Savage Hunger (5 page)

When he finally arrived and looked up at his sister, spread out on the branch as if she owned it, with the human sleeping next to her, he still hadn’t reached a decision as to how to easily get Kat down. Maya stretched. Then to his surprise, she bit into the woman’s backpack, pulled her with a jerk from her seat on the branch, and released her into midair. Kat screamed as she felt herself fall.

Connor quickly maneuvered to catch her and easily swept her up in his arms and cast Maya an annoyed look. That was one way to get Kat down from the tree. He would have tried something less frightening for the poor woman.

In panic, she struggled to get free from him, pushing at his shoulders with her fists and yelling, “Let me go!”

A shadowy darkness surrounded them and she couldn’t see him well, although he could see her with his cat’s night vision, so he could understand her fear. One minute she was in the tree, sleeping with two jaguars that were protecting her. The next minute, she was free-falling from the tree and now secure in the arms of a man she didn’t know.

“I raised the cats,” he quickly assured her while cradling her in his arms, his voice as soothing as he could make it, although it sounded way too gruff to his ears. He tightened his hold on her so she wouldn’t get loose, land on her feet, and put pressure on her injured knee. Although as much as she was struggling, he figured she would end up on her ass if she managed to wriggle free.

“Connor?” she inquired, her voice steady and hopeful.

“Corand came to get me, letting me know that I needed to rescue a beautiful woman in the jungle. But yeah, I’m Connor Anderson,” he added, giving himself a fake name for when he was in his jaguar form.

She stilled as if she realized he was with the jaguars, that he was the man who had stopped her bleeding when Gonzales’s men had shot her, and that Connor wasn’t the enemy. She stared up into his face. “You’re… you’re American.”

“Texan,” he said smiling, as if that meant he was a special category of American.

“From Texas.”

“Yes, ma’am. I didn’t recognize you at first. Different color hair, eyes.” He waited for an explanation.

She took a deep breath. “
This
is my natural look. That was for the mission.”

Connor raised his brows.

She smiled a little at the astonished look he gave her. “I was supposed to look like a cute, clueless college-age girl who was too stupid to live, but who had loads of money. Blue contacts made my eyes look like the Caribbean. I kind of liked the blue eyes.”

Connor shook his head. “You’re beautiful as a brunette. And your green eyes remind me of the jungle.”

Appreciating his comments, she gave him a rueful smile, then sighed. “Thank you. Believe me, as a blonde, I did
not
have more fun. The guys I worked with ribbed me by repeating every dumb-blonde joke known to mankind.” She swallowed hard, and he wondered if she was remembering her fallen comrades.

Not wanting her to relive what had to be nightmarish memories, he glanced up at Maya. “Come on. Time to return to the hut.” Then he said to the wet, curvaceous woman in his arms, “You’ll meet my twin sister, Maya, soon.”

His sister dropped easily to the ground and led the way down the path to the hut, her long tail swishing back and forth.

“Your sister? Oh.” Kathleen sounded relieved that his sister was here with him. She probably assumed he couldn’t be all that dangerous then. Little did she know.

“Anderson? Is that English?” she asked.

“On our father’s side. But he married a Scotswoman, so we’re also Scottish. The Scots moved into Texas and settled a lot of the areas.”

He didn’t know how far back his jaguar roots went. Neither their mother nor their father would talk about it much. Just something about their father’s great grandfather having been a Sir Lionel Anderson who had taken an expedition into the Amazon searching for medicinal properties in the plant life. Rumors abounded that he had been searching for gold. They suspected he had tangled with a jaguar-shifter. And somehow he’d managed to live. Return trips to Edinburgh had been far and few between until he stopped returning to Scotland altogether. But a son took his father’s place. A son who had been born in the jungle.

The woman nodded at Connor, breaking into his thoughts. “I’m Kathleen McKnight.”

“Kat,” he mused. “The captain.” He wondered why she was alone in the jungle, but if she was doing an undercover operation, he suspected she wouldn’t tell him the truth anyway.

She frowned up at him. “I… I can’t see a thing any longer. How can you find your way in the dark?”

Chapter 3

As he made his way over twisted vines and kept his footing in muddier areas, Connor hadn’t considered that Kat would realize he shouldn’t be able to see anything in the dark, just like she couldn’t. As cats, jaguar-shifters could see well at dusk and dawn. And that ability carried over to their human half once they had shifted back. Just as their sense of smell was enhanced, so was their hearing.

“She can lead us back to the hut.” But that didn’t explain how he could see his sister. Hopefully, Kat wouldn’t realize this.

“But I can’t see the jaguar. How can you?”

Connor gave the woman points not only for her astuteness but also for not allowing him to get away with attempting to bamboozle her.

Maya glanced back at Connor as if to say, “How are you going to cover your tracks on that one?” He could almost see the smile in her expression.

“I know the way back. Traveled it many a time,” he smoothly said, giving his sister a superior look.

“Oh.” But Kathleen didn’t sound entirely convinced. “The jaguars, have you raised them from cubs?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She sighed. “Orphaned?”

“Yes.” Essentially yes. Their father had left their mother to raise Connor and his twin sister and never came back. And their mother had left them when they were teens with the same result.

Sometimes he thought it was because of their parents’ cat-shifter half. Sometimes he thought they just weren’t meant to be good parents. That was one reason he and his sister were thirty years old and hadn’t settled down. Well, also partly because of the problem with finding a shifter mate. Real jaguars had been known to mate with a leopard or a lion. But their offspring were sterile. So it had occurred to him that if they couldn’t locate a jaguar-shifter, maybe another would do, if such a shifter even existed. But they probably couldn’t have any offspring, and something in his primal big cat makeup balked at that.

