by Red, Lynn
Between a Bear and a Hard Place
Alpha Werebear Ménage Romance
by
Lynn Red
A Broken Pine Bears novel
Copyright 2014 Lynn Red
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Also by Lynn Red
Jamesburg Shifter Romance
Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)
The Alpha's Kiss
Change For Me (Werewolf Romance)
Shift Into Me (Alpha Werewolf Romance)
Howl For Me (Alpha Werewolf Shifter Paranormal Romance)
The Broken Pine Bears
Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance)
Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance)
The Jamesburg Shifters
Bearing It All (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)
Bear With Me (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)
Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)
Bearly Hanging On (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)
The Jamesburg Shifters Volume 1 (BBW Alpha Werewolf Werebear Paranormal Romance)
To Catch a Wolf (BBW Werewolf Shifter Romance)
Standalone
The Alpha's Kiss Complete Series (Alpha Werewolf Fated Mate Romance)
Lion In Wait (A Paranormal Alpha Lion Romance)
Watch for more at Lynn Red’s site.
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Also By Lynn Red
Dedication
-1- | “It’s the jowls. They get me every time.” | -Claire Redmon
-2- | “I wasn’t really trying to embarrass him. Okay, all right, fine, maybe just a little.” | -Claire
-3- | “Rumbling and explosions are usually not what I expect when I walk into work.” | -Claire
-4- | “Look, I don’t have time for this. I have two cubs who just discovered parties and a mate who wants me to pick milk up on the way home. Can we hurry this along?” | -Rogue
-5- | “Where’s the milk?” | -Jill
-6- | “Good thing I watched all that Survivorman I guess.” | -Claire
-7- | “Why do people insist on wearing so many clothes all the time?” | -King
-8- | “What the hell was that thing? What’s up with all the bears everywhere?” | -Claire
-9- | “This is going to get real confusing, real fast.” | -Claire
-10- | “Life is just... funny sometimes. Not funny ha-ha, but funny weird.” | -Jill
-11- | “This is not at all going the way I expected it to go.” | -Claire
-12- | “Just point at what you want to kill and pull the trigger? Really, that’s your advice?” | -Claire
-13- | “Not a comedian, huh?” | -Rogue
-14- | “Panic never, ever does any good. But for some reason, I keep doing it.” | -Claire
-15- | “I’m not much for violence, but... okay fine, that felt really, really good.” | -Claire
-16- | “You know that saying – united we stand? The second part should be ‘divided, we’re stupid.’” | -Rogue
-17- | “I really wish someone would just tell me what the point of all this is.” | -Claire
-18- | “Why is it always helicopters?” | -Claire
-19- | “How do dead phones buzz?” | -Claire
-20- | “Is this what a hangover feels like?” | -Fury
-21- | “Glad you could make it.” | -Rogue
-22- | “That was... a long drop.” | -Claire
-23- | “Let’s get the hell out of here!” | -Claire
-24- | “I can’t believe it’s all over. I really, really can’t.” | -Claire
-25- | “A day without my bears? Sounds like a day without sunshine.” | -Claire
-26- | “It’s weird, but... I feel like I’m home.” | -Claire
The End
Special Excerpts | Lion in Wait
Bearly Hanging On
To Catch a Wolf
Further Reading: Bearing It All (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)
Also By Lynn Red
About the Author
To all my awesome readers - you make this all possible!
-LR
-1-
“It’s the jowls. They get me every time.”
-Claire Redmon
The medicinal taste of steroid inhaler filling her lungs, Claire Redmon took a deep breath, held it in for a few seconds, and let the cloud of science out of her mouth a moment later.
“That wasn’t so bad,” she announced to her empty bedroom as the rosy tendrils of a late winter dusk crept through the shades in her too-big and too-empty house. Her dog, Cleo, some kind of hilariously snorty, wonderfully stupid pit-bull mix, made a noise reminiscent of an old gate, and flopped over on her belly.
Claire snorted a laugh as she crawled off her giant recliner and knelt down beside the massive, gray, hippo-dog and laughed as the dog started groaning as Claire scratched her white stomach. The dog had a long, jagged scar across her stomach from where the Humane Society had to stitch up an injury when they found her, but Cleo never seemed to mind. In fact, she didn’t seem to mind much of anything.
Must be nice, Claire thought, just go on with your life, not worrying about all the stupid shit there is to worry about. She was still mindful of her short breaths, as she rubbed the writhing, groaning, moaning pup.
The tail end of Sanford and Son played as Cleo’s tongue flopped out of her mouth and her upside-down jowls hung like curtains down the sides of her drool-covered face. Sighing, Claire pushed herself to her feet and picked up a remote.
The first one she tried flicked on the cable box, but wouldn’t switch the TV off. The second one she tried did something to her surround system and the third somehow made the light on her fan turn off and on. With a sigh, she tossed the third remote onto the ruffled up blankets, and finally picked up the last one she could find.
