Her Wild Hero

“He doesn’t know I went to Washington. No one knows. There are people whose lives will be ruined if it comes out, so no one can ever know.” Though it was impossible for her to see in the darkness, she looked right at him anyway. “Promise me that you won’t tell anyone.”


She didn’t say who she was protecting, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out she was talking about Ivy. The two women were as close as sisters. If there was anyone Kendra would keep a secret for, it would be the feline shifter. He could respect that.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Declan assured her. “You didn’t answer my other question. Did John know there were hybrids down here?”

“No. We had no idea there were hybrids.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He took a deep breath. He couldn’t even believe he was thinking this. John had brought him into the DCO. “I don’t think we just stumbled across these things, Kendra. Remember how I said earlier today that it was like we were being run through a search grid?” She nodded. “Well, I think it’s pretty obvious we found what they had us searching for.”

“That’s crazy,” she said. “If you’re right—and someone had us looking for hybrids—they had to know we’d all be killed.”

Declan nodded. “My guess is that they were willing to sacrifice us to find them. Only someone high up in the DCO could have made it happen.”

“It doesn’t mean it was John,” she protested. “It could just as easily have been Dick.”

“How many times has Dick ever gotten involved in a field operation? I don’t think he even knows how to arrange an ambush.”

Kendra didn’t answer.

Declan finished cleaning his weapon in silence. He could hear a lot of animals, but none of them sounded like hybrids.

“What are we going to do?” Kendra asked as he set down his weapon.

“We survive,” he told her.

“I mean about John…or whoever set us up.”

“We’ll worry about that later. Right now, we focus on getting out of this jungle and away from these things.”

She took a deep breath as if composing herself. The same steely resolve he’d seen all day came back into her eyes. “Okay. So, what’s the plan?”

“First, we lie down and get some rest,” he said.

Declan shifted a little to make room for her. She got the idea and crawled in close, her back against his chest. He automatically wrapped her in his arms. Her clothes were drier, but she’d get cold again as the night chill crept in. He needed her fully functional tomorrow. If she stayed close to him, she’d be warm—it was that simple.

“Tomorrow, we head northwest, back across the same general area we spent the last four days covering,” he continued. “It’s the shortest route out of the jungle.”

“Won’t that be like crossing right through their territory?”

“Pretty much, but that may actually be our best chance. The hybrid leader sent a lot of his men south toward the border, so going that way would be too dangerous. East’ll take us deeper into the Talamanca mountain range, which would slow us down to a crawl and keep us in the jungle for weeks. We’re not left with a lot of options and I’d rather do the unexpected and go where they don’t think we’ll go. With so many of them going south, the hybrids in the northwest will be spread thin. If we’re careful, we should be able to slip through without them knowing.”

“Being careful means going slowly,” she pointed out. “It could take a week or more to get back to civilization. Can we make it that long on our own?”

“I’m hoping we won’t have to. Tate, Brent, and Gavin are already out looking for us. We just have to hold on until they find us.”

Kendra didn’t say anything for a while, and when she spoke again, her voice was soft. “How do we know they even made it out? Our helicopter got hit so fast, I never had a chance to see what was happening with the other one. What if they went down, too?”

Declan’s chest tightened. He’d been teamed with Tate, Brent, and Gavin since he started working at the DCO, and they were more like his family than his real family. They weren’t dead. He’d know if they were.

“They made it out. I know that in my gut,” he told Kendra firmly. “They’ll find us.”

Kendra sighed. “Okay, we have a plan. All we have to do is sneak right through the middle of a valley filled with vicious hybrids, not to mention the regular soldiers they had with them. Then we somehow have to let Tate, Gavin, and Brent know where we are. Once we do that, it’s just a simple matter of the five of us fighting our way out of the jungle against a hundred bad guys. Doesn’t sound hard at all.”

He chuckled. “Exactly. You know what they say—the simplest plans are the best plans. Now get some rest. I’ll wake you in a couple of hours to stand watch.”

She must have been pretty beat, because she didn’t even try to argue with him. Instead, she snuggled closer to his chest and fell asleep.