Jaguar Pride (12 page)

“Okay.” Melissa had to trust that was the case. She didn't want to believe the cubs had shifted for any other reason, but she was damned glad the police officers had left. “I have to go back to that store. It's the only one I found that had baby articles. They'll have diapers. I should have gotten some at the time, but I didn't think the cubs would shift.”

“I keep thinking that the family had to be staying somewhere near the park. If we could locate their rental unit, we could find their passports and baby stuff, and learn who they are.”

“That would take time. We know they're not at our resort because ours are the only jaguar scents around here. Most of the places I looked up on the Internet are hotels, and I'm certain this family wouldn't have been running as jaguars through a hotel. So it would be someplace like this that's more of a single unit, isolated from the rest and close to the park.” She handed her baby to Huntley, and she swore he was going to panic, not certain he could juggle two squalling babies at once.

She hurried to warm up the bottles of milk.

“They might have had a tent in the rainforest, like we set up,” Huntley said, bouncing the babies slightly in his arms to soothe them.

She smiled at him. He was a natural dad. “I thought we were going to be found out when the police officers were here. Did you see the looks on their faces when not one but two babies began to cry?”

“Yeah, I'm certain they were trying to figure that one out—how we could be on a mission and managing two babies at the same time. They were probably dying to ask about that. I couldn't believe that calling Martin worked.”

“I just want to know what Martin said to their supervisor.” She set the warmed-up bottles on the kitchen counter, relieved Huntley of Goldie, then grabbed a bottle and headed for the living room. Huntley followed her, sat on the couch, and began feeding Sweetpea. But she wasn't feeding. Still, Melissa smiled when the baby looked content to be sitting on his lap. Maybe they'd just been startled by the change into their human forms and needed to be held. “You look like you know what you're doing.”

“Might as well get in some practice. When my half sister, Maya, has hers, I might be called on to do babysitting duty.”

She smiled at him. “I would never have imagined you offering. What would your brother say?”

“Everett would be laughing his head off. My sister? Tammy would be the same way. Of course, I'd have felt the same about my brother if he'd been in my situation. Tammy babysat when she was a teen so she would be ready for it.”

“Not me,” Melissa said, glancing down at Goldie. She was just mouthing the nipple, not sucking, but like her sister, she seemed happy just to be held. “I figured I wouldn't be handling babies until my sister had some.”

“I didn't know that she's seeing someone seriously,” Huntley said, surprised.

“She isn't. But when she does, she'll have kids. She's always wanted them.”

Melissa's phone went off. “How much do you want to bet it's the boss, and he's going to be just as concerned as we are?”

“Just a tad.”

She managed to get to her phone while holding on to the baby, but she set the bottle down because Goldie didn't seem to want to feed again so soon. Melissa decided she wasn't half bad at this.

“Yeah, Martin, the cubs turned into babies.”

Silence. Melissa knew that her boss was thinking the worst-case scenario: that in death, the jaguar had shifted in front of human onlookers who just happened to be Costa Rican police officers.

She took a deep breath and let it out. “Are you still there? I just pray the mother is fine. That she just shifted and the babies turned with—”

The babies suddenly shifted from their human forms into cubs.

“Oh, thank God,” Melissa said. “They're back to being cubs. At least I hope everything's all right. That the mother wasn't found out. The babies cried when the police officers were here, unfortunately, but they didn't question us about why we had babies on the mission. Just wanted to let you know.” She couldn't manage Goldie, who was squirming to get out of the towel. “I'll call you right back.” She unwrapped the cub from the towel and carried her into the bathroom so she could use the litter box. Then Melissa remembered that the litter boxes weren't in the bathroom but in the bedroom closet.

She went to retrieve one, then set the cat and box in the bathroom. Then Melissa quickly called Martin back. Huntley joined her and set his charge on the floor, then wrapped his arms around Melissa and hugged her tight. She smiled up at him. This was turning out to be some wild mission.

Melissa put her cell on speakerphone and said, “Martin, what did you say to the police officers?”

“We gave them a million dollars last year to help fund more rangers for their park.”

Feeling a bit shocked, she didn't say anything.

“Did we?” Huntley asked.

“Hell yeah, we did. It's the least we can do to help save a habitat where our people can still enjoy the wilderness in our jaguar coats. And your father, Huntley, footed a fourth of the bill. Which I also told the police officers' supervisor. I was down there when we handed over the money, so Gonzalez knows exactly who I am and how important this is to us and to our organization.”

“You could have told us,” Huntley said.

“We preferred remaining anonymous. Tell one person, and the word gets out. But when we need to use it for leverage, we will. Even so, if the police had found the cubs in your possession, I couldn't have helped you. If they were truly jaguar cubs, you would have handed them over to authorities to care for. Since they aren't, my ploy wouldn't have worked to get you out of that trouble.”

