Jaguar Fever

A shot rang out. A thunk sounded as the bullet hit something. Ignoring the gunshot, Maya didn’t take her focus off Bettinger. She slammed against him with her huge jaguar paws planted on his chest. He fell back with a strangled cry. Eyes wide, his expression was full of disbelief and fear. Jaguars in the wild didn’t stick together, unless they were a mother and her cubs. Then she’d protect them with her life. Full-grown jaguars? No way. So he hadn’t anticipated another jaguar’s attack.

Flat on his back, he smelled her and his lips parted in shock. He knew who she was.

“Let me shift,” he begged as she stood on top of him, pinning him down. “Give me a chance.”

A growl rumbled in her throat. Like he was going to give Wade a chance? And the female cat? The jaguar wasn’t going to be allowed to live, but hunted to the death on someone’s ranch.

And if Maya gave the bastard a chance, if she allowed him to shift to fight her that way, he’d be bigger and could easily kill her instead.

Bettinger knew Maya planned to eliminate him. She didn’t have any choice. If she let him up, he’d fatally shoot Wade and her. They knew he was involved now, and he couldn’t risk letting them live.

She growled softly, her face close to his, smelling his fear but unable to decide what to do with him. Killing humans who were out to murder them had to be done with finesse. If she terminated Bettinger in a jaguar way, crushing the head with her powerful jaws, investigators would know a jaguar had killed him. Then hunters would descend on the area to destroy the jaguar, which could mean any that they came across. They were all the same, after all.

“Hey!” a man shouted from behind her.

Her skin prickled with fear. Hell, the other man had come back.

“Shoot her!” Bettinger shouted, panic driving his words.

That’s when she felt Bettinger pull a gun from a holster at his side, realizing he’d only pretended to be panicked to distract her. She didn’t hesitate this time. It was kill or be killed.

And she had two killers to contend with now.

She swiped at Bettinger’s head with a powerful slash of her paw. He dropped the gun, his head turned hard to the right, his neck broken, his eyes staring but unseeing.

She whipped around to target the other man, the hunter who was ready with a rifle aimed at her. Wade growled softly, and Mylar turned as if afraid the other jaguar—the rabid one—was ready to eat him alive. He wasn’t. Poor Wade was struggling to lift his head off the leaf-littered ground.

But his action had given her the precious time she needed to take care of the other man.

She leaped, trying out Kat’s unusual way of landing on the prey’s head, and it worked. When her body slammed onto his head, he dropped like a rock and hit the ground hard. His neck was broken. She sniffed Mylar for any sign of a breath, listened for a heartbeat. Nothing.

Now what was she to do? Lion Mane was most likely still in the area, and maybe even more of the men who were working with these bastards were around.

Wade was too drugged to leave the area under his own speed, and she couldn’t move a cat as big as he was all on her own. The female couldn’t be left alone like this, either. Not in the lethargic condition she was in.

Wade opened his eyes again, looking at her. If she could find his brother, David could help. She had no idea where he was but suspected he might be following Lion Mane and the others.

She stood as still as a spotted statue. Not even her tail was swishing as she considered her options in the shadowed jungle, listening for any sounds that would indicate men were approaching. Her heart was pumping hard and her body felt overheated. Unable to sweat like a human could, she began to pant, the only way for a cat to cool off.

She moved in close to Wade and bent down to nuzzle his cheek. She licked it, trying to get him to stand and shake off the drug. He sat up and shifted into one gorgeous naked hunk of a human male.

“Go,” he said, his voice dark, deep, and… sleepy.

She shook her head and nudged at him to climb a tree. He struggled to get into one, and it was almost painful watching him climb the liana—a drainpipe-thick vine-like plant—slipping and scrambling for purchase and pausing to catch his breath, as if every movement was the most wearing. When he reached the first branch off the ground, he shifted back into his jaguar form. Couldn’t he have jumped up there more easily as a cat? Was he too out of it to be thinking clearly?

Now what to do with the female jaguar? Maya tore a liana with her teeth and dragged the plant over to the sleeping jaguar, allowing the water dripping from inside the plant to fall on her face. The liana was a common source of water for survival, pure and cleansed as it was filtered by the plant. If Maya could revive the cat enough, she’d have another reason to revere the life-giving source.

Wake up, she pleaded in her jaguar brain. If she could just get the jaguar to wake enough, she could attempt to move her away from the area where the dead men were lying. The dead men. She needed to deal with them, too. The female jaguar’s tongue licked at the water droplets on her face, but she didn’t sit up.

Wade was watching her, his head resting on the branch as if he couldn’t lift it.

Maya jumped onto the branch next to him, and they stayed there until he seemed to be able to gather more strength and leaped to another tree farther from where she’d killed the men.

Then she had another horrible thought. What if Connor and Kat came to her cottage and found her gone? What if they both came looking for her here?

She had to get Wade to her cottage before they came for her and got caught in the crossfire. If Lion Mane came, he’d know just who she was, and he’d smell Wade’s scent, too.

* * *

Connor and Kat always rendezvoused with Maya at her cottage at night, but he and Kat had taken a little more time than usual so he was late arriving at Maya’s place.

He knocked on her front door. “Maya?”

At first he was thought she was with Wade, but he heard no sounds coming from inside her room. He didn’t think Wade had come back for her since that night he’d visited her. She had never told Connor that Wade had been with her, but Connor knew, just from her blushes and Wade’s scent on her deck.

He’d also seen the way she’d watched for Wade when they were exploring the rainforest, looking for any signs that he was nearby. A couple of times, Connor had thought Wade was following them, watching their backs, being protective like he’d been when they were in the Amazon.

Connor paced in front of the door, then knocked again. “Maya!”

When there was still no response, he went around to her deck. He smelled that she’d been here recently, but the trail led down into the jungle. He opened the door to her cottage and quickly searched the place.

Maya wasn’t there. She had obviously decided to take a run through the jungle by herself while he and Kat had been busy making love. Again. He wasn’t happy about Maya exploring the jungle on her own. He understood Maya’s restlessness and the fact that she probably was feeling like a third wheel. And that being this close to the jungle pulled on their wild-cat urges.

Back at his cottage, he found Kat straightening up their bed and said, “Stay here and wait for Maya to return, Kat. I’m going to look for her.”

“She’s gone again?”

“Yeah, like last night. I’ll be right back.”

“Can’t I come with you this time?” Kat asked.

“No. I don’t want to worry about you being out there if she’s gotten herself into trouble. Stay here and I’ll return soon.”

He kissed her and hugged her tight, knowing she didn’t want to be left alone. Last night, Maya hadn’t been far from the cottages. He hoped he’d find the same thing tonight.

Returning to Maya’s deck, he removed his clothes and shifted in a blur of tanned skin to golden fur, nails to claws, and much bigger teeth. Then he leaped from the deck and took off to find her most recent trail. She’d been exploring the jungle in a happy-go-lucky way as they usually did, carving her nails into a tree, rubbing off strands of fur on another, but then her path and the scent she left changed.

That had him worried. Dogs were barking somewhere in the distance as he moved a mile away from the