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.”