Tempted by the Jaguar #4: Infiltration (Riverford Shifters) (6 page)

Kylie felt Sasha’s stare like a physical touch as she and Hunter
approached the tiger siblings after the rest of the shifters left to make
preparations to travel west. Blatantly sizing her up, it made the jaguar in
Kylie want to growl in warning. To distract herself from inadvertently doing
something embarrassing, she focused on the warmth of Hunter’s hand around hers
and tried to make her expression as friendly and open as possible.

Maxim glanced at his sister, probably sensing the slight tension
between them, and said, “That’s right. You two haven’t been introduced yet.
Sasha, this is Kylie Moore, Kylie, this is my little sister, Sasha.”

Kylie held out her hand with a small smile and was relieved when the
girl’s scrutinizing gaze melted into a grin as she accepted Kylie’s hand for a
shake. “Nice to meet you, Kylie. I’m glad to see Hunter has finally found a strong
woman that’ll cheer his brooding ass up. Except for the night he brought you
here and you started that brawl, he hasn’t been in the club except to talk
business with Max in ages. I haven’t seen him that animated since he and my brother
used to pick fights with the Bengals or the bears back in high school.”

“Um…” Kylie had no idea how to respond to that, looking at first Hunter
and then Maxim with a raised eyebrow. “You picked fights?”

Hunter, however, shot Sasha a dirty look. “Just because I don’t like
crowds doesn’t mean I brood. And we didn’t ‘pick fights,’ either.”

Maxim’s grin was nearly identical to his sister’s. “No, we just
finished them.” Then his expression sobered. “And we sure as hell will finish
this one.”

Sasha’s eyes suddenly became fierce. “We’ll get Anna back, Max. Ryder
and Kylie’s friend, too. We’ll make those bastards pay for even thinking they
could touch our own without severe consequences.”

“You’re coming with us?” Kylie asked.

The blonde girl nodded, then threw a challenging look at Maxim. “I’ll
be flying the plane. The last thing Max needs is to be exhausted once we reach
Lubbock. Our older brother and my mate can run things here just fine while
we’re gone.”

Maxim threw up his hands. “Fine. You can fly us there,
but
, I
don’t want you anywhere near that damned ranch.”

“I don’t have a death wish, Max,” Sasha huffed. “I’m not nearly as good
a fighter as any of you, but I want to do my part in helping Anna. I love her,
too, you know.”

Kylie shifted uncomfortably, suddenly feeling as if she was
eavesdropping on a conversation not meant for outside ears.

“Hey, we’re going to head out, you two,” Hunter said, breaking the
awkward mood, to Kylie’s relief. “We need to grab a few things for the trip.”

Maxim nodded. “Meet us at the airport in an hour, same hanger as always.”

“We’ll talk more later, Kylie,” Sasha said, something like a
conspiratorial gleam in her eyes. Kylie could well imagine the stories she
could tell her about Hunter.

A slow smile stretched her lips. “I look forward to it.

“I just knew the two of you would get along,” Hunter said with a heavy
sigh as they drove away from the club. “She loves to tease, so expect to hear
plenty about all our past exploits at the oddest times.”

Kylie chuckled. “I could tell, though the way she was looking at me in
the beginning, I half-expected her to go for my throat.”

Another sigh. “She can be very protective, too. She’s always treated me
as one of her brothers. In this instance, I’m glad she insisted in coming along
to take over pilot duties. Maxim needs the rest badly whether he’ll admit it or
not.”

Kylie poked him in the side. “So do you. I can’t imagine that you got
more than a couple of hours yourself last night.”

“It’s only around an hour and a half flight from here to Lubbock, so I
doubt any of us’ll get much sleep on the plane, but I promise to sleep once we
get to Maxim’s cousin’s estate. We’ll need to be as rested and alert as
possible should we decide to move on the ranch as early as tomorrow.”

“This whole thing is almost surreal,” Kylie said, shaking her head.
“Last week I never would have thought I would be taking part in a military-like
rescue operation.”

“If we didn’t need your ability to shift into a lion,” Hunter said
unhappily, “you wouldn’t be getting anywhere near that god-forsaken place at
all.”

“My best friend is in there and probably my mother,” Kylie said
heatedly. “Even if I couldn’t shift into a lion, there’s no way I would’ve let
you leave me behind.”

“Which brings us to the problem of your father,” Hunter said. “Should
we tell him what we’re doing? I can’t imagine that he’d be thrilled about you
going directly into the lion’s den, even if your mother
is
there.”

“The condition he’s in, I’d rather not upset him, but if something
happens to me, I don’t want him to blame you, either. He needs to at least know
about what Jack said about the cougar shifter that looks like me.”

Hunter reached over and squeezed her arm. “I won’t let anything happen
to you.”

Kylie matched his determined expression. “We’ll look out for each
other.”

