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Kathleen managed to live through this, she could write about how caring a jaguar male could be toward his mate. Of course, after the cubs were born and only a couple of weeks old, the mother would chase the male off so he didn’t eat her offspring.
    To her surprise, the male jaguar left Kathleen next to the female’s hind foot. Then he came around and put his nose close to the thorn. She could see now there were two, but he didn’t touch either of them. She thought he really was telling her to remove them.
    She couldn’t believe it. She wondered if the two jaguars were like wolves that had been raised by families in the States who then grew tired of them and released them into the wild. She had heard that sometimes people in the jungle raised jaguars. Manuel, her guide now long gone, had told her about a male jaguar cub discovered on a road, his mother nowhere to be found. The people in his village took the cub in because he would never have survived otherwise. Another was kept at a reserve for injured wild animals.
    Maybe these two had been raised by natives and…
    She shook her head. They still were wild beasts of prey. But what if one had been Connor’s pet and the jaguar had picked up a mate? What if Connor was nearby?
    Kathleen didn’t believe she could get that lucky.
    Her hand shaking, she reached for the two thorns wedged between the pads of the jaguar’s foot. As soon as Kathleen grasped the first, the female cat growled low at her.
    Kathleen’s heart stuttered, but she had done it now. She yanked out the thorn, then reached for the other and heard male voices. The male jaguar growled low this time.
    Kathleen yanked out the other thorn, and to her astonishment, the male jaguar grabbed her bag and dragged her back to the tree. The female quickly raced to the tree and climbed into the higher branches. Kathleen couldn’t climb. She couldn’t even stand, but before she knew what the male was up to, he’d jumped into the tree, carrying her by the backpack and nearly giving her a seizure. Now she was in the tree again.
    His action reminded her that big cats often carried their catch—even one as large as a dead deer—into a tree to eat it later, protecting the snack from predators below.
    ***
    Connor assumed the woman thought he and his sister would eat her. At least if he was in her predicament, that’s what he would have thought. But for now, they would sleep, hidden in the canopy in the rain forest, away from the human predators who were moving noisily through the jungle, cutting a swath through the tangle of vines and plants and cursing as they went. He didn’t trust handing the woman over to them, not after he had found her alone in the jungle and not knowing who they were.
    He assumed she was alone because something had gone wrong and that the man he had heard earlier was part of this group of maybe three or four men. They wouldn’t stay out here for long because it would grow too dark for the men to see, and Connor was sure they didn’t have a camp nearby. That made him wonder just what they were doing out here this late in the day.
    When they could safely do so, he and his sister would escort the woman to the resort and leave her there. But the woman had hurt herself, and they couldn’t easily get her to the resort anytime soon.
    The woman was sitting stiffly on the branch next to him, looking tired and uneasy. She alternated between watching for the men, who were moving away from them, and looking at Connor as he quietly observed her. He was afraid she would accidentally slip off the branch if she managed to fall asleep, as tired and drawn as she looked. He put a leg over her lap and looked up at her to see her reaction. Her eyes widening, she stared at him in disbelief. She had the most beautiful green eyes, the irises flecked with gold and encircled by a ring of gold. He envisioned that she would be one beautiful jaguar.
    She whispered, “You were someone’s pet?”
    If he could have smiled