“Gotcha. So now what do we do?” Huntley asked.

“Sit tight. Are the cubs doing okay otherwise?”

“Yeah. They're eating well and playing with us,” Melissa said. “And as long as no one discovers them here and reports us, we're okay.”

“Good. Hold on.” Martin talked to someone in the background. “Okay, great.” He said to Melissa and Huntley, “Just got word that we have a plane flying in tomorrow at noon. We need you to drive to the private field—figure on three hours to reach it—and we'll get the cubs back to the States. We should be good to go, as long as the two of you don't get caught on the way there. You can come home that way too.”

“Wait. What about Jackson and his men?” Melissa asked, wanting to get the bastard. She definitely didn't want to go home until they helped find him and freed the parents.

“We've got teams on it. Okay?” Martin asked. It wasn't a case of getting their approval. He made the rules.

“All right,” Melissa said, but she didn't agree with the plan, and she was fairly certain he could hear the irritation in her tone of voice. “Are you going to have someone come along to take care of the cubs?”

“I thought you were doing a great job of it.” She heard a hint of a smile in Martin's words. “Yeah, of course. I'm sending a couple of Guardian agents. Brother-and-sister team. They'll take care of the cubs until we can bring the parents home.”

“Good,” she said, totally relieved because she had other plans.

When they ended the call, Huntley said, “I know you have something in mind. Why else would you ask if someone else was coming to take care of the cubs? What are you thinking?”

“We're here already. We return to the park as jaguars and stay there, living off the land until we can track Jackson down, if he returns to the rainforest. Let him take us to the couple. If he hasn't already sold them off.”

“That's damn risky and there are a lot of ifs,” Huntley said. “Discounting any trouble, we drop off the cubs with the pilot and the Guardian agents, and then return to the cabana, leave our gear, and head into the rainforest that night? We'd have to let Martin know, just in case we don't make it back. It would be bad if four of us needed to be rescued and no one had any clue where any of us were taken, and then we were separated and shipped off to God knows where.”

She nodded. “We have to do whatever we can to return the couple to their cubs and take down Jackson at the same time. We're here and too close not to see this through. I don't understand why Martin would want to pull us from the task.”

“Maybe he thinks we're too close to the situation. Too emotionally tied to it.” Huntley shook his head. “Hell, Oliver thought you were in danger on these missions?
You
are dangerous.”

She smiled up at him. “Is that a problem for you?”

“Hell, no. I'll grab the other litter box out of the bedroom.” Once he was done, he said, “We need to make sure that we have a more foolproof way to ensure Jackson returns to the rainforest.”

She straightened out the towels for the cubs, then closed the door to the bathroom so they'd go back to sleep. “We've still got Phil and Eloise's phones. What if we have ‘Phil' text him? Say he arrived late because he got into a fracas with the police. Tell Jackson that he plans to meet him at that beach late that night. And you and I are there instead—as jaguars. Jackson wouldn't be able to resist capturing us.”

What if when Phil was accidentally released from jail, he came down here? What if he wants the money for the job of poaching some more animals, and Jackson doesn't know anything about his sister?”

“Lots of ifs, Huntley. If Phil is down here, we'll grab him too.”

“What if I am the only one running as a jaguar, and you call it in?” Huntley said, sounding suspiciously like he didn't want her to go with him on that part of the mission.

“Call it in to the rangers? Ha! By the time they got there, Jackson and his men would have taken off with you. Same if I called Martin. It would be way too late.”

“There's no way for Martin to track us either. That would be the best way to go about this,” Huntley said.

“Okay, so we let him take both of us, because we have a better chance of rescuing ourselves if there are two of us. We're highly trained JAG agents, after all.”

“What if Jackson thinks Phil's call is a trick?”

“He'll probably arrive there early.”

“Or he won't come. We need to have someone watching our backs,” Huntley said. “We need to have a team down here ready to free us if everything goes bad.”

“Okay, so who's down here now?”

Huntley got on the phone to Martin. “We have an alternate plan.”

“Martin can't say no,” Melissa said to Huntley later that afternoon as they made a lunch of casado, a traditional Costa Rican meal of rice and beans, meat, salad, tortillas, and plantains.

They were still pondering how they would allow Jackson to capture them as jaguars in the park. One thing Melissa loved about her boss was that he was always willing to listen to suggestions from his field agents. She and Huntley were in the field and well aware of their capabilities and limitations. They knew that this job came with a lot of risks. But they had to do something. Every hour that went by meant Jackson could be moving the jaguars and selling them off. And then tracking them down could be a real nightmare.

Some places that bought the big cats didn't care for them properly, and the cats could die. If that happened? A shifter dying in a cage in front of a bunch of onlookers and then turning into his human form, unable to keep his jaguar form in death, would be a disaster. Not to mention that a pair of cubs could lose their mom or dad.