Taking a stance like Superman about to save someone, she put one hand on her hip, one on the remote, pointed that bastard at the set and pushed the button.
The pleasant chime that played as the picture faded was the sweetest sound of all.
“I... really need some hobbies,” she told Cleo, who made a mewling sort of growl in response. “Maybe train sets? Could take up tennis?” The slight hiss in her breath made her rethink tennis in high school, but there was no reason she couldn’t take it up again.
The asthma had, for a long time, defined Claire Redmon’s life. She was the snorty girl, the one with the wheeze, the one who always had to sit out of PE. For a time it made her bitter, angry, and irritable, but then she realized she could use it to her advantage. All that time other people spent with sports or whatever else, she turned to thinking. By the time she was fifteen, she’d published two papers in biology journals, and won an award from Yale to use their lab for an experiment involving blood sugar in mice.
From there, it was a hop, a skip, a wheeze and a jump before she landed herself a spot in the biology department working for some exalted professor she saw four times in her eight years of school.
Reconsidering her decision, Claire turned the TV back on, and was thankful she hadn’t put the remote down, or else she’d have to do the shuffle again. The 1960s Batman had begun, with Adam West trapped in some nefarious and completely silly situation.
“Well, there’s always drinking,” Claire
said, pouring a half-glass of Malbec and taking a sip. “Although I guess that’s not really much of a hobby. I wonder what it takes to get into moonshining?”
Then again, after the run through Yale, she ended up without much going on. She was, as a restless twenty-five year old with a PhD and nothing to do with it, an asthmatic counter clerk at a very hip, very expensive coffee bar in New Haven. She’d been sitting there, roasting beans and debating the finer points of whether or not Joy Division was new wave music or goth, when the call came, out of the blue.
She remembered it like it was yesterday. An old voice, rattling and slightly shaky, had asked if she was looking for work. At first, she’d said no, since she wasn’t, but then thought better of it, since being a hundred grand in the student loan hole and making ten bucks an hour wasn’t exactly an ideal situation.
The whole thing was strange, from the very beginning. The rattled voice never mentioned any names, and never mentioned what she’d be doing. They arranged a phone interview for later in the afternoon, and with a heavy, confused heart, Claire walked straight out of her extended adolescence and into a shadowy, slightly uncomfortable adulthood.
She walked straight into GlasCorp.
She’d heard of the pharmaceutical mega corporation. Everyone had – at Yale, the best and brightest biologists, chemists, physicists; they all ended up at one of a handful of companies to work. When she ended up at that coffee shop? It was a slap in the face, although she didn’t mind so much. The coffee shop was nice, the people were decent, and she didn’t have to do anything ethically confusing – if you discount selling a cup of black coffee for three bucks and change, anyway.
After the interview, her nerves were frazzled and she still wasn’t sure what her job was – but she did have one.
The company paid for everything: movers, two months of a luxury hotel while she found a more permanent living situation. Gave her a voucher for furniture, hell, they even covered the dog bed. It was all very exciting and thrilling and secretive.
She was supposed to work as an assistant to a guy named Eckert, who was the doctor in charge of some kind of drug testing, or maybe it was development – again, not really clear on much of anything.
Cleo flipped back to her feet and clattered over to the bay window that overlooked a small lake. She growled at something, probably a raccoon or a squirrel, and then immediately flopped over and went back to sleep.
House on a lake, more money than I ever thought I’d make, and I’m absolutely bored as shit. Claire took a deep breath, finished her drink, and started mindlessly flipping through channels, not paying a lick of attention to anything piping through the tubes.
Her phone buzzed, letting Claire know that seven-thirty was upon her, and with it, the point at which she had to leave for GlasCorp.
Yep, pre-work wine. Thing is though, it didn’t have any effect on her performance. Of course, even if it did, it wouldn’t much matter, since her “performance” was less about actually doing anything and more about wandering around between different labs and copying stuff down off a clipboard.
She figured at some point, she’d have actual responsibilities and things to do that in some way justified her salary, but she’d been there for a year, and nothing had changed. She showed up when Eckert told her to appear, and did a whole lot of nothing. Well, she had gotten really good at Sudoku, so there was that.
For all the secrecy and the shadows and the feel of living in a History Channel documentary every time she walked through the massive, but nondescript, entrance to GlasCorp HQ, it was an entirely underwhelming place to be.
So far as Claire knew, absolutely nothing secretive, shadowy, or even interesting, really went on. Sure there were a handful of off-limits labs down a very long elevator, but by and large, it was a place as sterile and dull as the interior of her graduate school office.
Every now and then, something strange would happen. Something would be off, or one of her coworkers would clam up when asked a question about a particular project. She knew something was going on in that building – or else why would it be there? – but it was largely so routine and boring that it was hard to keep her imagination alive.
