Savage Hunger

Chapter 4

Connor pulled off his shirt and watched Kat getting into bed, her movement cautious as she tried not to hurt her knee further. Seeing her half naked didn’t make him feel gentlemanly in the least.

He sat on Maya’s bed and untied his boots. “Do you have some Wellingtons in your backpack?”

“Yes.” Kat pulled the cover over herself, and he eyed her through the mesh as if she were a princess in another land, her dark hair spilling across his pillow, the bed surrounded by a gauzy film.

He thought about how after she left them, he would still be breathing in her delectable scent on his pillow and his bedsheets. Neither of which would be conducive to sleep.

“Good. Because of the recent rainfall, we’ll be walking in mud up to our calves in some areas. Progress will really be slow at times,” he said.

She was already closing her eyes, opening them, and then shutting them again as if she was having the most difficult time keeping them open.

“Sleep,” he said quietly, pulling off his boots, then his trousers. He figured she had already had quite an ordeal—getting lost alone in the jungle, coming across two jaguars that had scared the pants off her, and more than likely getting very little rest for however long she had been lost. “We’ll talk again in the morning.” He crossed the floor to the sole table in the hut, saw his sister watching him through the screen door, and shook his head.

He knew what she hoped for, but he wanted to make sure Maya understood that he and Kat couldn’t go there. Then he turned off the lamp and retired to his sister’s bed. The rain began again, making a lulling sound as it hit the tree canopy above them and their own thatched roof. He thought the sounds and scents would help him sleep—the fresh smell of rain and the steady downpour, the ceaseless sounds of cicadas and other insects offering a cacophony of various pitched songs, a frog in a nearby fig tree making a knocking sound, and the scurrying of some rodent through the leaf litter on the forest floor. But he couldn’t quit worrying about the woman resting in the bed across from him and wondering how he could safely get her to civilization sooner rather than later.

Much later that night, Kat’s soft moans awoke him from a light sleep, and he quickly sat up and stared in her direction. A nightmare? Dreaming of jaguars attacking her? Her guide abandoning her? Fear of snakes? The threat of the men who had been slashing through the jungle? Or of Gonzales’s men shooting her?

He took a deep breath, listening to her ragged breathing, and stared at her through the mesh.

Or had something else caused her to moan in her sleep?

Something much worse?

Kathleen was used to Florida heat and humidity and the feel of semitropical weather, but the Amazon was much more tropical than that. Hotter, muggier, buggier.

Being in the rain forest was like living in the primordial soup where life began. Even scientists studying Amazon plant life had to admit they had not discovered all the varieties growing in the canopy. She felt saddened at the thought that they might never have the chance if the trees were cut down and the rain forest destroyed, along with the animals that lived there.

Millions of cicadas sang through the night, reminding her of Florida. But the black howler monkeys—screeching in alarm way up in the treetops when something, maybe an anaconda, had come a’calling—brought her back to the South American Amazon far, far from home.

She tossed and turned, feeling the heat boiling her blood, the jaguar’s scratches burning down the back side of her thigh, her knee throbbing with pressure—the tissue bruised and swollen—and her cheeks and hands sizzling from the sunburn she had gotten while traveling up one of the rivers by canoe. Even her old bullet wounds seemed as hot as fire all over again, scorching her from the inside out.

She moaned, miserable, soaking in sweat, and so sleepy she could barely stay awake but in so much pain that she couldn’t drift off all the way.

A masculine voice intruded in her world, worried, deep, baritone, soothing. She couldn’t see the figure in the inky blackness because her eyes were blurry with hot tears.

“Kat,” he said again, then a cold hand pressed against her forehead, leaving an icy imprint as he cursed aloud. His soothing voice was incongruous with his angry words.

“What’s wrong?” a woman’s voice asked, soft and worried as she drew close.

“She’s burning up with fever.”

The woman sucked in her breath. The sound of rain pouring down on the roof overhead should have drowned out any other sound, Kat thought, as hard as it was coming down. But she heard the woman’s audible gasp and wondered who she was. Wondered who he was. And where she was right now.

Her eyes burned and she couldn’t focus, couldn’t see much more than a blur. The hut was too dark to make out anything more than that.

The boards creaked as someone moved across them. Then her cover was pulled away and a wet cloth placed on her forehead.

