by Terry Spear
Everything about Kat compelled him to want to keep her for his own. She was his mate. She completed him.
He had never really given thought to having jaguar-shifter children of his own before, except maybe in a really vague way. Now he wanted them, wanted to prove to his parents, to Maya, and to himself that he could be the kind of father his own couldn’t be. That he wouldn’t abandon his mate or children the way his father had done.
He rolled over onto his back and pulled Kat against his chest, wanting to discuss something that had bothered him since the day she’d had the fever and he had seen her bullet wounds. They should have no secrets between them, even though Maya had warned him that she had asked Kat and had been told the mission was classified. He didn’t buy that she couldn’t share her whole life with him. Not with what they were and how they needed to confide in one another while keeping the secret about what they were from the world.
Connor kissed the top of Kat’s head, and she purred. He loved the way she did that. He sighed. “What really went down in the jungle that day you were hit?”
He didn’t want to ever leave the bed as long as he had Kat to hold close. He had never felt that way about a woman, always wanting to distance himself both physically and emotionally after he’d had sex. He’d never thought he would enjoy the exclusive company of a woman and regret the notion of leaving her for anything.
The heat of the day was upon them, and everything in the city would be shut down anyway. Later, he would call to get plane reservations. Tonight, they would go to the beach.
“It’s classified,” Kat said quietly, yet he heard the metal in her voice, as if she was ready to tell him her name, rank, and serial number—and nothing more.
He smiled, then frowned, running his fingers over her bare arm and loving the feel of her silky skin. “Are you still in the military?”
She shook her head, her hair tickling his chest.
“Good.”
She snorted.
“What? The Army mission went wrong,” he said, not willing to let it go. He had to know what she’d had to deal with. When she was wounded, she must have been scarred both physically and emotionally.
“Yes. The mission went horribly wrong,” she whispered against his chest.
“I take it you were one of the lucky ones.” He hadn’t had time to check the other men. Some might have survived around the perimeter of the camp. He just hadn’t known.
A tear splashed on his chest, and he felt mortified. “Kat…”
“I was the only one of my team who made it out of there alive, Connor.”
He stroked her hair and kissed her cheek. “I’m glad you made it. God, I’m glad.” He took a deep settling breath. “And, although I wouldn’t have condoned what Maya did to you, I’m still grateful she did.”
“Hmpf. That remains to be seen.” Kat sighed. “You don’t know the half of it,” she said softly. “I have flashbacks. I don’t know when I’ll have them. I don’t know what will happen when I do, either.”
He didn’t say anything for a time, just stroked Kat’s silky hair. What kind of flashbacks had she been living through? He wanted to take them and crush them with his bare hands. More than anything, he wanted to help her get over them.
“We’ll deal with it,” he said firmly. He intended to help her get over them any way that he could. But he had to know what was causing them, and he wasn’t sure how someone could deal with that kind of trauma.
She gave a disparaging grunt. “And I walk in my sleep.”
He chuckled low. “Yeah, well, I’m not letting you out of my grasp at night or whenever we chance to lie down together.”
“Controlling, aren’t we?”
“You bet. What about the flashbacks?”
She sighed. “Everyone has flashbacks of memory. A song that you love might trigger a memory of… dancing with someone in the past. Or the scent of jasmine might remind you of a botanical garden you visited when you were a child.”
“Your fragrance,” Connor said. “When I came upon you in the jungle, I recognized your special scent.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. But when a traumatic event has occurred in your life, something in your everyday life can trigger the memory.”
“Like?”
“A car backfiring.”
Connor kissed her cheek. “Which sounds like gunfire.”
“Yes. So I wouldn’t necessarily have to hear gunfire to have some stimuli trigger another bout of a flashback.”
“Hell, Kat, you must have felt terrible when Manuel shot at you.”
She gave a ladylike snort. “Hardly. The sound of gunfire was terrifying only because the bullets were winging right past me—way too close. I was afraid for you and Maya, and terrified I’d fall out of the tree and break my neck when I landed on the ground. I might be a cat sometimes, but I still don’t land on my feet when in my human form.”
He heaved a sigh because that hadn’t been too far from his own thoughts and pressed a tender kiss on her forehead. “But the gunfire didn’t trigger a flashback?”
“No.”
“Has anything triggered one while you’ve been here?”
“Yes. The voice of one of the men. The leader. Something about his voice made me think of the man we were trying to take down. But what I’m worried about—what will happen if I have a flashback when I’m in my jaguar form?”
“You’ll be fine, Kat.” He stroked her cheek and looked down into her eyes. “Have you been given any treatment for it?”
“Yeah.”
“What can I do for you if it happens again?”
“Hold me close. Tell me it’s just a flashback. That it isn’t real. Or I can stomp my feet and tell it to go away. Or talk to you and Maya about it.” She shrugged and smiled a little. “The doc said a nice warm bath could help. Breathing in deeply. Reminding myself that I survived. That it’s over with. And it will get better.”
