“It must have built your confidence though. As much time as I’ve spent in the rain forest, I stay in camp at night.”

“I was a kid, Isabeau. I hadn’t learned all the dangers in the forest. Mom would tell me and I’d just shrug my shoulders and think it could never happen to me. I was invincible.”

“Most kids think they are. I know I did. I liked to climb on the roof of our house at night. Any place high. My father would get so upset once he found out. I forget how old I was when I first started. I think he said around three.”

He flashed a companionable grin at her. “That was the leopard in you. They like to go up all the time. The higher the better.”

“And I took tons of naps. I was always sleepy in the day.”

He nodded. “And up all night. Mom actually made me do lessons at night when I was a teen. She said I’d do my best work then.”

“And you played music at night?”

“I couldn’t sleep sometimes—most of the time. And she was . . . sad. We’d sit listening to the rain and then we’d come out here with our instruments. She’d have the violin and I’d have a guitar and we’d play together. Most of the time the animals would come. A few times I glimpsed leopards, but they never came close and she pretended not to notice them, so I followed her lead.”

“I wish I could have met her.”

He blinked and his expression settled into the familiar mask. “She would have loved you. She always wanted a daughter.”

“You said she was killed by Suma? Why? Why would he kill a female leopard?”

His jaw hardened. “Suma killed her in the village. She tried to defend Adan’s family.”

Her breath caught in her lungs. “That was your mother? I heard you tell Jeremiah that Suma killed your mother, but I had no idea that was the Marisa I knew from Adan’s village. I did meet her—more than once, but of course I saw her only as a human, not a leopard. She was so sweet to me. She treated me as a daughter.” She felt burning in her eyes and looked away. “For a while she made me feel less lonely. I was pretty broken up.” Her throat burned. Maybe he’d believe it was over the death of her father. She’d been shocked—traumatized, but Conner’s deceit had shattered her.

He stared at her almost in horror. “You spent time with my mother?”

As if that was all he heard and he didn’t seem happy about it. Isabeau tried not to be hurt all over again, but it was a blow nevertheless.

“She often would come to my camp with Adan’s grandson, or even by herself, and she sometimes stayed several days with me. She would bring a little boy with her. They’d even go out looking for plants with me. She was very knowledgeable. Sometimes all I had to do was sketch a plant and she’d identify what it was and where it was as well as the various uses for it. She could take me right to it. She never mentioned playing the violin though.” She made an effort not to sound defiant.

“My God.” He scrubbed his hands over his face and then he stood abruptly.

She caught the sheen of tears in his eyes before he leapt from the platform to the ground below, leaving her alone.

7

SHE knew. His mother knew he had betrayed his own mate. Shame was a living, breathing entity. Bile rose as he landed in a crouch on the forest floor. Thunder pounded through his skull. He had scent-marked Isabeau a thousand times, so deep he knew his scent was in her bones, and his mother would have known the moment she was close to Isabeau. Had she died believing he had betrayed and abandoned his mate the way his father had done her?

He raised his head and roared his anguish. She’d suffered enough without believing her only child—the son she loved—had repeated history. His father, Raul Fernandez, had thrown them—him—out, and his mother had chosen to go with him. In his anger at her decision to keep her child, his father had forced them from the village, their only protection, so that his mother had to make a home in the forest for her son. Conner knew his father had believed they would die alone there, and he’d cruelly left them to their fate. He despised the man with every breath in his body.

The thought that his mother might think of him like that . . . He stripped off his shirt and jeans and willed his cat to the surface. He needed to run. To think. To not think. She had known. Of course she would befriend Isabeau and try to help her. Marisa Vega had a kind heart. There wasn’t a mean bone in her body. She had mated with his father in good faith, believing he loved her as she loved him, but his true mate had died years earlier.

At first Raul had insisted Marisa, twenty years younger than he, was in her next life and born early, and was truly his mate. He’d been lonely and wanted a woman and Marisa had been young and beautiful. He had courted her, made her love him, but after Conner was born, he became angry and resentful—filled with guilt—because all along, he’d known it wasn’t true.

Raul had hated the sight of Conner from the moment he was born, refusing to interact with him—the living reminder that he had betrayed his true mate. Conner would never forget the night his father had given his ultimatum to Marisa, stating coldly she must get rid of her child or go. When she refused to abandon Conner, Raul had told Marisa he didn’t love her. Conner had been very young, still small, crouched outside the door, listening to the man say cruel, demeaning things to the mother he adored, and he had felt the first stirrings of his cat’s terrible temper. The man had driven them both away using every means he could. Conner had known, with a child’s intuition, that his father couldn’t stand the sight or smell of him. Now, that same hatred had spilled over to his mother.