She was still feeling more than a little guilty nearly an hour later as
Hunter and she boarded Maxim’s plane. She could still see the flash of panic in
Paul’s eyes when he had realized she meant to throw herself into the thick of
things. He had spent a good portion of his life keeping her hidden away from
the lions only to have her willingly enter into their domain in the end and
knowing there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop her from doing it, or worse,
being
unable
to do anything about it, even join her, because he was currently
stuck in a hospital bed.

“Promise me that you’ll bring my little girl back to me.”

The look in Paul’s eyes when he had said that to Hunter was seared into
her soul forever.

“The rest of the group are already on the road,” Maxim informed them as
they settled into the rear-most seats while the three wolves he had brought for
their security filled the rest. He then gestured to the cell phone clutched
tightly in Kylie’s hand. “Has Karen tried to contact you yet? I’m sorry to say
my people haven’t been able to locate her or Mitch.”

“No, and that fact really has me worried,” Kylie replied.

“Maybe we should contact her first,” Hunter suggested, “send her the
text you mentioned earlier about Kylie and Paul being moved to a more secure
location.”

Maxim nodded. “Do it, and then turn your phone off until this whole
mess is over. That goes for us, too. We can’t be sure that they won’t try to
track them. We can buy a few pre-paid phones once we reach Lubbock.”

“Fine by me. Gaither has already sent me over a dozen texts today,”
Hunter said with a grimace. “Needless to say, he’s less than pleased that I’m
ignoring him.”

“I hope he doesn’t start pestering Paul,” Kylie fretted.

Hunter leaned over and kissed her forehead tenderly. “Your father took
on a lion assassin without hesitation. Compared to that, taking on an Elder,
even one as insufferable as Gaither, should be a piece of cake.”

“The Elders are going to be so pissed when they find out we’ve left
them out of all this,” Kylie said.

“No doubt,” Hunter agreed, “but we still have no idea about the
identity of the gator who kidnapped your friend or even if it was a gator at
all. Plus, with all the Sniffers suddenly popping up everywhere, even they will
have to admit that keeping our rescue plans close to the chest was the smartest
move here.”

“That’s enough yapping out of you three!” Sasha called from the front
of the plane in a no-nonsense tone. “I offered to fly the plane to give you a
chance to rest, Max, and I expect you to take it! Buckle up. We’re about to
take off.”

Maxim sighed and turned to sit down in his seat properly without a word.

Hunter laced their hands together and looked at the back of Maxim’s
head with a faint smile.

Score one for Sasha.

Kylie brushed her lips lightly over Hunter’s lips, making her lover
scrunch his nose adorably as his eyes fluttered open. “We’re here,” she said.

Hunter blinked a few more times, then lifted his head from where it had
been resting on Kylie’s shoulder.

“I only meant to close my eyes for a few minutes,” he said sheepishly.

Kylie smiled. “I’m sure that’s what Maxim thought, but I think he
drifted off the moment his eyes closed. I wish we didn’t have to wake him up.”

“Sasha will make sure he gets plenty of rest at the estate; I guarantee
it. I’m actually glad she bullied him into allowing her to fly us here. She’s
really the only one that can force him to take care of himself sometimes.”

Thirty minutes later, Kylie was shaking the hand of Maxim’s cousin,
Lev, a blond, handsome man in his mid-thirties and then they were climbing into
his black Escalade. She ended up squished in between Hunter and Maxim in the
backseat.

“Several of your men are waiting for you back at my place,” Lev said as
they left the airport. “Based on the intel I saw before I came out here to pick
you all up, we should be able to draw up a pretty great battle map of the area.
Josh also said that geneticist you’re targeting left the ranch early this
morning and headed into Amarillo. He currently has a couple of wolves staked
out outside what appears to be his current residence.”

“Good. We should probably expect the first people we recruited to start
arriving in four to five hours,” Maxim said.

“I’ve got the large hunting lodge on the west field ready to
accommodate them,” Lev said. “You all can stay in the main house.” Kylie saw
him grin in the rearview mirror. “Even the jaguar asshole in the back, but only
because he has a lady with him.”

“Thanks,” Hunter said dryly, but he was grinning, too. To Kylie he
added, “Lev’s still sore about losing a friendly fight with me back when I was
only thirteen.”

“That’s because I never expected you jaguars to be so sneaky!” the
Siberian protested. “I was limping for two days after!”

Hunter snorted. “And whose fault is that?” he shot back, completely
unrepentant.

“Really, Lev, give it a rest,” Sasha said from the front seat. Although
she could only see the girl’s profile, Kylie imagined she was rolling her eyes
at her cousin.

“So what kind of game do people hunt on his land?” Kylie asked.

“Deer, wild boars, some emu, nothing too exotic,” Hunter replied.

“Are we talking about human hunters or shifters?”

“Both, but mostly shifters.”

“My hunting packages are quite popular,” Lev cut in. “Maybe when things
aren’t so dire, Hunter can bring you out for a weekend of hunting.”

A surge of excitement washed through her at the thought of chasing down
a deer. It was unsettling as she had never had the desire to hunt, even the
human way. Now that her shifter side had awakened, she still wasn’t sure she
wanted to ever hunt, no matter what her instincts said about the matter. They
hadn’t yet revealed to Lev that she was a Returner, so he naturally assumed she
had been hunting all her life like most shifters.