“We'll do it, Melissa. We just have to come up with a plan that Martin can live with. He doesn't want to lose us.” Huntley carried the dishes to the small wooden kitchen table and they took their seats.

“And if we can't come up with a plan that works for him?”

“Then we do it our way. But I still believe we need to nail down how we're going to carry this out without getting ourselves into a fine mess. What if other poachers grab us instead? We would be nowhere near rescuing the other shifters, and we'd have a time rescuing ourselves,” Huntley said, digging into his casado. He took his first bite and looked like he was in heaven.

She smiled, loving that he enjoyed her cooking and that he enjoyed letting her know it.

“Okay, so what if some of our teams spread the word that jaguars have been spotted at the beach where Jackson and his friends tried to escape with the puma and her cubs? We could have someone with the agency say that he is looking to buy a male and female jaguar he assumes are courting. That he has witnessed the cats three times on the same beach. And he knows they've claimed the territory. He could give them all the facts about jaguars, showing he's a real expert in the field, so that's why he knows what he's talking about. At dusk, we could put on a jaguar courting show on the beach, acting all lovey-dovey, in the event Jackson comes to check out the agent's story.”

“I could really get into that role.” He gave her a sexy wink, then ate more of his meal.

She chuckled. She had never imagined a mission where she would pretend to court a jaguar in the wild for the benefit of poachers. “Jaguars that are mating also stay together during the female's pregnancy. So the agent, acting as the buyer, states that he assumes that the female might already be pregnant with one to four cubs. She wouldn't be having them for ninety-five to a hundred-and-ten days, but he doesn't know how far along she is, if she's pregnant.

“Breeding big cats in captivity isn't very successful, and he could let Jackson know this. I read about one pair that has been bred successfully three times in captivity, which is really rare, and they sell the cubs each time—once they're old enough. So we could have an agent posing as a buyer, looking to get a pair of jaguars that are courting in the wild and see if they will have a better success rate at breeding them in captivity. Not to mention that this courting couple of jaguars—us—might already have a litter on the way.”

Huntley smiled at Melissa. “I think we've got our plan. Then when Jackson goes to sell the jaguars—us—to the buyer, the agents swoop in on him and his buddies, and if our mom and dad shifters have already been sold, we force Jackson to tell us where they've gone.”

“With any means available to us.”

“You got that right,” Huntley said.

They finished eating lunch and Huntley said, “You call Martin with the new plan of action. I'll clean up the dishes.”

She pulled out her phone, gave Huntley a kiss on the cheek, and called Martin.

“Okay, here's our new plan.”

And he'd better damn well like it. She feared time was running out to catch up with the parents before real disaster struck. If the couple was trying to rescue themselves and got caught, what would the poachers think? Not that they'd caught a couple of shape-shifting jaguars, but that they had two naked humans who, for whatever crazy reason, had let their jaguars go—and then? The poachers would kill them.

***

Tomorrow, after they left the cubs with the Guardians who would care for them on the flight home, Huntley and Melissa had every intention of heading back into the rainforest. They didn't want to risk waiting for the word to get out and hoping Jackson heard that a buyer was looking to pick up a male and female mating jaguar pair that frequented one of the beaches. That said buyer had witnessed them and wanted to have them captured because he didn't have any way to do so himself. Melissa and Huntley hoped that if they visited the beach at night, the word might get back to Jackson that way.

Martin wasn't happy about their plan, but he didn't have a better one. He said he'd have men accompany them. The agents would arrive on the plane carrying the Guardians who would pick up the cubs.

Now, there wasn't anything to do but wait for tomorrow morning.

Huntley gathered Melissa up in his arms and said, “Martin went along with our plan, at least.”

“Very reluctantly. I'm certain he's worried about us,” she said, kissing his lips.

“Hell, yeah.
I'm
worried about us,” Huntley said, then kissed her back, tongue in her mouth and exploring, his body pressed against hers, his arousal growing.

She smiled, ready to take this back to bed.

Then her phone rang, instantly stoking her ire. “Our boss better not be changing his mind.” She answered it and heard Oliver's voice instead. She was so surprised that she said, “Oliver?” As if it couldn't be him, and she had to verify it.

Huntley immediately frowned at her, like he believed her ex-boyfriend was trying to make up to her. More likely, he wanted to remind her to pick up her stuff soon.

“I think I might have found your couple.” Oliver sounded excited.

Melissa's heart skipped a beat. “Wait, let me put this on speaker.” She couldn't believe it!

Oliver paused and she was afraid he didn't want to share the information with Huntley, but she wanted her partner to hear the same thing she heard.

“Oliver?”

“Well, I wasn't sure it was them. But they took out a life insurance policy for their kids, and the twins are two months old. They were adamant that if anything happened to them, they'd have money set aside for their baby girls.”

