She hadn’t realized how easy it would be—or what a relief it was to be able to tell him. In his leopard form, she didn’t have to face his burning eyes and know he was judging her. As a child, she hadn’t had an inkling of what her father was into, but as a grown woman, she should have been able to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. She should have known: All the signs were there, she just hadn’t opened her eyes.
“He did it for me,” she said softly, hating the truth. “He wanted the money for me.” Her throat burned. Her father was a doctor, dedicated to saving lives. He’d taken an oath to save others, yet he’d sold information to a group of terrorists—information that led to the kidnapping and deaths of many people over the years.
The leopard pushed his head close to her, nuzzling her thigh as if to comfort her. She was grateful Conner didn’t shift to his human form. She needed to get this said, and it was so much easier talking to the leopard there in the darkness. She took another breath and lifted her face to the cleansing rain. The drops were slowing, so it was more thick mist than driving rain, but it felt good on her burning face.
“I know this will be difficult for you to believe, but my father was a good man. I don’t know what happened, why he thought we’d need that kind of blood money. He made good money as a doctor. After he died, I inherited everything. I went over his books carefully.”
She tripped on a small branch hidden deep in the layers of leaves and decaying vegetation, stumbling a little. The cat moved fluidly in front of her, preventing her from falling onto the ground. She had to grab handfuls of fur to keep herself upright, her fingers curling into the pelt. For a moment she buried her face in the neck, rubbing her wet face into the thick fur. It was amazing to feel so comfortable with the animal when the man made her crazy inside. She gave a small self-deprecating laugh. “Maybe you should just stay a leopard.”
She felt the large cat stiffen, his muscles coiling tight as his head came up alertly. He opened his mouth in a silent snarl, showing teeth, his eyes blazing. She looked in the direction he was looking, back toward the cabin. She couldn’t see or hear anything at all, but she trusted his animal senses and stepped back behind him. They waited in silence and then Elijah stepped out of the trees.
“Rio sent me,” he said hastily. “He was worried your woman might run into trouble.” He stopped abruptly the moment he saw the crouching leopard, but he appeared relaxed.
Isabeau tried to place him from her past. He was good looking. Intriguing even. The same dangerous aura that surrounded Conner enveloped him as well, and he looked vaguely familiar. A man like Elijah was memorable, yet she didn’t recall anyone else who had stormed the compound where her father had gone to warn his friends. For all she knew, this man could be the one who shot her father.
“I’m fine. I found him without any trouble,” she replied.
“I see that.” Elijah studied her face. “I didn’t shoot him—your father, I mean. I didn’t shoot him.”
She swallowed hard, but didn’t respond to the bait.
“That’s what you were wondering. I would have done it without hesitation,” he admitted honestly, “to save Conner’s life, but I wasn’t first inside. I’m wondering what you were doing there.”
She went rigid. No one had thought to ask her that question. Not one person. Not even Conner before she’d raked his face. She’d been so shocked, so traumatized, but even then, she’d waited for the question, wondering how she would answer it. Now, here in the jungle with the mist cloaking her and a leopard pressing close to her legs, she knew.
“I was worried about the way my father had been behaving. It wasn’t rational. I knew he was upset, but he’d become secretive and . . .” She trailed off, realizing what it had been that had sent her following him. She smelled his lies. The memory swept over her fast, her stomach reacting, churning with bile, just as it had when she’d followed her father down the streets of the city and then the trails by the river, deeper and deeper into the Borneo rain forest. Her heart had sunk in her chest, and she’d known he wasn’t going on a medical call.
He’d gone through guarded gates and she had parked her car in the forest itself and continued on foot. She’d stood for a long time in the trees when he drove behind those large gates, debating what to do. All the little clues from her childhood had begun to fit like pieces of a giant puzzle.
