Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance)

by Red, Lynn

  The phone in his back pocket rang again.

  Rogue slipped it from his jeans and opened it, pressing the handset against his face without speaking.

  “You there?” it was Jill, and she wasn’t happy. “Rogue? Answer me. I need you back here.”

  “Sorry,” he finally croaked, still reflecting on everything that had come up in the last eight minutes of his life. Elsa, the clan, the escape. But something stopped him from saying anything. Something made him just act like he’d had yet another pointless, boring meeting with the old man that saved all their skins. “Draven was just... just checking in. What’s wrong?”

  “King,” she said plainly. “Slate and Arrow went out drinking with their friends. King is convinced they’re going to end up on someone’s mantle. Just hurry up, okay?”

  He nodded, even though he knew no one could see him. “I’m on the way. I’ll try to cut some time on the way back. It’s raining a little. It’ll be easy to blast across big chunks of desert.”

  She usually told him to be careful when he suggested something like that. Although recently, she’d started relaxing more, figuring that he wasn’t actually going to hurt himself, since even if he did, he’d heal shortly afterward.

  “Well okay,” she said. “Listen, I’m going to bed. If you show up before I wake up tomorrow, I’m sure he’ll still be pacing. Just... do me a favor, okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Anything for you.”

  “I’m not feeling so great. Something’s giving me indigestion. Anyway, calm him down, get him to get some sleep. And Rogue?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t slam the door.”

  With a laugh, he clicked the phone shut, swinging his leg back over the saddle of his motorcycle and kicking the engine to life.

  -5-

  “Where’s the milk?”

  -Jill

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  Jill pushed the slightly-sweaty tendrils of hair out of her head, and swallowed hard. Rogue looked at her for a moment, thinking that she really didn’t look all that great. Not in a non-attractive way, rather in a super-tired and not-sleeping-well kind of way. On top of all that, King had been up all night worrying about his cubs, which didn’t help a damn thing in the world.

  She threw the words at Rogue like a brick to the forehead, thrown from a car which was going fairly slowly, but fast enough to get away before he could chase it. He put his hands up defensively, instinctually, and shook his head. “Hold on just a second, Jill, you know where I went, I went—”

  She blew out a puff of air that sent one of her curls of hair flying backward before it flopped back down in front of her face. “Yes,” she said. “I know where you were. How is he, by the way?”

  “Draven? Fine. Mysterious, I guess.”

  “So he’s still Draven. Good, glad we got that out of the way. Now, will you do something about him?”

  Jill flicked her hand backward, thumb outstretched in the direction of an excessively large, and apparently excessively mopey, werebear.

  “What’s wrong with King?” Rogue asked, looking perplexed. “Is he really this upset over Arrow and Slate? But they’re—”

  “Yeah,” Jill said, firmly entrenching her hands into the tops of her hipbones. “Yeah, they’re both twenty-one, and went out with their friends. God knows what he’s so worked up about, but he’s been pacing back and forth since they left. If he had any pearls, he’d be clutching them.”

  Rogue cocked his head to the side.

  Still not quite up to snuff on idioms, I guess. “Like a housewife from the 50s. Donna Reed? June Cleaver? I know you’ve seen those shows because I sat in a hotel room with you two while you drank half the liquor in Santa Barbara, laughing at Leave it to Beaver re-runs.”

  When they’d beat their hasty escape, Rogue, King, Jill, and all twenty-three of the remaining Broken Pine cubs – all boys – were lucky enough to be put up in a hotel owned by someone Jill once went on a very bad date with. But it turned out, he was a pretty all right guy after all. He wasn’t even mad about the messes they left, since Jill agreed to another date with him.

  Poor guy.

  He’d just about shit his pants when he walked in on a half-shifted bear-cub trying to get out of a locked bathroom, but he was oddly easy to convince that he hadn’t seen what he thought he saw. It all worked out. It always does.

  “But why pearls?”