Still, neither Connor nor his sister had had any luck in locating any kind of cat-shifters, and he wasn’t about to bite some poor unsuspecting woman so he could have a suitable mate. Not that he knew if a bite could cause someone to carry their genes anyway. They still didn’t know if Sir Lionel Anderson was the first on their dad’s side to carry the jaguar-shifter genetics or if someone earlier had carried the genes. Maybe he had been born with it and that was why he’d gone to the Amazon. Not in search of medicinal plants or gold, but in search of a shifter mate. Or like they did—to be one with their jaguar halves. They just didn’t know enough about it.

Then there was their mother’s side of the equation. Her great-great grandfather had been studying some of the ancient civilizations in South America and didn’t return for ten years, this time settling in Texas. He couldn’t stay away from the rain forest, either, and his Scottish wife began accompanying him, although everyone thought it odd. She was more of a homebody from what journal entries had said, so trekking through the Amazon seemed out of character for her. So had he been turned, then changed her?

If a wolf-shifter—although totally fantasy—could turn someone with a bite, why not cat-shifters?

Not that he was about to test that theory.

“Connor, thanks. I can probably walk now,” Kathleen said.

“The tree roots and vines are hard to see at this time of night. Best if you don’t twist your knee while trying to get to our place.” Besides, he enjoyed carrying her, enjoyed feeling her soft curves against his hard chest, smelling her sweet, wet fragrance, and feeling the heat of her body against his. Any physical exertion in the steamy jungle would make a body hot, Connor told himself. So why was holding this woman against his body making every sexual part of him tighten with need?

Which reminded him again that he hadn’t been with a woman in a damned long while.

But it was more than that. He couldn’t say what it was exactly. Maybe the feel of the energy surrounding them in the jungle, the primal, feral nature of it, the fact she was here in his territory, vulnerable and yet adventurous enough to be here, that made him keep thinking about the possibilities of turning a woman.

Not any woman though. Just
this
one.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that for a year he had thought about what had happened to her, worried that she hadn’t made it out of the jungle in time, and wondered if she had recovered physically and psychologically from the battle with Gonzales’s men if she had.

Kat didn’t say anything more, just leaned her head against his chest, and he thought she might have drifted off to sleep before he arrived back at the hut sitting high on its stilts. As exhausted as she was, he thought she probably had been wandering through the jungle for some time, unable to sleep because of all of the dangers surrounding her. He climbed the rickety stairs to the hut. When he walked across the mahogany floor, the boards creaked slightly with his weight, and she jerked awake.

“You can sit on one of the wooden chairs so that you don’t put any weight on that knee. Do you have a change of clothes in your pack?” he asked, moving toward the chair. He set her down on it, then helped her off with her pack, resting it on the floor nearby.

“Yes, I have several changes of clothes.”

“Good.” He wasn’t sure Maya would want to share her clothes with a virtual stranger if Kat had nothing else to wear.

He had left a kerosene lamp glowing in the one-room hut so that she wouldn’t be so spooked when he brought her back here. The lamp cast a soft, mellow light throughout. The roof was thatched over wooden walls, and screened windows provided some relief from bugs and snakes. Mesh netting covered the two beds to keep the mosquitoes away because there wasn’t any way to keep them out of the hut in the wet jungle environment.

He and Maya used a small propane camping stove to cook what they needed when they couldn’t eat as jaguars, although they normally hunted their meals and ate them as a cat would—no mess, no bother. Connor and Maya came down here from Texas to be one with their jaguar halves, normally not intending to play house as humans while on a jungle vacation. But if they were worried about hunters in the area, they remained in their human forms until the threat passed, therefore the necessity to have provisions for any situation that might arise.

A basin of water was nearby, and he motioned to it. “Fresh water that you can clean up with. We don’t have any real privacy here so I’ll leave while you change.” He glanced at Maya, who was still in her jaguar form, pacing across the hut’s floor and swishing her tail. He knew she wondered why Kat had called him by name while he was still in his jaguar form. “Did you want to stay with her?” he asked his sister.

She grunted, which he took as a “yes.”

Good
. He nodded. “Be back in a little while.”

“I’ll hurry so you won’t have to be out there for very long.”

He smiled at the notion. Here Kat was worried about
his
safety, while he was worried about
hers
.

He just hoped the men who had been cutting a swath through the jungle weren’t looking to cause trouble for any of them.

***

Maya continued to pace across the hut as Kathleen turned her back and began unbuttoning her shirt. Maya wondered just what the connection was between Kathleen and her brother. She had seen the raw attraction between them, smelled it, felt the air between them fairly sizzle. For the first time in a year, he had shown real interest in a woman. Why this one? And how had Kathleen known her brother’s name? She and her brother made it a point not to get attached to humans. So where had he met Kathleen before?

Her mouth gaped as the notion came to her—the battle between the drug runners and the U.S. soldiers. When Connor had returned to the hut early that evening, Maya had been annoyed that dinner had grown cold before he had shown up. But when she smelled and saw the blood soaking his fur coat, she had been horrified and rushed to see to his injuries. Except he hadn’t been injured.

Maya stared at the woman as she peeled the wet shirt off and hung it over the back of the chair.
Captain
Kathleen
McKnight.
Connor had been beside himself with worry over the woman’s condition when she had been shot. He had tried to hide it from Maya, tried to pretend the woman had been an inconvenience, but Maya knew her brother better than that. He couldn’t eat dinner that night, hadn’t slept, had prowled the jungle in his jaguar form. She had followed him and discovered that he had returned to the drug dealer’s encampment.