Her Wild Hero

Damn, her ass had been really nice—firm, but soft, too.

Stop thinking those thoughts, you stupid idiot. But it was too late. His cock had started to harden again in his uniform. Shit. He’d spent most of the time in that tree thinking about anything and everything he could just to get the thing to go down. Now he was going to have to walk around the jungle with a tree branch in his pants.

“You hear anything?” she asked, completely oblivious to the torture she was putting him through.

Declan forced his attention outward, glad to have something else to focus on. He picked up a hundred individual sounds—small animals moving across the jungle floor, monkeys and birds hooting and screeching, leaves and branches rustling against each other—but nothing that made him think hybrids were nearby.

“Nothing right now,” he told her.

“Good because my butt is so numb from sitting on that branch, I’m not going to be able to move fast for a while.”

She started off ahead of him, but he quickly passed her so he wouldn’t have to go through the torture of watching her massaging her ass as she walked.

“How can there still be so many hybrids around?” she asked from behind him. “I thought they were supposed to be spreading out.”

He’d thought so too, but Kendra was right. The area had been crawling with hybrids since 0500 that morning. They’d been ducking and diving nearly every twenty minutes as the creatures appeared. It was destroying his plan to keep them traveling in a generally northwest direction. No matter what he did to correct for it, every encounter forced them to move east and deeper into the mountains. He liked to think that all the hybrids moving through this part of the jungle was random, but his instincts told him different.

“The way I see it, there are two possibilities that can explain why we’re seeing so many of them right now—one good and one not so good. Which would you like to hear first?”

Declan looked over his shoulder to see Kendra smiling. Then she laughed as she caught up and started walking beside him. At least she wasn’t rubbing her butt anymore.

“Give me the good news first,” she said. “If I really like it, we can skip the bad news completely.”

He chuckled, too. She always knew what to say to make him laugh. “Well, if we’re lucky, the reason we’re seeing all these hybrids this morning is because we’ve reached the edge of their perimeter and the noose they’ve been tightening around us. If that’s the case, once we’re through them, it’ll be clear sailing all the way back to base camp.”

“Okay, let’s just go with that,” Kendra said. “But that’s probably not what’s really going on, is it?” When Declan shook his head, she sighed. “Thought so. Let me hear the bad news then.”

He hesitated, wondering just how much he should tell her. He decided to only go with the really bad, instead of the really, really bad.

“The bad news is that I think my biggest fear has come true—that the intermittent gunfire we heard last night and early this morning is the rescue party trying to track us down.”

A glimmer of hope flashed in her eyes. “But isn’t that a good thing? If it’s the rescue party, don’t we want them to find us?”

“Sure. Except, every time they fire their weapons, they’re drawing every hybrid within a twenty-mile radius to us. We may not survive their rescue if this gets any worse.”

She thought about that for a while, and he felt bad to burst her bubble like that. But what could he do?

“You think it’s Tate leading the rescue party, with Brent and Gavin?”

“I’m not sure anyone else would willingly come looking for us,” he said. “Not after going up against those hybrids in the dark. But it’s likely there’s a shifter with them, too. Tate and the guys wouldn’t be able to track us, especially at night.”

Kendra’s eyes went wide. “You mean Clayne?”

Hearing her say the shifter’s name made him want to growl. Kendra might know what to say to make him laugh, but she also knew exactly what to say to piss him off. And it usually had to do with bringing up Clayne’s name in the worst possible moment.

“Maybe.” Declan tried to keep his voice even. “But it could be Ivy, Trevor, even Lucy,” he added, thinking of the other female feline shifter at the DCO. “There are a couple others who could do it.”

Even though she had this irritating habit of bringing up Clayne’s name all the time, which usually snapped at least a little sense into him, Declan knew he was falling for Kendra all over again. As stupid as that was, it was happening, and he couldn’t seem to stop it. Lying close to her last night had been pure misery. But it had also been one of the best nights of his life. That was sad.