  Jill sighed heavily, trying hard not to laugh, because laughing would really degrade how serious she was acting. “They wore pearl necklaces.”

  Rogue started giggling – or as close to giggling as massive bear can get. “Pearl... necklace? Like...?”

  “Oh right, of course he understands that. Shut up and go calm King down, will you? I can’t handle this idiot. I went to bed with him pacing, woke up to him pacing.”

  Suddenly, the look on Rogue’s face got a bit stormier, more worried. “They were gone all night?”

  “I guess?” she shrugged. “They went out, they never called. They live half a block away.”

  Speaking of things working out, when it came time to get out of the hotel, it just so happened that Jill’s friend had a line on a handful of row houses that backed up to a little pond. It wasn’t cheap, but it was doable. Then again, they hadn’t actually finished buying them yet. The closing date for the mortgage was in a week and a half, and Jill wasn’t entirely sure what to do about a couple of bears who were citizens of the United States in only the strictest sense, one of whom had taken almost a month to leave behind his penchant for loincloths.

  Rogue nodded, but his eyes were still dark. “This could mean trouble,” he growled. “They wouldn’t stay out all night. Not unless—”

  “They... got drunk and passed out on someone’s couch? They’re the same age as people graduating from college. And, being honest with you – which probably will say a lot about our colleges – they’re probably more responsible than most of those.”

  Rogue grunted a laugh.

  “I just don’t understand!” King threw his hands up in the air. “How could they have been kidnapped like this? How did we let them out of our sight?”

  “That’s quite a step,” Rogue side-mouthed, to Jill. “King,” he called out, “they’re cubs. Both of us did things just as irresponsible when we were... Okay, probably you didn’t. I certainly did, though.”

  “And that’s supposed to calm my storming nerves? My roiling stomach?”

  Rogue let out a sigh and placed his hand on his sworn brother’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said, consciously calm. “There’s almost no chance they’ve been kidnapped. No one knows where we went, no one has been watching us, and no one has followed any of us anywhere.”

  Jill sauntered into the room, nursing a cup of coffee she’d plucked off the countertop. “GlasCorp headquarters is halfway across the country.”

  The word stung her throat. GlasCorp – the shadowy, mysterious organization that on the surface was a simple pharmaceutical company – turned out to be in an even darker business. They’d been the ones to kidnap the Broken Pine clan, and done horrific experiments on them, leaving Rogue and King alone with the cubs. Understandably, the two bear alphas were both rather... cautious, to put it lightly, about the possibility of their having been found.

  “Draven is safe, brother,” Rogue said flatly. “If anyone was being hunted, it’d be him. And he makes no secret of himself, at least, not so far as I could tell. He seemed unconcerned. Perhaps we should calm down?”

  King resumed pacing, shrugging Rogue’s hand off his shoulder. “You calm down,” he growled. “You be calm. I’ll be realistic.”

  “He’s starting to sound like you,” Jill said to Rogue. “Can’t blame me for the fretting.”

  Rogue narrowed his eyes and moved past her, once again grabbing King by the shoulder. “Why are you so worried? Explain that, at least.”

  “Because!” the larger alpha shouted. “Because they’ve never left like this! They�
��ve never gone quiet and not called, not answered. Something is wrong, Rogue. No matter how badly you want to think it hasn’t, something has gone wrong. I feel it in my bones.”

  “But where? Why? And even if you’re right, what can be done about it?”

  “I don’t know,” King growled. “But until I hear something, I’m not going to calm down.”

  He hissed the last two words, as though they burned his tongue to speak.

  A sound outside turned Jill’s head, but the two bears were too caught up in their duel of grim looks to notice. “Uh, guys?” she prodded Rogue, because King was so tense she figured she’d sprain her finger if she tried.

  “We have to find them,” King said.

  “We can’t,” Rogue answered.

  “Guys?”

  “What?” they both said, turning to face her at the same time. Just as they did, two other faces appeared, flanking Jill.

