Free Savage Hunger by Terry Spear Page B

where he thought you stayed. But he didn’t meet me, and I paid for a guide who said he knew of you also.”
    Connor looked at Maya, who was just as astonished. “Who is the man you missed seeing?” Connor asked.
    “Wade Patterson. Do you know him?”
    “No,” both Maya and Connor said at once. Maya had an uneasy feeling about this, but their food was getting cold. “Let’s eat.”
    Maya served up some of the fish, bananas, plantain, and pineapple—all harvested from the jungle—on reusable plastic plates. She hadn’t had a girlfriend in years. Bonding was too difficult when Maya was a shifter and the potential girlfriend wasn’t. But she wondered who this man was who knew about Connor and herself. “The men who were scouting around the area were all right, weren’t they, Connor?”
    “They had gone way around where we live. But I don’t know if they were safe or not. Thankfully, the noise of the jungle and the vegetation would have helped to muffle your voices.”
    The men probably couldn’t have heard them because they didn’t have jaguar hearing, Maya figured.
    “What about this Wade Patterson?” Connor said, helping Kat to the chair.
    “I met him on Facebook,” Kat said. “He got interested in my articles about jaguars, then saw my queries concerning a Connor Anderson and his pet jaguar in the Amazon. I didn’t tell him how you saved me or anything about the mission. Just that you had saved my life, and I wished to find you to thank you. He didn’t know where you lived in the States, either, but he said he’d heard from the locals that you visited here twice a year. Wade also vacations in the area.”
    “But you didn’t know the man before this?” Connor asked, poking at his blackened fish, his gaze still zeroed in on Kat.
    Maya knew what he was inferring. How could Kat have trusted a virtual stranger with her life? But Maya also read between the lines. As determined as Kat had been to find Connor, Maya knew more was going on between them than Connor was willing to admit.
    “I investigated Wade as thoroughly as I could. I discovered that when he wasn’t in the Amazon searching for lost treasure, he was a respectable businessman in Pensacola, Florida—a computer programmer during the day and a game-design hobbyist at night. He was on Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Twitter, and a number of other networking sites.”
    Connor was frowning.
    Kat ignored his obvious annoyance. “I had posted about doing a feature on the new jaguar cubs at my local zoo and was searching for any information about a Connor Anderson and his jaguar who vacationed in the Amazon when Wade told me he knew of you—not personally, but he had seen you around.”
    “Around,” Connor said skeptically.
    Kat folded her arms and said to Connor, “Wade asked if I wanted to meet up with him when he visited the rain forest and said he would take me to where you stayed. I did check him out. I found a number of pictures of him—some when he was wearing a suit, some in his jungle khaki attire. They all revealed a friendly sort who liked adventure. I admit I admired his enthusiasm for the unusual and the way he seemed grounded in a real job, too.”
    “Like you?” Connor asked.
    “Yeah. But everything began to unravel when he didn’t meet me at the café at the appointed time.”
    Connor shook his head. “I don’t know this Wade Patterson.”
    Maya could tell her brother didn’t like that Patterson had known anything about them or their connection to jaguars. But the inflection in Connor’s voice and his expression revealed more. He didn’t like that Kat had been meeting with this man alone.
    “Are you finished eating?” Connor asked, sounding annoyed.
    Kat nodded.
    “Was there any other reason you came here?” Connor pried.
    “What do you mean?” Kat responded, sounding defensive.
    Connor rose from his chair, looking more like a grizzly than a jaguar, and closed in on Kat like the predator he was. He lifted her into