Melissa barely breathed. “Yeah, go on.”
Get
to
the
bottom
line
. He was always this way when talking about insurance and his clients, and it drove her nuts.

“Okay, so I called their house. I got an answering machine. I tried to text them. No response.”

“Wait, I wonder if they camped in the rainforest and their stuff is still out there,” she said. Not that they could go searching for it and leave the infants behind—or take them with them and risk running into trouble.

“That might be,” Oliver said. “Okay, so I'm still not certain it was them. I called the man's sister, who also came in and signed up for a policy, and told her that I learned a couple had disappeared at the park and that you were taking care of their babies.”

Melissa took a deep, calming breath.

“She broke into tears. She said she knew it was too early for them to take the babies to the Amazon. That they should have had a bunch of family members go with them to watch their backs.”

“Wait. Amazon?”

“Yeah, wrong rainforest.”

Huntley was grinning.

Melissa could just strangle Oliver. She punched Huntley in the shoulder. Not hard, but jeez. This is what drove her crazy about Oliver. He had to tell her every detail of whatever he had been doing before he ever got to the point.

“So the sister verified that they had taken a trip to Columbia, not Costa Rica.”

“Airlines? Everything?” Melissa asked, still wondering if they'd changed their minds and booked a flight and made reservations in Costa Rica instead.

“Yes. They were on the flight, got there fine, and they're headed back today.”

“I thought you knew who they were.” She was so exasperated that she might have growled.

Huntley took her in his arms and rubbed her back.

“Okay, yeah, the sister was angry with me for upsetting her unnecessarily, but then she realized that another couple was out there and in danger. She said that her brother's daughters stayed at a day care sometimes—jaguar shifters only. And so she gave me the information. I called the day care and spoke to the owner. I told her the bind the JAG branch was in while trying to determine who the missing parents were.”

Melissa held her breath again. “Tell me you got the right names this time.”

“I did. Avery and Kathy Carrington. The girls' names are Jaime and Jenny. The woman at the day care said that the girls wouldn't be returning until the end of next week. Kathy had told the woman that they'd be at the same park as the shifters were taken from, and they would have been there at the same time as their disappearance. She was horrified, of course, and wished you all the best and offered to do anything she could to help.”

“Ohmigod, thank you so much, Oliver. You're a godsend,” Melissa said, smiling. “I've got to call my boss. Thanks so much, and…I'll let you know when we have some resolution.” Melissa loved Oliver for having helped them on this mission. She immediately called Martin.

“Oliver Strickland, my ex-boyfriend, called to tell me he believes Avery and Kathy Carrington are the cubs' parents. The girls are Jaime and Jenny.”

“Amen to that,” Martin said. “I'll have agents right on it. Call you back ASAP.”

“Thanks!”

Melissa hugged Huntley. “I can't wait until the cubs are home safely.”

“You and me both.”

She was going to ask Huntley what they should do now when Martin called back again. “We have the location of the family's bungalow. It's five miles from where you are. I need one of you to pack up their belongings and store them at your place so that when the plane comes tomorrow, their things can be shipped off with the cubs.”

“Okay, will do.”

When she ended the call, she said, “I'll run over there.”

“Wait. Don't you want more time to bond with the kids?” Huntley asked, sounding like he really hoped he'd get out of cub-sitting duty for a while.

She grinned at him, patted his chest, and reminded him, “Maya will likely have her kids before my sister does—since she doesn't even have a steady boyfriend—so you'll need all the practice you can get.”

He kissed her thoroughly. “Don't get caught.”

“I won't.” Then she headed out with every intention of doing what Martin had asked, pronto, hoping she wouldn't run into any trouble with the management there when she tried to remove the Carringtons' things.

***

Huntley hadn't wanted to make a big deal of it, but he was concerned about Melissa, just as he knew she'd be concerned about him if he had left her alone with the cubs. Anything could go wrong, as they were learning on this mission. He was glad to have a partner who was as flexible as she was and could handle a crisis efficiently, though. He still admired her greatly for how she had managed to get him, the cubs, and their gear all back to the cabana in one piece when he'd been half out of it.

Then the babies began to cry, not snarl like they should have if they were cubs, and he nearly lost it. Sick with worry about their mother, he rushed to the bathroom to take care of the babies. He paused midway to the bathroom and realized he needed to get the bottles first. They hadn't eaten the last time they'd turned, and it had been about four hours.

He wanted to call Melissa, but he couldn't worry her about the mother when she had a job to do. Man, he wished he had insisted she stay home and be their momma while he took care of the family's personal effects.

He called Martin as he stalked into the kitchen and began warming up the milk. “Hey, boss, Melissa's on her way to get the Carringtons' things, but bad news. The cubs turned into babies again.”