Savage Hunger (2 page)

But he must have left the camp after she saw him running for cover, or she was certain he would be standing over her, gloating over killing her team members while she was at his mercy.

The mission to take down the bastard was a bust. It was too late for the others in her team. Too late for her.

Her thigh and arm burned where the bullets had bitten into them. Yet her skin chilled. She twisted her hands to free herself from the ropes binding her. Blinding pain shot through her leg, arm, and head. Her vision blurred with the blood loss and from the excruciating pain, and she knew if she didn’t stop the bleeding, she wouldn’t make it. Three of Gonzales’s men remained in the tent with her, guarding her. One smiled with half-rotted teeth, clearly amused at her futile attempt to free herself.

A shower of bullets popped again and again in the Amazon jungle, farther from the drug warlord’s compound.
Rat-ta-tat-tat.
Men swore in Spanish, some screaming in pain, others shouting orders.

Her heart raced with renewed hope. A rescue attempt? For her? Well, for the team, but no one else was alive and whoever it was probably didn’t know that. But… who were
they
?

“Captain McKnight?” someone shouted from somewhere far away, like he was on the other side of the planet.

“Here!” she croaked, her throat parched and hoarse.

Callahan?
She thought. But the major hadn’t been on this mission. He had been responsible for it, but she thought he had stayed behind the scenes.

Then silence.
Callahan?

No one approached the tent, and the three men guarding her exited to see what was happening. “Jaguar!” one of the men shouted, terror in his voice.

Jaguar?
No feral cat with any sense would come here in the middle of a shoot-out. Maybe she hadn’t heard the man right.

She twisted to free her wrists from the rope. Not making any progress, she stretched out her uninjured leg so that the toe of her hiking boot could hook onto the hilt of a sheathed dagger of the dead man lying closest to her.

Weapons fired. She stopped and stared in the direction of the tent flap. Outside, screams and curses ensued. Fierce growling mixed with the men’s terrified voices. Then silence.

Kathleen envisioned a vicious jaguar bounding into the tent and finishing her off, too. She struggled again to free herself. Then she heard movement outside, not sure what was happening.

With her skin perspiring and her wounds bleeding, the only thing keeping her conscious was the pain and the fear of what was coming next.

Footfalls hurried toward the tent. Kathleen braced for whoever it was—one of her captors or a rescuer—praying he was her rescuer.

His chest and feet bare, a man wearing a pair of jungle-green camouflage pants and carrying an assault rifle at the ready stopped in the entryway and stared at her, his mouth grim. His hair was short and blond but not cut in the military style. His face was angular and handsome, his torso bronzed and well sculpted. He didn’t look like he could be one of Gonzales’s men, yet he wasn’t one of her men, either. His hair was too shaggy, and his face sported a shadow of blond stubble.

Even the pants he was wearing didn’t fit. The waistband was slung low on his lean hips, the pant legs too short for his long legs, as though he had borrowed them in a hurry from a much shorter man. His gaze searched the tent, ensuring no one was a threat, then again fastened on hers, and for an instant his eyes reminded her of the golden eyes of a feral beast.

***

The female captain’s eyes shut and Connor raced across the tent. He grabbed a knife from one of Gonzales’s dead soldiers and cut a much cleaner shirt off a dead American soldier. Then Connor sliced through the rope tied around the captain’s wrists. He quickly worked to bind her wounds to stem the bleeding. Her blue eyes opened briefly, but she was drifting off, her gaze attempting to focus on him, her lips parted as if to speak. He could tell she was having a devil of a time staying conscious.

Despite everything, she smelled like a bit of fairy heaven, a sweet flowery fragrance that forced him to take another deep breath, despite his attempt at staying neutral. Her sensual feminine smell assaulted his senses, irritating him at being cursed with his jaguar senses at this particular moment. His pheromones kicked up a notch, triggered by the firestorm of sensations he was experiencing.

“Stay awake,” he ordered, trying to concentrate on keeping her alive until help could come for her and struggling to get his focus back on what was important and off his own primitive jaguar need to find a mate and procreate.

“American,” she whispered, her eyes heavily lidded. She closed them.

He snapped, “
Captain
, stay… awake!”

“Easy for you to say,” she said, sounding waspish, but as weak as she was, she didn’t have the bite to her words.

He smiled darkly and continued to bind her wounds.

“Who are you? What… ah,” she grimaced, reaching out to touch him, “are you doing here?”

“Connor Anderson’s the name, and I’m vacationing in the area. Save your strength.” As soon as he said his last name, he wondered why he had given her that much information.

“I’m… trying… to… stay… awake,” she growled, but again the softly irritated tone didn’t have the effect he imagined she was going for.

“Where is your rendezvous point?”

If he could take her to where her men would pick up the Army team, she might have a chance. The sound of men crashing through the trees made Connor rise quickly, grab a rifle, and slip out the back of the tent, intending to ambush Gonzales’s men before they knew what had hit them.

“Connor,” the captain whispered, and it killed him to have to leave her behind, even for just the moment.

But he couldn’t protect her if armed men greatly outnumbered him. Hidden in the thick vegetation, Connor saw U.S. Army men scouring the campsite, and he assumed they were coming to rescue the captain. He tossed the rifle and borrowed camouflaged pants and shifted, then waited in the mesh of trees until he heard one of the men speaking: “Hell, Kathleen.”

Kat.

The woman’s rescue was now out of Connor’s hands. So why the hell wasn’t he relieved?

Chapter 1

A Year Later in the Colombian Amazon Rain Forest

Thick black lines, forming rosettes with black spots dotting their centers, covered his golden body as Connor Anderson prowled through the Amazon as a jaguar, searching for his sister, Maya. He was certain the sound of her deep, throaty growl somewhere in the dark jungle had been a stern warning to something that had threatened her.