Connor still couldn’t get his own anger under control over what had been done to her, although for Kat’s sake he tried not to show it. “You don’t work for them any longer, right? Not undercover or anything?”
She finally said, “They gave me a medical discharge.”
“Hell.”
“They do that when they believe you’ve cracked under pressure.”
“What gave them that idea?”
She smiled up at him sweetly and innocently, but deep down, full of the devil.
He raised his brows. Once again he found himself admiring her.
“I had it together for about three months after the… incident. Really, I thought I could keep it all in, bury it where I never had to deal with it again, pretend that the men I had trained with for years who had families, well, that none of it mattered because we’d had a mission to do. We’d signed up, and that was our way to bring down the scum of the earth. But the intelligence was dead wrong, and we walked right into a trap.” She hesitated. “I’m not really telling you all this, you know.”
“Hell,” Connor said again. He couldn’t help it. His muscles bunched with tension as he felt like turning into his jaguar form and tearing into the men who had injured her. He would have loved to force the men who gave them the false intelligence to take their place on the front line instead of Kat. “Why did they have you go? A woman?”
“I was supposed to be the bait in a hostage-taking situation. The man in charge was supposed to take me into the camp, and my men would come in afterward, guns blazing, and free me. But the drug leader knew who I was all along. They pretended complacency, and when my team came in to rescue me, they found themselves fired upon from every corner of the camp. We’d been set up.”
“But your people got you out.”
“Yeah,” she said sarcastically, “after everyone else on the team was dead. I was interrogated before I went into surgery and after I came out, despite the fact that I was mostly out of it the entire time. Who knows what I really said. I knew it was my job to tell them
everything I could about the mission, but I was so emotionally and physically exhausted that I finally told them where they could take their future missions. I think I bloodied Roger’s nose when he tried the ‘I’m your fiancé and you can talk to me’ ploy.”
She kissed Connor’s cheek. “I wouldn’t have been a suitable Army wife or career Army myself. Not after I had a mental breakdown.”
“Why did you really come back here, Kat?” Connor asked, thinking that a woman who had experienced a mental breakdown shouldn’t be alone in the Amazon.
She let out her breath in a huff. “If I tell you all my secrets, you might just decide I’m too much to handle.”
“Ha! You say that to a jaguar god?”
She chuckled but then grew serious. “I was under a doctor’s care. He suggested I visit a place similar to where I had experienced my trauma. He thought it would help to cure me of the flashbacks. At least that’s what I got out of the sessions. Go someplace that was relatively safe, but that might trigger the feel of where I’d been. Of course I was supposed to take a reliable friend or two with me. I couldn’t find anyone like that who was in the least bit interested in going to the Amazon rain forest.”
“Has it helped?” Connor shook his head. “Here Maya changes you, and you already had a nightmare to deal with.”
“I feel… different. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but when I first arrived here intent on dealing with my problems and trying to find you to thank you, I loved the jungle, but I was more like a vacationer just here to observe. And I have to admit I was a little on edge, as if the enemy was hiding behind every tree. Now it’s almost as though this is my second home.”
Relieved that she would feel that way, Connor nodded. “I understand the sensation. As jaguars, we come home to roost, so to speak, from time to time. It’s as though the craving to be here is in our blood.”
He would hate it if she didn’t want to return with them when they came here in the future. Yet, the fact that they had no idea how often she would shift or when bothered him. What if it took years before she could get it under control? What if she could never control it? He couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be to visit the jungle then. Maybe they could buy a boat or visit a location closer to home. Belize bordered Mexico. A rain forest existed there, too, and it was closer to Texas and another haven for jaguars.
“I’m not sure about flying home,” Kat finally admitted.
“I understand,” he said, running his hand over her arm. He was worried about it, too, not at all sure they would make it. He was thinking of checking into other options in the meantime. “I’ll get dressed and call the airlines to see if we can book a flight.”
“All right. I’m going to take another shower.”
The water was cold, even though the sun would warm them somewhat. Thinking of the water sluicing down her tan skin in the shower brought a smile to his lips. He couldn’t help thinking how he could warm her up in there again. Trying to get his lascivious thoughts under control, he slipped into his boxers.
He pulled out his phone and called the airlines while Kat disappeared into the shower. One flight would accommodate them best, a one-and-a-half-hour trip to Bogotá, Colombia, from Santa Marta. One stop. He was certain that Kat could make that trip. Then they would have a five-hour layover in the city. Maybe they could find someplace to hide out for a while. After that, it would be a little over a five-hour flight to Houston. It was the shortest flight plan he could find.
He heard the water shut off and cursed softly under his breath. He had wanted to join Kat in the sunny shower before she finished.
He walked into the bathroom to see her wearing only a towel around her head. He smiled, hurriedly ditched his boxers, and gathered her in his arms before she could escape. “Don’t you need to… rinse off a little more?”
She laughed. “No, but do you want me to soap up your hard-to-reach spots?”
He pulled the towel off her head and tossed it on the towel rack, then turned the water on and moved her under the showerhead with him. “Only if I get to soap up all your hard-to-reach spots.”
