Savage Hunger (34 page)

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.

“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.

Standing next to her own dead prey, Maya looked over at Kat, smiled in a jaguar’s way, then joined her. She listened to the man’s heart, but Kat had already done so. His head was turned at an odd angle, and she seemed to have broken his neck with the weight of her body. She didn’t think that was a jaguar’s way to kill its prey, but she was just learning after all.

She would have to practice jumping to learn how high and how far she could go to hit her intended target spot on.

They heard someone else rustling through the brush, and Kat knew the man or men would soon find the two dead men and raise the alarm. Maya quickly moved into the trees, making enough noise to draw the man’s attention, even though the cats normally moved silently. Kat waited for the man to follow her, to see if he was friend or foe. He didn’t call out, though.

Then she saw him trying to move quietly through the jungle, but he just wasn’t able. Maya was still making noise but hidden in the brush. Kat leaped onto an overhead branch, thinking she might do a better job taking him down in a jaguar way if she pounced from a branch rather than leaping from the ground.

She jumped down on top of him and landed on his head like the other, but this man cried out before he was silenced. When he fell to the ground, she thought she had killed him in the same way as the first man. Maybe that would be her special technique, since she couldn’t seem to master any other in quick order.

The man’s cry brought others running, though.
Great!
How many were there?

Then the oddest thing happened. Men were shouting to their fallen comrade, fallen
dead
comrade, tromping at a rapid pace to reach him, but they never arrived. Maya rejoined her, urging her to take cover. Kat hadn’t quite gotten the notion that they ambushed and stalked rather than facing their foe in a frontal assault. That’s how she had been trained in the Army. She would have to practice with Maya and Connor, like they probably did when they were cubs, tackling and taking each other down in an ambush.

She had a lot to learn. She jumped into a tree, and Maya leaped onto the same branch beside her. She licked Kat’s face, saying in a jaguar-shifter’s way that she had done all right.