Terry Spear: Savage Hunger

He couldn’t believe how different she looked, but he had recognized her scent and her voice.

Why was she here?

When the dark finally came, he raised his head and saw that she was indeed sleeping. He looked up at Maya. She was watching him curiously, a speculative gleam in her golden eyes, and she knew just what he intended to do. He leaped from the branch to the ground, and she jumped down to the one Kat was sleeping on, then followed his example and rested her head in the woman’s lap to make sure she didn’t fall. With one last look at the two hidden in the canopy, feeling sure they would be safe, Connor loped off to his and Maya’s home in the jungle.

Running as a jaguar, he didn’t take long to reach the hut. He quickly shifted, dressed, and raced back to where he had left his sister and the woman. Maneuvering along the narrow path and running as a human, he hated how much time was passing, much longer than when he had run as a powerful jaguar. Even though they normally didn’t chase anything down, jaguars could run up to twenty-five miles per hour if necessary. They just couldn’t run for extended periods of time.

All the while on his trek back to where he had left the women, he was considering how he was going to get Kat out of the tree without injuring her knee further.

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?”

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.