The waterways weren’t safe. Everyone knew that. People were kidnapped so often and held for ransom, no one even blinked anymore on hearing the news. Most of the ransoms were paid and the prisoners released. It was business. Just business. But there were a few groups she’d read about, terrorist camps that tortured and murdered prisoners, always milking the families of those they kidnapped for more until there was no more and the bodies were sent back in pieces. The money was used for guns and bombs and more terrorist camps.
She’d been horrified, and then she’d been in denial. Of course her father wasn’t involved in such a thing—and she’d decided to bluff her way inside. The leopard rubbed along her leg, probably sensing her distress. She realized she had fisted her hands in the leopard’s fur, burying her fingers deep, trying to push back her thoughts.
“I know what you’re doing,” Isabeau whispered. “You don’t want me angry at Conner so you think by making my father look bad, I’ll forgive what he did.”
“I don’t need to make your father look bad, he did that all on his own,” Elijah said. “But the thing is, you don’t have to defend him.” He ignored the threatening roar of the leopard, although he adjusted his position slightly, preparing for defense. “My father left me a drug empire when his own brother killed him. I don’t have any reason to defend his lifestyle choice. It makes a great cover for me to move between the underworld and the business world, but no matter what, that’s my legacy and I have to deal with it. I choose my life. You choose yours.”
She felt her cat leap in anger. In a few sentences he’d reduced her real grief to self-pity. And maybe it was time someone did. She was tired of carrying her anger and wrapping it around her as armor. She’d run like a child and hid in the rain forest instead of tracking Conner down and confronting him as she should have. She’d loved him with every breath in her body, but she hadn’t even tried to find out why he’d used her feelings for him.
She hated that this man, looking so cool and calm, with the mist swirling around him and the night shining in his eyes, was the one to make her look at herself. She should have looked in the mirror and found the courage herself. She’d never been much afraid of anything, certainly not expressing her opinion or confronting someone if she had to. Yet she’d run like a rabbit, and hid herself away with her plants and work instead of picking up the pieces. Instead of admitting her father had been a criminal, she should’ve at least demanded some kind of closure with Conner.
When had she become such a coward that she needed a snarling leopard to threaten his friend because her little feelings might be hurt when someone told the truth? She was ashamed of herself. She straightened, letting go of her death grip on the cat’s fur. “Self-pity is insidious, isn’t it?”
Elijah shrugged. “So is righteous anger, of which I’ve felt plenty in my lifetime. Come on back to the cabin, you two. We have a lot of work to do in the morning. And, Conner, someone has to take that cub in hand. You didn’t let us kill him, so he’s on you.”
Isabeau scowled at him. “He fell in with the wrong crowd. He didn’t deserve to die. Are all of you this blood-thirsty? He can’t be more than twenty.”
“He sank his claws into a female, and you wouldn’t be saying that if Adan was lying dead at your feet,” Elijah pointed out, his tone mild.
She noted that he’d put the sin of clawing a female before killing Adan. She had a lot to learn about the world of leopards. It was strange how she was more comfortable with these men than she should have been. She looked up at the high canopy where the wind swirled the mist into strange shapes that wrapped around the trees, forming gray veils she couldn’t see through, not even with her superior night vision. This, then, was the world where she belonged.
Conner had said there was a higher law. Before she closed all doors and made judgments, she needed to learn the rules. In any case, while she was in the presence of so many leopards, she needed to learn as much as she could from them.
“I don’t think he would have killed Adan without provocation,” Isabeau defended. “He was actually quite gentle and a few times he whispered to me that he wouldn’t really hurt me.”
“That’s bullshit with his claws in your throat and blood dripping down.” Now there was suppressed rage in Elijah’s voice.
Isabeau felt the echo of it in the shudder that went through the leopard pressed so close to her. Jeremiah had come very close to death. For touching her. That was where the anger was coming from. Not because he’d threatened any of them or Adan. She was somehow sacred to all of them. Because of Conner? Because she was a female leopard? She didn’t know, but there was solace in the knowledge. A kind of security she’d never felt before.