Sensing her discomfort, Hunter answered in her stead. “It may be way in
the future, but yeah, sounds like something to look forward to.”

They drove west out of the city about ten miles before turning down a
dirt county road, the land dotted by mesquites on either side. Five minutes
later, they stopped in front of a tall gate that blocked the entrance to
another road, this one paved. Lev hopped out of the SUV to unlock and open the
gate.

“His estate really is in the middle of nowhere,” Kylie remarked as they
began driving down the paved road and Lev’s estate was still nowhere in sight.

“It’s too remote for my tastes,” Maxim said. “I like a little noise.”

“Me, too,” Sasha piped in.

“That’s because you two are little hellions,” Lev sniffed. “Cooped up
in a building surrounded by hundreds of people night after night—
mingling
.”
He visibly shuddered. “Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. I’m all
about the fresh air and the sounds of nature.”

When they crested a small incline, a large, three-story brick finally
came into view in the distance.

“Wow, I wasn’t expecting it to be so big,” Kylie blurted in a little
awe. It was like seeing a resort in the middle of the Texas plains. She had
thought they had been exaggerating when they said they were going to an
“estate.”

“Lev’s younger brother and his mate also live there,” Sasha said.
“Taking into account his two sons and his niece, lots of space is necessary
when it comes to tigers and their surly tempers.”

At the estate, Kylie was briefly introduced to Lev’s mate, Polina,
their teenaged sons, and extended family before her group was shuffled into a
large den with several couches that reminded her a bit of the community room
down in the wolves’ secret den. They then proceeded to spend the entire
afternoon huddled around the half-finished map of the grounds and structures of
the lions’ ranch she had seen earlier, discussing possible strategies of
attack, occasionally adding to the map as various people reported new intel to
both Maxim and Lev as the day wore on.

After lunch, other shifters from Riverford began trickling in, the
first to arrive were, unsurprisingly, the bobcats looking altogether too
gleeful for such a dire situation, particularly the set of identical twin young
men that Hunter spent a long while talking to. Apparently her lover had been
friends with them since elementary school.

The last to arrive was Jack and his father. The injured wolf looked
alarmingly pale and sickly. Although Kylie could understand only too well why
he would refuse to be left behind, traveling in his condition had set his
recovery back probably days. The way he looked now, as if he was a breath away
from collapsing, she doubted he would be able to join them at the ranch at all,
no matter how much he wanted to be there to see his mate rescued. Luckily
Polina thought the same, and took it upon herself to fuss over him.

Through all this controlled chaos, and the dinner that followed, Kylie
sat quietly beside Hunter, absorbing all the information and adding a
suggestion a couple of times, but for the most part, she felt way out of her
league in a discussion that resembled a military war council. As only Maxim and
Hunter knew she was a Polyshifter, the very dangerous part she would play—that
of an Assassin bringing urgent news, and probable punishment, about a possible
breach in security with the geneticist as the suspect—was never mentioned, just
that Maxim, Hunter, and a couple of wolves would handle that part of the
operation.

Kylie felt sick when a photo of Molly was once again passed around, reminding
everyone of the importance of rescuing the sole human among the captives and
the precautions that absolutely needed to be taken. However, that was nothing
close to the way her heart felt as though it had been shredded when Maxim began
passing out copies of the photo she had given him of her mother that had been
taken a week before her parents had left her with Paul and Laura.

As expected, almost everyone looked over at her with expressions of
confusion. “My mother’s been missing for over a decade,” Kylie said quietly.
“Her name is Grace Hall. Jack Bray thinks she may be one of the cougars being
held captive.”

Hunter slipped an arm around her waist and gave her a comforting hug.
His familiar smell and the warmth of his body were enough to keep Kylie from
losing it in front of everyone. After a couple of deep breaths, her pulse
slowed back to a more normal rhythm.

“My cousin, Lev, has prepared a place for all of you to sleep in one of
his hunting lodges,” Maxim said into the following silence. “Jack, you and your
father will obviously be staying here in the main house. We’ll be heading out
to Amarillo at the crack of dawn in order to get into position, so I suggest
you get as much rest and sleep as possible.”

“Follow me,” Lev called out.

“I’ll show the rest of you to your rooms,” Polina said, waving over her
sons to help Jack.

The kids had already taken their luggage up to the guestrooms on the
second floor. The sky had just darkened, but even though it wasn’t quite eight
yet, Kylie suggested that she and Hunter go to bed, to which he readily agreed.

Kylie began rummaging in her bag that the kids had left on the bed for
her nightgown and toiletries. She pointed towards the opened door of the
en
suite
bathroom. “I’m just going to go wash up for bed,” she said.

Hunter sat down on the bed and pulled out one of the throwaway cell
phones Lev had given him. “I’ll go in after you’re done. I just need to make a
call to the manager I left in charge of a couple of my complexes, first.”

She couldn’t resist bending down to give him a tender kiss. “I won’t be
long,” she promised.