  “Where the hell have you been?” King almost roared. He rushed forward, grabbing both – very large – cubs with fistfuls of jacket in either of his hands. “Where the hell were you?”

  In the next breath, he held them close, crushing the two of them against his body.

  “Out?” Slate answered in a question. “It got later than we thought.”

  “And now it’s earlier, uh, than we thought.” Arrow – Grant, whichever – spoke next.

  Rogue took in the two disheveled, confused-looking, bleary-eyed cubs, and immediately broke into a smile, then a booming laugh that came straight from his belly. “Oh have I ever been there a time or two.”

  -6-

  “Good thing I watched all that Survivorman I guess.”

  -Claire

  “How long do we have to stay out here?” Claire asked, picking a burr out of her sock, and then deciding maybe it was time to wash the socks again, instead of just picking off the stickers. “I think I’m starting to wilt.”

  “No flower as beautiful as you could wilt,” the very serious, very somber, and apparently, very studied in pick-up lines, bear named Stone said.

  “You keep laying those on her,” the other one, with an easier way about him, said. He called himself Fury, but that wasn’t his original name, which he didn’t use, because he didn’t much like it. “She’s gonna turn you in for harassment.”

  Stone was serious, grim, and more than a little hard to take because every single word he said had such intense gravity that it was slightly uncomfortable. Fury, on the other hand, seemed to never be serious, not even when the situation called for it. On their way out of GlasCorp, he’d been chattering away, rattling off one-liners that would have impressed Arnold Schwarzenegger. They’d arrived in the forest without much drama, following the mess with Eckert. The only other guard they’d come across was easily knocked out – at Claire’s insistence that no one else be killed after Eckert was maimed and that other guard hit the wall so hard he must’ve broken about thirty bones.

  But, she knew that underneath his easy exterior, Fury was hiding something darker. He’d been the one that ended Eckert, and moved with such easy grace that she could tell it wasn’t the first time he’d killed.

  “Officer,” Claire said, picking up her phone and pantomiming a call. “Yeah, I’d like to report sexual harassment. Yes, that’s right. Uh-huh, well actually it was a bear. Yeah, he’s about seven feet tall and—”

  She recoiled and looked at the phone. “That asshole hung up on me. Guess it’s not quite a believable story, huh?”

  A noise in the distance made Stone sit up straight and tall. He stared into the sky. “I’m still not used to these ears,” he said. “We’d been locked up so long that I forgot what it was to feel human. I forgot how the emotions run and the passions...”

  He let his eyes fall on Claire, who flushed hot under his gaze. “The passions,” he continued, “they make me feel things that I’m not entirely familiar with.”

  Fury stood up from his place by the small fire, and patted Stone on the shoulder. “You’re scaring her. I guess no one’s gonna blame a guy for being in a cage for twenty years and getting excited, though, huh?”

  Claire was chuckling at the two of them. Their bickering had become easy, or at least, easier, than it had been three days before. When they slept, it was in a pile, which Stone insisted was for safety, and it probably was, but Claire felt nothing but pleasure at being smooshed between the pair of them during the long, cold nights.

  Something about these two made her feel safe and secure, even when she really, really shouldn’t. Not for the first time since they’d run, her thoughts turned back to her ex-boss.

  “Can I ask something?”

  “You’ve asked a lot of somethings,” Fury said with one of his easy, disarming, crooked smiles. “What’s stopping you now?”

  “It’s just... I don’t know what you two know about the way the world works, but we can’t hide forever. Someone’s dead, you know? People tend to go on alert when something like that happens.”

  “A criminal is dead,” Stone said.

  “Which doesn’t matter. A person is dead, and I’m on the run. You two aren’t supposed to exist – hell, most of the world has no idea you’re real outside of TV shows and movies, so guess who it looks like killed her shitty old boss?”

  “You couldn’t have bit him like that,” Stone said. “They’re bear marks.”

