Savage Hunger (35 page)

They heard no one coming, and Kat felt antsy, wanting to look for Connor, to make sure he was all right. She kept telling herself that no gunshots had been fired, so the only way one of the men could have wounded Connor was if he’d drawn a knife. But she didn’t think anyone would be foolish enough to chance fighting a jaguar with a puny knife.

Then Connor materialized out of the ferns, saw her and Maya in the tree, and grunted. It was time to get on their way. All the bad men were dead. What would Gonzales think about that? This time he would know for sure his men had come across Kat and died at the hands of her and her companions. But he would probably wonder how that had happened. No bullets fired. No knife wounds. Only two women and one man to fight off all his men. And all his men were dead.

They returned to the tree where their backpacks rested, and Connor climbed and shifted. He tossed down Maya and Kat’s bags, then proceeded to get dressed.

Maya shifted also and dressed. Kat just stood there, panting as a jaguar, wishing she could shift, too, and get dressed.

She groaned, waiting for Connor and Maya to join her, and then they all ran back to their rental car. Kat smelled the scent of the male jaguar that had followed them before. She glanced at Connor. He didn’t look happy.

When they were in the car and on the road, Maya pulled some clothes out of Kat’s bag and tossed them to the backseat for Kat when she managed to turn back into a human. She might have gotten away with being a jaguar in a small village, but she didn’t imagine she could do so in the city of Bogotá.

“How did Kat do?” Connor asked.

Maya smiled at her brother. “She’s a great hunter. And you know what? She has a new technique we could learn from.”

Kat stared at her in disbelief. Maya thought her “technique” was worth sharing?

“Oh?” He cast a look back over his shoulder at Kat, his eyes sparkling with amusement and pride.

“Yep. Works like a charm. Without fail. But I’ll let her tell you about it later.”

Three hours later, Kat finally had the urge to shift. What had taken her so long? At least she was glad she had been a help to Maya and Connor with Gonzales’s thugs. But she was glad to be in her human form again, able to communicate, too. Maya had dozed off in the front passenger seat, and Connor was staring at the road, half-asleep himself, she thought.

“Connor,” she said quietly, not wanting to startle him and cause an accident.

He glanced back at her, his expression one of relief.

“Yeah, I’m back.” She pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “Are we almost there?” She thought they were because more urban sprawl existed now as they grew closer to the city.

“Half an hour. We’ll get a room, and then it’ll be another four hours before we check in for our midnight flight.”

“I’m not interested in him,” Kat said.

Connor nodded. “I know. But it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want you.”

“Did you see him? How do you know he doesn’t want Maya and not me?”

“I saw him. If looks could kill, he would have eaten me alive. But instead, he acted as a part of our jaguar team and took out two of the men, while I brought down the other two. I might actually have liked him if it wasn’t for the fact that he wants you.”

“But what if he might be right for Maya?”

Connor’s dark look made her think he knew what he was talking about. She sighed. “All right. But you have to know he means nothing to me.”

But Connor still didn’t look really sure of himself, and that surprised her, considering how much he always seemed in charge. Cats were fickle, she reminded herself. Maybe he thought she’d be like one of his parents, loving and then leaving him far behind.

***

When they arrived in the city, they stayed at a classy hotel close to El Dorado International Airport. Connor paid for a suite with an adjoining room that Maya could have. That would give them all privacy and easy access in case they had any more trouble. They all ordered room service, ate fried cheese
arepas
and shish kebabs and then a dessert of
crema
de
arroz
, sweet rice with milk and coconut, in Maya’s room. Then Connor and Kat left Maya to shower and rest up until their late-night flight.

But Connor had other plans for Kat. He took her down to the lobby, which was brilliantly lit with floral-shaped chandeliers, expansive eggshell tile floors, and white marble walls. Pine and bleach cleaners filled his nostrils as he walked Kat past a winding marble staircase leading to a bar that overlooked an Olympic-sized pool, the aqua water inviting.

The place was ultra-elegant, but he preferred the jungle—the plants, the earthy and sweet floral fragrances, and the closed-in leafy cover—to this stark white openness with hard floors and pungent cleanser smells that left him feeling vulnerable and exposed.

Attempting to shake off the feeling that they were being watched, he led Kat to a bank of computers near the massive floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the pool so they could use the hotel’s pay-by-the-minute Internet service. Connor paid for the service, then motioned Kat to the chair while he pulled up another. “Let me see your emails from this Wade Patterson.”

Sighing, Kat signed on to the Internet to show Connor her emails, and after an hour of researching and showing Connor all that she had said she knew about Wade, Kat received an email from him.

Startled, she stared at the subject line:
Sorry
I
Missed
You!

Connor swore beneath his breath. “Open it.”

She felt uneasy as she did and read:

Dear Kathleen, I’m sorry I missed you in the city. I learned you had reservations at the resort near where the jaguar sightings had occurred, but they said you hadn’t arrived. Please email me as soon as you get this message. I have to know that you are all right. Wade

Surprised to read the email, Kat looked at Connor. He frowned at her. “His message sounds as though he knows you’re here, Kat. He hadn’t emailed you, not once while you were in the jungle or traveling with us to reach Bogotá, but now that you’re here, reading your emails for the first time, he writes to you? Coincidence or something else? He’s followed us here.”

A chill crawled up her spine. She looked around the lobby but didn’t see anyone who looked like the man in the photos on Facebook. “Do you want me to respond? Ask him if he’s a jaguar or works for Gonzales?” Kat asked.

