Savage Hunger (16 page)

“What are you?” she asked just as softly, so… so tired, but she had to know, she had to learn all she could before she could sleep. She wondered if they could morph into anything, like on the reruns of a sci-fi series she used to watch where some aliens could change into anything—even melding into metal or wood or water. She was glad that her voice had come out normally.

What if they could become eagles and soar over the jungle? Or porpoises and swim across the oceans? Or a snake slithering in the grass? She didn’t like the idea of being a slithering snake, but being a bird could be fun.

What were they really? Aliens from another planet? Any of it seemed too unreal to consider, but she had to know, although her head was pounding and she could barely keep her eyes open.

“We’re jaguar-shifters,” he said, his voice still quiet and reassuring, his hand still touching her hair as if it made him feel connected to her in some way or he thought she would feel comforted by his gentle touch.

She did. His touching her like this was reminiscent of the way he had taken care of her when she had been so sick. “You can only change into
jaguars
?”

He smiled… genuinely smiled as if he had never expected her to ask such a question. “Just jaguars, Kat. Nothing else. We were born this way.”

“Born…” she whispered. “How…?”

He gave her a half shrug. “Just like with regular people. We had a mother and dad, and our mother birthed us at the local hospital just like normal.”

“You… what… what if you had shifted in the middle of being born? Or couldn’t you have until you reached puberty, or something?” She could just imagine the poor human woman giving birth to a couple of cubs—and the looks on the doctor’s and nurses’ faces. And then when she was nursing them. Their teeth and claws… even thinking about such a thing made her breasts ache.

“Our mother could have birthed us as a jaguar, and we would have been cubs if that had happened.”

Kat closed her gaping mouth.

“When we were young, we were tied to our mother’s shifting. When she would shift, we would. When we were older, we knew enough not to shift when it was dangerous to do so.”

“You can control it?” she asked, surprised.

She
sure couldn’t control it. One minute she was staring up at the steps to the hut, intending to climb them, and then in the next instant, she was dizzy and unbelievably tired and couldn’t move another inch. Couldn’t even stand. And then? She turned! And then she was sitting there as a human, naked and unable to stand or climb the stairs.

And then? Connor shifted! He was just as naked as her, sexier than any man she had ever seen nude. Then he scooped her up with tenderness—if she hadn’t been so tired and stressed, she would have felt much more than
just
shocked—and carried her into the hut.

God, he was gorgeous. If she hadn’t been so shook up and tired, she would have enjoyed the intimacy between them more—their bared skin heated as they touched one another, and the way he was so hard, virile, and sexy. But more than that. He was kind and protective, careful not to appear brusque or annoyed, but genuinely concerned for her well-being. He had to have been irritated with her when she wouldn’t come down from the tree deep in the jungle and he had wanted her to come home with them. He had to have been incensed when she actually knocked
him
off the branch. In front of his sister, too.

She was certain it couldn’t have been good for his alpha male ego.

At first, Kat thought he had been aggravated with her when he jumped so quickly back onto her branch and then shoved her off. But she realized afterward that by reacting so fast, he had caught her off guard. That time, he had gotten her out of the tree like he had wanted, not that he was irritated with her. Just concerned that they needed to get her back to the hut.

She frowned. Omigod, what if she had shifted earlier? In the tree? Without a stitch of clothing on?

This was truly a nightmare.

Chapter 13

Kat let out her breath and stared at Connor’s naked chest, contemplating just how gorgeous he was. All tanned muscle, with light golden hair trailing down to his boxers. No battle scars. No tattoos or freckles. Just unblemished golden skin. Before he had slipped into a pair of black boxers, she had gotten an eyeful of an erection she had stirred up, tan the way the rest of his skin was, and the golden curls surrounding it. Did he lie out in the Texas sun and soak it up?

For a second, she stared at his lap as he sat next to her on the bed, just studying her without saying a word. Then her eyes widened, and she looked back at his eyes. She had been eyeing his jaguar male package—just to determine which sex he was—when he had jumped into the tree to join her the first time she had seen him as a jaguar. She realized that had been
him
. Connor. In the jaguar flesh.

He had been checking her out when she was soaking wet, staring at her breasts as a big, old, safe cat. But he hadn’t been all cat. Or safe. He had been a man who had been intrigued with a woman alone in the jungle.

She groaned to herself, trying to remember what else had happened between them when she had thought he was only a jaguar. Nothing, she hoped.

“We were born with the genes,” he finally said.

Kat swallowed hard. “But I wasn’t.” Which meant what? Did they know many who had been changed like her? What difference would it make in her case, as compared to jaguar-shifters who were born that way? Besides the obvious, which was that she didn’t have control over her shifting like they did. “How will I be different?”

His gaze remained on hers, although she saw a shadow of concern in the darkened depths of his eyes. “Truthfully, I don’t know.”

This was so not good. “Where… where are you from?”

“Texas,” he said, offering a small smile. “Just like I said.”

“You’re not human,” she said, frowning at him.

“Not like regular humans.” He sighed and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. “But we’re human when in human form and jaguar in our cat form. Although we retain our human thought processes while a cat and our cat senses when we’re human.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I ate a raw fish. I would
never
have eaten a raw fish if I had retained my human sensibilities.”

He smiled. “As a jaguar, you’ll want to satisfy your hunger in a feral cat’s way. It’s instinctive. You hadn’t had dinner. You were hungry. Fishing for your dinner came naturally. Eating meat raw is usually the only way we eat in our jaguar form. No need to cook. Our stomachs can handle it. We don’t need spices to make it taste better. We eat to survive.”

