Jaguar Fever

Chapter 10

Eating dinner was next on the agenda because Maya and Kat said they were starving.

Connor almost felt left out when Maya and Kat linked arms and strolled ahead of him on the narrow walkway as they headed toward the main lodge. “Tell me what the club was like,” Kat coaxed.

“Maya started a brawl,” Connor said, “and the place will probably never be the same.”

Kat glanced back at Connor. Maya rolled her eyes at him. He smiled.

Maya said, “We had drinks and…”

“Dancing?” Connor suddenly asked. “You danced with Wade Patterson?”

“And Thompson…”

“The guy from the zoo?” Connor asked, not believing this.

“Yeah, he was protecting me from the other shifters who wanted to dance with me.”

“Where the hell was Wade when all of this was going on?” Even though Connor still wasn’t sure about the man’s intentions with regard to Maya or Kat, he thought Wade would have looked out for her welfare better than that. “Where were our cousins?”

“They wanted to talk to Wade about business—you know, as it pertained to their line of work.”

Connor shook his head.

“The club sounds like fun,” Kat said, a sparkle in her eye.

“You’re not going,” Connor said.

Kat frowned over her shoulder at him. “For your information, I believe I’ve been to one like that in Florida. I didn’t know that’s what it was, of course. But I loved the jungle theme and seeing the men and women dancing on stage in loincloths.”

“You weren’t a wild cat back then, Kathleen,” he said. “It would be different now. Hell, as bad as Maya made the fight sound, can you imagine the two of you together, stirring things up? We’d be banned from ever entering the club again.”

Kat smiled at Maya. Connor shook his head again. He wondered if that was the reason their mother had kept them away from others of their kind, ensuring they lived in a more natural environment.

When they walked into the dining room, they found they were the first to take their seats for the evening meal.

Each of them chose to begin with the chicken soup.

Kat happily chatted about all that she’d seen in the jungle, from the largest flying bird in the Americas—the jabiru stork—to a rare agami heron, tons of hummingbirds, neon-green parrots, macaws, and a snowy egret. She described several of the orchids they’d witnessed. Then she said, her eyes bright with excitement, “We saw an ocelot!”

“No jaguars, though?” Maya asked, a teasing light in her eyes.

Guests said hi to them as they took their seats around some of the tables. Connor and Kat always arrived early for dinner so they could go on their jungle treks at dusk, while the other guests spent their days in the jungle and stayed in their cottages at night.

“Did you hear the howler monkey?” one woman asked another at a different table. “It nearly gave me a seizure until I figured out what it was.”

“What was Wade like?” Kat asked Maya.

Connor tried not to stiffen, but he didn’t manage well—especially when Kat was asking about Wade.

“He’s protective,” Maya said.

Connor meant to keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t let that go. “Yeah, like he left you alone and a barroom brawl started over you.”

Two of the men and a woman at another table looked in their direction. Maya’s cheeks blossomed with color.

She tilted her chin up and said to Kat, “He came to my protection and even carried me out of there when I slipped on all the broken glass.” She gave Connor an “I told you so” look.

All conversation at the other tables concerning what the guests had discovered on treks to a nearby cave and the jungle died as soon as the barroom brawl was mentioned. Connor knew Kat and Maya should have had this discussion in one of their cottages.

Then he began to consider the sleeping arrangements at their home, and before he could stop himself from saying something about it, he asked, “None of the men slept in our bedroom, did they?”

“Of course not,” Maya said, sounding irritated. “We all slept in my bed.”

He knew she was kidding because there was no way in hell all of them could have slept in her queen-size bed with her. Not that he would have believed she’d slept with her cousins or David. Wade? Connor wasn’t certain about him.

Kat laughed. “As if four men could sleep in that bed of yours with you.”

Maya sighed. “If you must know, our cousins slept on the floor in the living room. Wade took one of the recliners so he could watch David. Poor David had gotten hit in the head by a bottle, and it cut him. So he slept on the couch.”

One of the male guests was smiling and shaking his head, and another was watching Connor and waggling his brows.

As dessert was served, Connor saw Maya suddenly look in the direction of the window as if something had caught her eye.

“What did you see?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing.” She dipped her fork into her banana rum crepe.

She looked pale and her heart was thumping hard.

“Maya?”

“I… I thought I saw something.”

“Someone,” he said, knowing her better than that.

“Okay, someone. After what Wade told me about the hunters, I’m just feeling a little jumpy.”

“They wouldn’t come to the lodge or the cottages looking for a jaguar,” Connor assured her.

“One was spotted last night in the jungle below our deck,” a woman at another table said, smiling. “The owner said several guests have seen it. Nothing to worry about, though.” She poked her fork into her dessert and continued talking to her companions.

It couldn’t have been Wade because he had arrived at the same time as Maya, she knew. Hell. If it was a true jaguar and word got out that it was frequenting the area, that could bring the hunters down on top of them.