascertain the reason for Gonzales’s interest in taking Kathleen hostage. Wade returned to his vehicle, stripped out of his clothes, and shifted. Then with his nose up and ears perked, he breathed in the air and listened for the sound of where any of them had gone. But particularly where Kathleen had gone.
The air was hot and muggy and still, the bugs and birds as noisy as ever. Maya stood near Kat as they heard the men moving around in the jungle. Kat was glad for Maya’s assistance. Even though she felt she could take down the men, Kat wanted to do it right without causing trouble for the jaguar kind. If she had to do it without any supervision, she would just take one bite and that would be the end of the man’s plan to ever hurt anyone again.
The men were drawing closer, and Maya started moving away from the sound of them. Kat frowned. They had to take care of them. Connor couldn’t do this on his own. Maya couldn’t believe that Kat was only a liability and wouldn’t be able to help.
Maya grunted at her. Kat gave her a disgruntled look back, then reluctantly followed her. Maya made a wide circle around the men, keeping them within earshot but out of sight, and Kat realized then what she was doing. Laying an ambush. She and Maya couldn’t confront the men head-on. They were armed and dangerous. They had to sneak up on them. It didn’t seem as heroic that way, but these men didn’t play by any gentlemanly rules of warfare.
Then they saw the first of the men alone, vulnerable, as vulnerable as an armed murderous man could be. Maya ran up behind him, silent as a cloud drifting across the sky, a dark, angry spotted cloud.
But as soon as she leaped at her target, another man moved into Kat’s vision. She didn’t hesitate. The man raised his weapon to shoot Maya. Panicked and needing to save her jaguar sister, Kat jumped high, not expecting to leap quite that distance, and nearly went too far. She landed on his head with her full jaguar body weight, heard a crack, and thought it was his spine. He went down silently, except for a thud that only Maya and she could hear with their enhanced hearing.