On some level, she could understand the concept. But she was still human and the notion that she would eat raw meat didn’t appeal. “So then Maya changed me?”

“She said she scratched you. I wouldn’t have thought that would have done it, but apparently it did.”

Kat stared at the bed for a moment, then frowned up at Connor. “She licked me afterward. I worried a little that she would get a taste of my blood and want more.”

“Ah,” he said. “That’s how she did it.”

“Why? Why did she change me?” Kat couldn’t keep an upset tone out of her voice. She was something so alien to herself now that she couldn’t grasp the ramifications. She didn’t think she minded that Connor and his sister were different. They couldn’t help what they were. But she did mind that she herself had changed.

But then she wondered—if she had discovered what they were, would they have had to resort to what Maya had done anyway? Change her? Or kill her even? Surely they couldn’t let the world know what they were.

“She wanted me to have a mate,” Connor said, his tone matter-of-fact.

Kat’s eyes widened. Not that she was totally surprised, but still, it seemed… medieval.

Connor let out his breath. “And she wanted you to be her sister.”

Kat bit her lower lip, trying to focus on one thought as millions of questions swirled through her mind. “Why me? Besides the fact that I was stuck here with you in the jungle and made for an easy target.”

“Kat, our kind don’t easily take in strangers and develop a fondness for them. I didn’t want her to turn you, although I assumed she would try. I wanted to take you to the resort before it was too late. But you were too sick.”

“That’s why you didn’t want me to visit you in Texas. Or with Maya, rather. You were afraid she’d try again if she wasn’t successful the first time.” Now his reaction to Kat made some sense. His interest in her, yet his need to keep his distance once she was feeling better.

Despite his wanting to stay away from her, Kat recalled Maya’s words to him:
“You were dying to know what had happened to her when she was wounded. You didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and we even left here early because you were so disconsolate. And as soon as we returned here, what did you do? Went straight back to the place where she’d been wounded, and then you didn’t come back for hours.”

Just like Kat had felt compelled to return to the Amazon and find Connor to thank him for rescuing her. She had often thought of him, bare-chested and barefooted, leaning over her, cutting the rope from her wrists, and then hurrying to bind her wounds. His eyes had focused on hers with so much concern and tenderness that she had often wondered what it would be like to be with a man like him.

Connor cleared his throat. “Yes, I was afraid she’d bite you to change you. Neither of us has ever tried to turn someone before. She knew I wouldn’t do it.”

Kat shifted her gaze from his muscled torso to his face. He hadn’t wanted her enough to change her himself. But then again, that made him more honorable, didn’t it? That he did indeed care for her but wouldn’t turn her against her will. “I wouldn’t have allowed it if I could have prevented it.”

“So now… you’re stuck with me?” That was a disagreeable notion.

His mouth curved in a predatory way. “Hell, Kat, I wouldn’t have turned you, but you’ve got to sense the chemistry between us. If I’d met you somewhere in Texas, you still would have garnered all my attention.”

“And?” She was dying to know what he would have done about it.

He shrugged. “I might have taken you out for a drink, maybe dinner, but I never would have gotten too close. Developing feelings for a human would be risky business, and I couldn’t afford it.”

“You would have wanted more than a drink.”

He gave her a dark smile. “With you, I couldn’t want less.”

“But you had vowed never to turn someone.”

“Yes. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of living a double life—as strictly a human in front of a woman I loved and, behind her back, as a jaguar-shifter with a sister cut from the same spotted cloth.”

She still couldn’t believe any of it, yet what had just happened had happened. She couldn’t deny it any longer. Used to dealing with matters that didn’t exactly go her way—the loss of her men on the mission, Roger leaving her, foster homes that hadn’t worked out—she’d make the most of this new change in her life. Somehow.

Kat took a deep breath and exhaled. “Now what?”

“Now we need to get you to Texas and hope to God you don’t shift somewhere along the way and create a real situation.”

She groaned, not having considered that new wrinkle in her life.

“Sorry, Kat.”

This nightmare was growing. “If we get to Texas, what then?”

“Then? We’re a family. You’ll live with us.”

“And I have no say?” All of a sudden, she felt as though she had lost total control over her life, and at a time when she thought she had just gotten it back!

“You can’t… live on your own, Kat. It’s too dangerous. If anyone learned what you were, they’d lock you up, study you, believe you were some alien race. No jaguar would be safe once you were discovered. There aren’t that many jaguars left in the wild. Can you imagine what kind of a sensation you’d be? They’d eventually find Maya and me. Although we’re careful, some have seen us with our jaguar pets—Maya with a jaguar, or me with Maya when she’s shifted into her jaguar coat.”

Kat hadn’t thought of that. In the back of her mind, she just thought they wanted to keep her because she would be like them. Not that she would need to be with those of her kind—for protection and companionship.

Yet she had read a lot about jaguars and their behavior, and they didn’t live as a family—at least not for long. The male stayed with the female during courtship and mating, but after the mother birthed her cubs, he was out of there, by her choice. Each male serviced a number of females, their territories overlapping his bigger one. Would she be considered part of a harem?
No way, José
.

“But jaguars don’t take a mate permanently. Any old jaguar will do. Just like a domesticated cat. Just like dogs,” she said. She had always figured that when she settled down and married a man, like she had planned with Roger, it would be forever.

“We’re human, too, and I promise if you decide to be my mate, I won’t stray.”

“What about others? You can’t be the only ones.”