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A mild fear of heights and the nagging certainty that he was making the biggest mistake of his life had Cole's stomach tied in knots. He hated flying. His wolf registered every sudden drop, slip and rattle of the plane as a threat, so whenever he was stuck on a rocky flight—like this one had been—it left him simmering in a stew of adrenaline and testosterone. Not the state he wanted to be in while on his way to negotiate a peace treaty with a hostile tribe of jaguar shifters. Rotating his wrist, he checked the time again. Forty minutes and they'd be on the ground.

Thank God.

It didn't help that the last person to hold this job had died because of it. Ben Fisher had made the mistake of agreeing to meet with a delegation from the rebel camp to hear their side of the story and never left Santar m. Ben's death had divided the pack, with the Fishers on one side clamoring for Yaguara blood and Michael, the pack's alpha, on the other urging caution until all the evidence was in. Not willing to wait, Ben's brother, Jack, had taken a shot at revenge by hiring a group of mercenaries to steal an ancient artifact that mapped the secret location of the Yaguara city in the Amazon rain forest.

The Yaguara were one of the last shifter groups to integrate with human society. If Jack had released that stone, the Yaguara would have been forced to abandon their ancient home and disperse into the human world just like everyone else. It never came to that. Jack was stopped. Gabriel proved to Michael's satisfaction that his Yaguara had had nothing to do with Ben's disappearance. As a gesture of goodwill Gabriel pardoned Jack for the failed attempt at outing the Yaguara to the human world.

A year and a half later, here they were.

Here he was...

Cole peered out the small window hoping to see some sign of civilization, but there was nothing out there. Just a vast ocean of trees stretching on to forever with only a narrow brown river threading through all that green to break up the monotony. The sun was rising, causing clouds of mist to lift from the low jungle like steam.

It was beautiful, he'd give it that.

But it was also such an alien and isolated place, so incredibly different from his home in Austin it might as well have been another planet.

Finding no comfort in the view, he rested his head against the leather seatback and briefly closed his eyes.

"Having second thoughts?"

Cole looked at his pilot. He'd flown with Pete often enough that they'd become casual friends. Apparently often enough that Pete thought he could pry.

"I made the right choice."

"Your mother didn't seem to think so."

Cole shrugged, wincing inwardly at the memory of the tears in his mother's eyes when she'd turned away on the tarmac. He'd never seen her cry and, by the determined way she strode back toward the car, she didn't intend for that to ever change.

"She worries," he said, raising his voice above the drone of the engine. "My father understands."

He hadn't at first. "Politics will change you. You're not hard enough or hungry enough to thrive in that world."