Neither the man nor the woman spoke again, but Kat was drifting in and out of her world, thinking of all the fevers she could have contracted in the jungle—malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever—and believing she had every one of them at the same time.

“She should have had the vaccination for yellow fever before she entered the jungle,” the woman said.

“She should have,” he agreed.

But had she? Kat couldn’t remember.

“But if she traveled into the jungle too soon after getting the vaccination…” the woman said, her words trailing off.

“Hopefully she was vaccinated early enough before she entered the Amazon. We’ve still got a supply of medicine for malaria, but there’s nothing we can do for dengue fever, if that’s what she has,” he said.

Everything grew silent except for the sounds of the jungle. The doves cooing somewhere nearby. Frogs croaking. Cicadas chirping.

Kat heard men’s screams, bullets showering the jungle, and felt her wrists burning where the rope tied them tightly together to the metal pole. The damnable metal pole secured deep in the hard-packed earth so there was no way for her to pull free. If she could have gotten a knife to cut through the ropes… Then she thought about the bleeding… her leg, her arm… she was going to bleed to death first. She had to stop the bleeding. She could see her Army buddies scattered around the large tent, dead and covered in blood, could smell the stench… heard Roger…

No, he wasn’t here. He couldn’t be here. Not on this mission.

The rain forest. She was in the rain forest. But not there. Not in the tent with the dead men. Somewhere else.

Her wet shirt lifted, and Kat felt exposed and cold. She began shivering violently.

“No rash. Probably not dengue fever. Get a fresh cloth, Maya.”

Maya. Who was Maya?

“And bring me the medicine for malaria. We’ll try to get her to drink some water.”

Kat’s eyes drifted shut.

If she had thought how miserable she would be on a second trip to the jungle… the first fighting the bad guys, the second… the second… What was she doing here again?

She wasn’t fighting the bad guys this time, was she?

She should never have come here. The Army… they wouldn’t let her go on another mission. The doctor said she was… was not right yet.

Tears blurred her eyes. She swallowed hard, trying to recall why she was here again in the jungle.

The doctor.

He said if she could… if she could what?

Her thoughts drifted again.

The jaguar rested his head in her lap, and she sighed, comforted by his presence. She had never visited anywhere that was as primitive and teeming with life as the Amazon. And she had found just what she had wanted to see—a jaguar, well, two of them, running in the wild—and felt the peace of the jungle when before it had just been a mission. A mission gone bad. And Connor, he had come for her before and he had come for her now.

She let out her breath hard and sucked in more soggy air.

The jaguars had even protected her in the tree. Now how astonishing was that?

But then someone was trying to cut through the ropes binding her wrists, and she screamed. Or tried to scream. Maybe the howler monkeys were screaming. Maybe it wasn’t her at all.

“Kat, it’s all right,” the man said, his voice soothing as he held her hand and ran a cool cloth over her cheek. “It’s all right. You’re having a nightmare. You’re safe.”

Her thoughts were so random as they shifted from one to another that she could barely catch hold of one before another intruded. She thought of Manuel and losing him in the jungle. How his friendly, South American charm had won her over. He was smiling at her. Talking with her in his broken English. Giving her a great guided tour, pointing out a howler monkey watching them from a tree overhead, showing her a yellow-and-black poisonous dart frog and a strawberry dart frog on a fig leaf nearby. An anaconda was coiled around the base of a tree, nearly invisible to her until Manuel showed it to her.

She moaned and someone brushed her hair away from her cheek.

She thought of sitting in the early-morning hours at the Spanish café where she was to meet Wade Patterson, who was supposed to lead her to where Connor Anderson was staying. What had become of Wade? How had she missed meeting him in the café? She thought she’d gotten the time wrong. The place wrong. But she hadn’t.

And then the sunny café faded and she was once again in the lush, green jungle, the jaguar again looming before her on a branch as if he was trying to distract her, comfort her. He nudged her with his broad head, then rested it in her lap. Immediately feeling protected in the dark jungle, she reached out to pet him.

She found her hand wrapped in larger hands.

“You’ll be all right, Kat,” the man said, his voice dark and low and comforting.

The chills receded, but the suffocating heat took hold again. She was in a sauna, sweating every ounce of water out of every cell in her body as she faded off into the humid, hot ozone.