Connor stood, placed his hands on her shoulders, and rubbed them, helping to massage the tension from them. “Ask him how you missed him in the city.”

She emailed Wade, and the reply was immediate.

Kathleen, thank God you are all right. I was so worried about you. My flight was delayed a day, but by then you were already out of phone or email contact. Where are you now? Wade

She looked up at Connor. “What should I say?”

“Tell him you’re engaged to be married and your fiancé wouldn’t like you meeting someone on the sly in Colombia like this.”

“I can’t say that! He’ll wonder why I said I’d meet him in the first place.”

“You weren’t engaged at the time.”

She folded her arms. “I’m not engaged now, either. Don’t you remember what Maya said? You have to do it right.”

Connor grinned at her.

“Besides, if I said I was engaged, he’d wonder how that had happened when I’ve been out of touch with the world all this time.”

Before she could type a response, Wade typed back:

Kathleen, I need to see you. I felt awful about missing you at the city. I want to get together with you before you leave. Wade

He sounded desperate.

“Tell him you’re engaged, Kat,” Connor said firmly.

She let out her breath in exasperation. “We are
not
engaged.”

“Tell him you have a lover who won’t permit you to see him, then.”

She smiled at Connor and shook her head.

“Fine. Tell him good-bye then, so your lover can prove to you that what he says is the truth.”

She chuckled. “Fine. I like challenges.”

She typed in:

Sorry, Wade, but I’ve started seeing someone, and so we’ll have to figure it was fate that we didn’t meet. Good luck with all you do. Bye. Kathleen

She logged off her email and shut down the connection. “Okay, lover boy?” she asked, offering her hand.

“You’re engaged to me,” he said, taking her hand and moving her through the lobby. “We’re getting married.”

She chuckled. “You called me stubborn.”

He looked down at her. “You are, about this marriage deal.”

That’s when she saw one of the men who had come to her rescue the year before in the Amazon. She recognized that hard, square jaw, those lean features and riveting blue eyes, and the scar from an earlier fight that cut in a straight line across his smooth, tanned cheek. Only he wasn’t wearing camouflage this time. He was trying to blend in with jeans and a black T-shirt and a baseball cap, the bill shadowing his face.

What was an Army sergeant doing here? At this particular hotel? She didn’t like coincidences. He glanced at her and quickly looked away. He was talking into a phone. Something wasn’t right.

“I need to talk to someone,” she said, pulling Connor in the direction of the sergeant.

“Who, Wade? You saw him?” Connor’s voice was rough with agitation.

“No, someone in the Army. Someone who helped rescue me from the jungle.”

“What is he doing here?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

Caught, the man couldn’t very well escape without looking really obvious. He made a mock salute to Kat.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked, her voice sharp.

Chapter 28

The sergeant looked at Connor as if he was a man to fear. If Sergeant Stratton knew anything about Connor, he would be right.

“Sergeant?” Kat said again, trying to get him to answer her question. “Why are you here?” She knew his being in Bogotá at the same hotel where she was staying, when Gonzales’s men had been chasing her for some time, wasn’t just happenstance.

His gaze shifted from Connor to her.

“Answer the lady,” Connor growled, taking a step forward.

The sergeant evidently wasn’t supposed to have been caught in the open like this and hadn’t been briefed on what to say if he was. He probably hadn’t believed they’d leave the hotel room this soon to come down to the lobby.

Sergeant Stratton backed up against the wall. “He’s a special operative, isn’t he?”

Kat glanced at Connor and nearly smiled at the thought. Yeah, he was special, the most unique kind of operative she could ever have found.

“We heard you were down here,” the sergeant finally said.

“Did Wade Patterson arrange this?” Kat asked, suspicious.

“Who?” He sounded genuinely surprised, like he didn’t recognize the name and Wade truly wasn’t involved.

“Forget it. How did you learn I was here?”

“Communication between Gonzales and his men. We’ve been monitoring him whenever we could. He said you’d arrived at the airport in Santa Marta, but before his men could pick you up, you had left.” The sergeant squirmed a little. “Ma’am, the major won’t like it if he learns I’ve talked to you.”

“Major?”

“Singleterry, ma’am.”

“Roger,” she said under her breath. He had been having her watched, followed, and was using her as bait without her knowledge and without an Army paycheck to make the job worthwhile this time?

“Well,” Sergeant Stratton licked his lips and said, “we lost you in the jungle. You just vanished. We didn’t know where you’d gone. Gonzales’s men couldn’t find you. And…” He looked at Connor and then fixed his gaze on Kat. “Strange things happened.”

“Strange things?” She was getting an uneasy feeling about this. What if someone in the Army had spotted them shifting at some point?

“Yeah. Villagers were talking about a jaguar god. Gonzales’s men began communicating with Gonzales, saying that they’d found you in the jungle, but the men sent out there to pick you up vanished without a trace.”

“Really,” Kat said, figuring that was when Manuel and the first bunch of brigands had come after them in the jungle.

“But we couldn’t get hold of the coordinates. Later, more communications from Gonzales’s men said they had found you with a man and woman at another location. Gonzales’s men were discovered in the same vicinity… all dead.”

So the Army hadn’t been there watching every move Kat and Connor and Maya had made. Relieved to an extent, she took a hesitant breath.

The sergeant chewed on his lip again but didn’t look at Connor. “The men said whoever used the techniques to kill Gonzales’s other men had to be a highly skilled spec ops man. Gonzales was pissed.”