He stopped what he was doing for a second as if startled by her reaction, almost as though he would obey her word.
Glad her backpack had protected her from his fearsome bite, she still figured that was only the beginning. Once he found out the bag didn’t taste all that good, he would take another bite, somewhere a lot more tasty.
He ignored her scream and didn’t take another bite. Instead, he held on tight to her bag and dragged it. Since the bag was attached to her back, that effectively pulled her along with it. She briefly thought of his teeth making mincemeat of everything in her bag—the canines puncturing her water bottles, sinking into her granola bars, destroying and desanitizing her medical kit. Then she realized how much more serious this was. He was taking her closer to the injured female so she could eat Kathleen at her leisure!
She struggled with the backpack but couldn’t get her arms out of the straps to save her life.
How sweet for his mate. If Kathleen managed to live through this, she could write about how caring a jaguar male could be toward his mate. Of course, after the cubs were born and only a couple of weeks old, the mother would chase the male off so he didn’t eat her offspring.
To her surprise, the male jaguar left Kathleen next to the female’s hind foot. Then he came around and put his nose close to the thorn. She could see now there were two, but he didn’t touch either of them. She thought he really was telling her to remove them.
She couldn’t believe it. She wondered if the two jaguars were like wolves that had been raised by families in the States who then grew tired of them and released them into the wild. She had heard that sometimes people in the jungle raised jaguars. Manuel, her guide now long gone, had told her about a male jaguar cub discovered on a road, his mother nowhere to be found. The people in his village took the cub in because he would never have survived otherwise. Another was kept at a reserve for injured wild animals.
Maybe these two had been raised by natives and…
She shook her head. They still were wild beasts of prey. But what if one had been Connor’s pet and the jaguar had picked up a mate? What if Connor was nearby?
Kathleen didn’t believe she could get that lucky.
Her hand shaking, she reached for the two thorns wedged between the pads of the jaguar’s foot. As soon as Kathleen grasped the first, the female cat growled low at her.
Kathleen’s heart stuttered, but she had done it now. She yanked out the thorn, then reached for the other and heard male voices. The male jaguar growled low this time.
Kathleen yanked out the other thorn, and to her astonishment, the male jaguar grabbed her bag and dragged her back to the tree. The female quickly raced to the tree and climbed into the higher branches. Kathleen couldn’t climb. She couldn’t even stand, but before she knew what the male was up to, he’d jumped into the tree, carrying her by the backpack and nearly giving her a seizure. Now she was in the tree again.
His action reminded her that big cats often carried their catch—even one as large as a dead deer—into a tree to eat it later, protecting the snack from predators below.
Connor assumed the woman thought he and his sister would eat her. At least if he was in her predicament, that’s what he would have thought. But for now, they would sleep, hidden in the canopy in the rain forest, away from the human predators who were moving noisily through the jungle, cutting a swath through the tangle of vines and plants and cursing as they went. He didn’t trust handing the woman over to them, not after he had found her alone in the jungle and not knowing who they were.
He assumed she was alone because something had gone wrong and that the man he had heard earlier was part of this group of maybe three or four men. They wouldn’t stay out here for long because it would grow too dark for the men to see, and Connor was sure they didn’t have a camp nearby. That made him wonder just what they were doing out here this late in the day.
When they could safely do so, he and his sister would escort the woman to the resort and leave her there. But the woman had hurt herself, and they couldn’t easily get her to the resort anytime soon.
The woman was sitting stiffly on the branch next to him, looking tired and uneasy. She alternated between watching for the men, who were moving away from them, and looking at Connor as he quietly observed her. He was afraid she would accidentally slip off the branch if she managed to fall asleep, as tired and drawn as she looked. He put a leg over her lap and looked up at her to see her reaction. Her eyes widening, she stared at him in disbelief. She had the most beautiful green eyes, the irises flecked with gold and encircled by a ring of gold. He envisioned that she would be one beautiful jaguar.
She whispered, “You were someone’s pet?”
If he could have smiled in amusement at the thought, he would have. But he was afraid smiling would show off his big predator’s teeth and wouldn’t put her at ease.
Her voice was sweet, in awe, and appealed to him on some deeper level. She was American like he and his sister were, but he couldn’t place the region she was from. He nudged her arm with his nose to show he meant her no ill will, pretending he had been someone’s pet. It would work well for all concerned if she believed it.
She put her hand on his paw, as if accepting his friendship, and he grunted in his jaguar way. But her touch was doing things to his body that he shouldn’t be thinking of as a jaguar.
His sister looked down at him from a higher branch. She appeared contemplative as she turned her attention to the woman. The woman’s hair was very dark brown and long and curly, the ends dripping with water. Again, he wondered how she had gotten so wet.
She was drenched, her lightweight, tan-colored clothes clinging provocatively to her figure, which he could enjoy without fear of censure because she thought he was only a cat. Dark pebbled nipples were visible under her wet shirt and bra, and he studied them with fascination. Mainly because the bra was some kind of leopard print yet sheer enough that he could see her rigid nipples.
Hell, he hadn’t been with a woman in months. And right now observing this woman was taking a toll on his body.
He rested his head on her lap to make sure she wasn’t still afraid of the two jaguars protecting her and would try to slip away into the jungle if he should fall asleep, or that she would accidentally fall from the tree and injure herself further.
Unable to ignore that carnal, feral side of his jaguar nature that wanted to learn just how ripe she was to have his offspring, he breathed in her musky feminine scent. Not that he normally sniffed at a woman in that way—mainly because he had never been in a situation like this before—but with his head resting in her lap, he couldn’t help himself. And didn’t want to, either. Yeah, she was ready. If she had been a jaguar and he hadn’t been a shifter, he would definitely have been enticed to see just how receptive she would be to his advances. But he was a shifter and she was strictly human, which should have meant paws off.
She frowned at him. “Connor Anderson?” she whispered.
He stared at her. Her voice. That’s what had sounded so familiar. It… it couldn’t be Captain Kathleen McKnight. For a second, he thought she knew he was the jaguar, then he realized she couldn’t. So how had she known he “ran” with a jaguar out here? But she had been a blonde before and had blue eyes.
She stroked his head as if he was her pet. It was her. She was safe, healed from her injuries from that firefight a year ago. So what was she doing in the jungle again? Another undercover mission?
But then her hand rubbed his head some more, and she stole his thoughts.
If she only knew the lascivious notions he was having about her, thinking of what he would attempt if they had both been jaguar-shifters.