He knew that if he let her out of his sight for even a moment, she would be in trouble. As usual, she hadn’t heeded his words about staying nearby while he went fishing.

Jaguars normally were solitary animals that only met up with one another when they were looking for a mate, or when a female was with her cubs until they were old enough to be on their own. But Connor and his sister stayed together. They needed to prowl the Amazon forest and swamps from time to time in their jaguar form to satisfy the urge to shift in their natural environment. But they didn’t feel the necessity to run alone. In fact, quite the opposite.

Their human halves dictated that they stick together and watch out for each other. They were wary of hunters who sought to eliminate them, fearing they would kill a farmer’s livestock, and those who would kill jaguars for their beautiful pelts. Wouldn’t the hunters be surprised if they killed either Connor or his sister and then found the dead jaguar shifting into a human?

So much for retrieving a beautiful, salable pelt.

On the other hand, the hunters might think they could sell the jaguar-shifter for much more—although their genetics were purely human when human, and when they each were a jaguar, they were strictly a big cat. No scientist who examined the body would ever be the wiser. And the hunter who shot the shifter? He would be called a madman and a murderer. Not that Connor ever wanted that scenario to come to pass.

Stopping, he listened, his restless tail twitching. He lifted his head and smelled the aromatic fragrance of orchids and the ripe richness of the jungle—from rotting vegetation to the sweet smell of the giant lilies and the sap from a tree that cleared the sinuses in a hurry. He heard the sound of insects buzzing, toucans and macaws singing, a howler monkey howling, thunder in the distance that warned of an approaching rain shower, and water trickling nearby.

Feeling unsettled, not only about Maya, he couldn’t return to their home in the jungle without thinking about Captain Kathleen McKnight and wondering what had become of her. Had she survived? Was she still traipsing around in the jungle, fighting the bad guys? He snorted. One little whiff of her scent a year ago had sent his testosterone into a raging battle of need. Even now as he explored the jungle, he thought he smelled her fragrance several times, but he knew how ridiculous that notion was. Even without that irrational spike of lust, he had been fascinated by her for some reason and had thought about her—even dreamed about her—many times in the past year.

He gave a low rumbling growl, attempting to get his sister’s response so he could locate her.

The ancients revered jaguars as warriors, royalty, having strength and bravery in any kind of warfare. Connor wondered if any of the ancients had ever come across a jaguar-shifter. Maybe that’s why they had revered them so much.

He suddenly heard a different kind of movement in the forest. Human movement, he thought. Jaguars moved silently through the jungle on quiet padded feet, so he knew it wasn’t Maya. The hunter-gatherers in the area also were known to move soundlessly through the jungle, so he didn’t think he was hearing any member of the local indigenous tribes.

Members of Gonzales’s drug cartel hadn’t returned here since the Americans hit so many of his men. But the rumor was that Gonzales had gotten away unscathed and was now living in Bolivia. As for the woman? Connor couldn’t stop thinking about her, the way her blue eyes had tried to stay focused on him while he had bound her wounds, the way she had tried to reach out to touch him, and how he had wanted to feel her hand on his skin. But she had been too weak, unable to make contact.

A year had passed, and he couldn’t believe how often he still thought of the woman. Annoyed with himself for being so distracted, he turned his attention back to the possible threat nearby.

Despite the noise of the surrounding jungle, the person was making a racket whacking through the bamboo, balsa wood, and tangles of vines, trying to clear a path and panting heavily.

Connor turned his head to determine which way the person was moving. Away from him, or toward him? If toward him, Connor suspected the person had heard his jaguar growl and would be armed and ready to kill.

Fine. Connor would rather have the man head in his direction and stay away from his sister, wherever she was.

Then she growled again. Of all the damn times to alert Connor where she was!

The human turned and headed in his sister’s direction, and Connor bounded after him—determined to change the man’s mind.

***

Taking a deep breath in the heavily oxygen-laden and moisture-burdened air, Kathleen McKnight stopped in the Amazon jungle, unsure which way to go. She was hoping to find a waterway that she could follow and maybe come to a village or, better yet, the resort where she had a reservation. An almost invisible cloud of fog seemed to cloak the breezeless rain forest, every square inch filled with living, breathing organisms that belonged here. All except for her—an intruder in their world.

She thought she had headed away from the sounds of a wild cat roaring in the woods. At first she had wanted desperately to see the jaguar because he might lead her to Connor Anderson. She wasn’t so sure now. Not after she had heard the cat roar. He sounded angry… and hungry. For some reason, she associated him with that long-ago jaguar roaming with Connor, but she couldn’t give a rational explanation for the feeling. What if he wasn’t Connor’s jaguar companion? Yet, she just had this gut feeling that the two were together.

First, his cry came from one direction, then another. From everything she had read about jaguars and from the way this one had roared, he was one big cat. But she knew they lived alone, so two of them probably weren’t roaming out here; the roars were just echoing off the jungle foliage or rocky cliffs or something. But she still was in big trouble.

Well, more so than she already had been. She surveyed the greenery surrounding her in every shade and hue of green imaginable to an artist and reminded herself that she was hopelessly lost.

As she maneuvered through the thick vegetation, the broad leaves and tangled vines brushing against and grasping at her, she hoped she was moving away from where the big cat had been roaring. She hadn’t thought she would be all alone in the jungle, listening to a big cat growl while maybe next on his dinner menu. So much for seeing a jaguar up close and personal. This wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

According to her research on jaguars, research she’d felt compelled to do though she couldn’t say why, they normally slept during the day and hunted during dusk and dawn. If necessary, they would hunt during the day. This one sounded too hungry to wait until nightfall.