  This isn’t going to be easy, Claire thought, before sighing. This really isn’t going to be easy.

  She looked back and forth between the two bears, and realized that for another reason entirely, it wasn’t going to be easy – she couldn’t stop thinking about them. She couldn’t bury how much she wanted them, how much she desired more during those long nights asleep in a pile. But then at the same time, she had no idea how she could even deal with one of them. Much less the two she inexplicably wanted.

  Of all the things that had changed about her in the last two days, this one was yet another. She wasn’t exactly inexperienced with sex, but it was never anything like this.

  A three-way? Good God, Claire, what are you thinking? What kind of wildness has overcome you?

  She chided herself, but reality was reality. Every time she looked at either of them, standing around naked, she couldn’t help what she thought, what she felt. Nothing, not even the constantly occurring thoughts about ending up on the wrong side of a jail cell for the rest of her life, could stop her weirdly intense fantasies.

  And then, as she sat there, considering all of this, that birthmark on her shoulder began to tingle again.

  “Why does this keep tingling?” she asked Fury, who was looking in her direction, though his gaze was distant. “It’s weird, this hasn’t even happened before.”

  He stood and narrowed his eyes as he crouched in front of her. Unashamedly, she drank his beautiful, muscular body, which made him smile again. “This?” his finger traced the top of the birthmark which made far more than Claire’s shoulder burn. His fingertip slid down further, following the collar of her shirt, down to the V of her collarbones. He stared straight into her eyes.

  Warmth crept from her core all the way to her fingers, to her toes, and once again, made her tingle sweetly between her legs. He was close enough for her to smell the scent of earth on him, the sweat on his skin, and to feel the heat of his breath sliding along her neck and down her shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered.

  She watched his lips as they formed the words, like she was in a semi-confused trance. “But,” she said. “It’s never happened before. And with you two, I feel—”

  “Get down,” Stone said, interrupting the two of them and dragging them to the brush on the edge of their little clearing as he stepped on the small fire, extinguishing it instantly. “They’re back.”

  The chopper whirred overhead, took two lazy circles around the area, and then departed. It was the third one of these visits so far that day, and it was only noon.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” Claire said. “I can’
t hide forever. They’re going to find me eventually. I can’t—”

  “It isn’t you they want,” Stone cut in. “It’s us. We’re far more important than one dead scientist. If word of us gets out?”

  The blades whipped past, just over their heads, but the deep underbrush where the threesome hid kept the black bird at bay. “But why?” Claire asked, as Stone wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and held her tight. “What were they doing to you?”

  Fury stood as the helicopter’s even rhythm dissipated. He twisted left, then right, popping his back in either direction before stretching his arms over his head and yawning. “They kept us separate from the rest. That lab we were in, for about twenty years? That was our whole life.”

  Claire’s mouth fell open without her even thinking about it. “But that’s terrible,” she whispered. “That’s not even legal, is it?”

  Stone shrugged. “Humans have odd laws.”

  “But that’s not animal experimentation, or anything else. That’s slavery. They took people and stuck them in cages to fiddle with? That’s... we have to tell someone. We have to go to—”

  “The police?” Fury laughed. “I hate to tell you this, but what lumpy said back in that lab? He was right. You could take your story straight to the President, and he’d just look at you funny. Now, if you were to get on one of those crazy late-night talk shows, then you might get yourself an audience, but I doubt it’d be the sort you wanted. What’s that look for?” he asked as Claire crooked an eyebrow. “They let us have a radio, but it didn’t work very well.”

  After a short pause, Stone stood up, right next to the other bear. Fury was wirier, slightly wilder looking, with a more harshly angled face. Next to him, Stone stood taller, and was thicker around the shoulders, waist and legs. When they both looked in Claire’s direction, she couldn’t help but be taken in by the sparkling, shimmering, impossibly entrancing eyes that they shared.

  “Why do you both have the same eye colors?”