Cleo mewled again, adjusted her position and resumed sleep, blissfully unaware of anything in the entire world.
That really, really must be nice, Claire thought, collecting her keys and checking her soul on the way out the door.
She knew all the rumors – secretive experiments done on rare animals; haunting cloning projects; monstrous attempts to hybridize man and animal – but she’d never seen anything to possibly lead her to believe any of that stuff was real. It was all so plain, so... sterile, the word kept coming up in her mind.
Then again, a lifetime of reading conspiracy rags and watching Mulder and Scully had trained Claire to know that the surest way to hide something is to pretend it doesn’t exist and just get on with life. If that was the case, then GlasCorp was not only the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, it was also the premiere hiding place for... whatever it was they were supposed to be doing.
“Need you here early, Carly,” Eckert texted as she was walking out the door.
“You work for a prick for this long, and he doesn’t even know your name. Guess that’s how you know he’s actually a prick.”
“Heading out the door right now,” she sent back. “Takes about fifteen minutes to get there.”
He never responded. Of course he didn’t, because he never did. She’d get a command, she’d respond, and that was it. And the funny part? She never did anything. There wasn’t a reason in the world she needed to get to the building early. She was going to sit there, like a toad on a log, alternating between staring at her computer and her phone, and counting the minutes. Around midnight, she’d take lunch, which she spent pretending she was going to exercise at the staff gym, but would instead spend staring out a window at the stars.
Absentmindedly, she scratched the birthmark that lay right about where shoulder and chest mixed. When she wore a sufficiently low-cut shirt, just the edge of it was visible. It was doing this lately – itching from time to time – which worried Claire somewhat, since it never had before. Or at least, she didn’t remember it. But as usual, she just shrugged it off and went back to thinking about, well, nothing.
The drive out to the building was long, winding, and mostly along long-deserted semi-rural streets. Out in the wilds of western Pennsylvania, she had absolutely nothing except her job, and a couple of friends she ate chicken wings and played Pub Quiz with every Thursday. Her parents were on the other side of the state, along with all her friends, and the two boyfriends she’d ever had.
As she clicked her blinker to signal a left turn, her headlights pierced the veil of thick blackness in front of her. Above, through the open moon roof on her CRV, she could see a billion stars, all placidly twinkling in the distance. If she had it all to do over again, Claire thought she maybe would go into astronomy instead.
But, she didn’t. The time for regrets – whatever they were about – was a luxury Claire didn’t have. There was too much nothing to do, too much idle sitting and wondering.
As she turned into the mostly-empty employee parking lot that stretched for what seemed like eternity, and checked in with Simon at the front door, Claire started to think about other things. Her mind wandered a lot, with so little to captivate it. She wondered what Simon’s life was like, she wondered what Eckert’s was like outside of work, or if he even had one. In a lot of ways, the rotund, crotchety old scientist brought back memories of professors who went through three marriages before they finally admitted to themselves that the only thing in the world they loved was work.
She didn’t want to be that person. She wanted other things – love, a family, and... for the damn birthmark to quit tingling.
Down the main hall, Claire plodded along with her feet clicking on the mirror-finish gray tile. So sterile, so clean and unassuming.
There it was again.
Sterile.
She passed the elevator leading down to the underground labs – B3 for one – and as she did, the place on the front of her left shoulder thrummed with heat. For a second, she thought she was going crazy, and pulled down the collar of her shirt. “No way,” she said, slightly breathless.
It looked like, impossibly, the dark purple discoloration was... changing colors? Shimmering? “I gotta stop drinking before I come in here,” Claire said to disarm her fear. “When you start to see birthmarks changing color, it’s time to take a long, hard look at some of your life choices.”
With a sigh, and a decision to stop paying attention to her weird birthmark, even though it had started making her feel strange in places she hadn’t felt stirs since the last time she watched a Matthew McConaughey movie. That, in turn, made her giggle nervously.
“Either quit drinking, or get a boyfriend. Either one would solve this problem, I think,” she smiled, buzzing herself into the elevator that would take her up to level forty-two, where her office – of course, spotlessly clean, hopelessly sterile – waited for her to warm a chair and play Sudoku and waste her life copying bullshit off clipboards.
The only thing less likely than Claire not having her nightly Malbec was Claire finding someone. It wasn’t that she was an incurable sourpuss or anything like that. It was just the time, the effort, and mostly the energy.
“What I need,” she said to her empty office, “is some big, rugged, bear to just fall into my lap.” She took a breath, not entirely sure why she said ‘bear’, and exhaled slowly. “Yeah, right. Well, either way, a girl can always dream. No harm in that, huh?”
With one click of a button, her three-monitor array hummed to life, and with a series of six very practiced clicks on her mouse, she opened Netflix, opened her email account, and resumed her half-finished Sudoku from the night before.
“Yeah,” she said again. “A girl sure can dream.”
-2-
