Terry Spear - [Shifter 02] by Jaguar Fever

with no lights in the jungle beyond. Perfect for a nighttime run.
    He didn’t know if the two men were using their cabana as their place of operation while looking for the cats, or if they had set up tents in the rainforest and searched for the elusive jaguar from there.
    They wouldn’t have to get a guide if Bettinger and Lion Mane knew their way around the jungle. They might have to pay a couple of men to help them carry the big cat to a waiting vehicle, then take off for Mexico and the States. Wade’s mission for now was to try to locate them and then take it from there.
    Two miles from the resort, in the thick of the jungle, he smelled Connor and Kat’s scent. All he could think of was Maya and her safety, and his mission flew straight out the window.
    David looked in the direction Wade did, and then Wade took off in the direction of her treetop cottage.
    David bolted after him.

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