“Hmm, jaguars love to play in the water,” she said and stroked his swelling cock.
Chapter 22
Maya had taken a nice long nap in her comfortable air-conditioned cabana. She thought she had heard Kat and Connor making love, if the muted love cries were from them and not from howler monkeys or something else that was imitating them. She smiled, satisfied that she had brought Kat and her brother together and that her plan had worked. She’d had some iffy moments over the past few days.
Now if they could only get Kat home to Texas without further incident. Early evening was upon them, the blue sky and wispy clouds turning violet as the warm yellow sun sank beneath the brilliant foliage, and Maya was starving.
She didn’t want to disturb Kat and Connor, but she wasn’t waiting.
She dressed in jeans and a flowery shirt and strappy sandals. Feeling more human, she left her cabana and headed down the quaint stone path that wound among more cabanas hidden away in the dense jungle foliage. When she reached the white building with blue awnings stretched over its long narrow windows, a toucan was sitting in a cocoa tree near the entrance and Spanish music drifted from the building.
Her mouth watered at the aroma of cheeses and fish and chicken and beef cooking in the kitchen.
When she stepped inside the large tiled room, which was bustling with tourists and what looked to be regulars, a hostess seated her at one of the empty square tables for four. The air-conditioned air felt good, but circulating fans whirling high above helped to move it even more. She felt like she was in a breezy, chillier place than South America.
The sound of laughter and splashing came from outside where the pool was located, though she couldn’t see it as she took her seat. She smiled up at the dark-haired miss who handed her a menu, but the owner of the establishment, Garcia, caught her attention. His face was dark and grim as he listened to a man speaking to him, the stranger gesticulating at the resort. Garcia’s forehead was sweating, his hands clenching and unclenching into fists at his sides, and she caught a whiff of the smell of sweat on him as the fans carried it to her.
Three other men were crowded around Garcia—all of Spanish descent, dark haired, and scruffy looking—standing too close, in his space, and extremely intimidating. The one who was speaking shoved a photo at him. The owner looked at it for a long moment, then shook his head and handed the picture back. Did the interrogator see the fleeting look of recognition on Garcia’s face like Maya did?
That’s when she noticed the man had a gun half-exposed by his camouflage vest. This was bad news.
The waitress returned with Maya’s glass of water.
“Are those men from around here?” Maya asked, knowing she shouldn’t stick her nose in where it didn’t belong, but she was both curious and annoyed that the men were bullying Garcia. He had been so pleasant toward her brother and Kat and her, and so accommodating, making sure they could have their cabanas right away despite their grungy appearances, the odd hour when they had arrived, and their having had no reservations.
She would have loved to have taken the men on in her jaguar form and scared them like they were scaring Garcia.
The waitress glanced back at the men and quickly returned her gaze to Maya, her eyes huge. She vehemently shook her head.
Did that mean she knew them and they weren’t from around here? Or that she didn’t know them but just knew their type?
“What are they doing here?” Maya asked.
The woman shook her head again, too afraid to speak and draw the men’s attention.
Maya wanted desperately to take them to task, but she knew it was best to cool her heels. No sense in making waves that could involve Kat, who didn’t have her shape-shifting abilities in hand.
“Are you certain Kathleen McKnight is not staying here? An eyewitness said he had seen her come in here to…” the man said to Garcia, h
is voice dark and threatening, prompting Garcia to finish the statement.
Maya’s blood chilled to ice.
There were only two things Kat might have done when she arrived here—eaten at the restaurant or taken a room.
Maya glanced back at the owner, fearing he would tell the men where Kathleen was staying, but he just shook his head, saying no.
Oh, God. He was helping them, but it could get him killed, she feared.
She had to warn Connor and Kat.
Her heart thundering, Maya said to the waitress, “I’m afraid I’m not feeling well all of a sudden. Can you cancel the order?”
The waitress looked bewildered.
Maya repeated her words in Spanish, but the woman still seemed surprised. Maya rose from her chair, trying not to catch the men’s attention. “I’ll be back later, if I can.”
She handed a tip to the woman, then with a forced easy stride, she left the restaurant, raced up the path to Connor and Kat’s cabana, and barged in without knocking first.
Connor and Kat were dressed at least, both their mouths gaping as they turned to stare at her in disbelief.
“Someone’s asking about Kat. Men like the ones we saw in the jungle. The owner is buying us some time, but they’re at the restaurant now, and he told them he’d never seen the woman in the photo they had of her.”
“We have a flight out of here at 5 p.m. tomorrow,” Connor said, quickly stuffing his things in his bag, while Kat put her clothes in her own bag.
“What if we drive to Bogotá tonight and take a flight to Houston from there instead of waiting for the flight tomorrow night to fly us to Bogotá? Then there would be no stops. Just a straight flight into Houston,” Maya said.
Connor zipped up his bag. “It’s the red-eye flight. It’ll leave tomorrow at midnight and arrive at 5:30 the next morning. But it’s a long drive to Bogotá and can be dangerous.”
