Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (8 page)

“What the hell,” she took a deep breath, shuddering as it trickled from her lips and her sex cooled on her thighs. “What the hell have I got myself into?”

Fury cocked a smile. Stone nodded sternly, but allowed himself the hint of a smile.

“Whatever it is,” Fury said, “we’re right there with you. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out together.”

She breathed for a moment, taking it all in, drinking in the afterglow and letting it wash over her, through her. As suddenly as the two bears’ ferocious excitement had overcome them, Stone collected Claire’s jeans and tossed them to her.

“But now we have to move,” he said mysteriously. “They’ll track us. They’ll find us. And,” he trailed off.

“We’re not going to let that happen,” Fury finished. “We’ll never give up, never stop until we’ve found our kin.”

Claire was just shaking her head. But before she could say anything, or even really formulate any useful thoughts, Fury spoke again.

“And more than that, we’ll keep you safe. I don’t know why, but it feels like something is telling me that there’s more to this than we know.”

“We need to find the others,” Stone agreed. “We find them, we’ll find our answers. But it isn’t just the two of us anymore.”

“Three?” Claire asked, still slightly addled, but starting to come around. “It’s the three of us, isn’t it? And when you get Cleo it’ll be four.”

Fury cracked a grin, and kissed her one last time before gathering up the sheet and kicking the remains of the bed they’d shared into disarray. She turned, but Stone caught her arm in his steel grasp. His eyes, entrancing, dangerous, intense, bore into her soul.

“Three of us,” he growled. “You’re ours, we’re yours. I don’t know what it means,” he took a breath. “But I do know it’s real. That much, I’m sure of, if nothing else.”

––––––––

“W
hy is it that nothing I do seems to make any sense?” King was standing in front of the open bay windows facing the small-ish back yard with his robe flapping open in the breeze.

“Doing that right there makes sense,” Rogue added. “Feels good to breathe fresh air. You better quit before Jill gets back though. She gets all bent out of shape every time I go out into the hot tub without any clothes on. Something about regular people not wanting to see each other naked all the time.”

With a look of confusion on his face, King took a sip of coffee. He quickly replaced the confused look with one of being overwhelmed by bitterness, and sputtered for a moment before taking another drink. “This is awful,” he said.

“If it’s so awful why do you keep drinking it? Hell, at least put some cream in it or something. You know, I saw on one of those TV shows where someone calls himself ‘Dr. Firstname’ that cream doesn’t have any carbs.”

“So?”

“So you don’t have to worry about getting fat off it. Then again, you keep drinking Steel Reserve pints like you have been, and not much is going to stop that.”

King considered this solemnly for a few moments. “I like the way it makes my head feel like I’ve been running in a circle for an hour.”

Rogue snorted a laugh. “Remember when you used to lecture me about taking my little jaunts into human towns and drinking their beer? At least the ones I drank were
good
. That stuff isn’t much different from turpentine.”

A couple of seconds passed, again in silence, before either of the bears decided to speak again. “I’m worried about them,” King finally said, admitting what Rogue already knew. “This isn’t the way our kind is meant to live. Not the way we’re meant to be.”

Rogue inhaled deeply. This wasn’t new subject matter, but it never stopped being a sticking point between the two alphas. This time, Rogue didn’t say anything. He just watched his sworn brother’s face, studying him.

“This world,” King continued. “High ways, cars, motorcycles, Steel Reserve, and loud music.”

Rogue wanted to point out how old and out of touch King sounded, but somehow he managed to bite his tongue. If there was one thing he’d learned in the past few months of learning to live in close proximity to two other people, it was when to yap and when to shut his damn mouth.

“We’re out of place. Don’t you feel it? Even you with your love for all things human and worldly, must feel at least a little tug on your heart?”

“Well,” Rogue said, taking a sip of his own coffee, which was heavily laden with cream and not at all bitter, “some things, sure. I miss the quiet, I miss going out into the middle of nowhere and listening to the bats and the birds and the night-things go about their business. But what we gain from being here? I—”

“I know,” King cut him off. “Jill, the cubs’ safety. I can’t help but feel though as if something’s missing. Some vital part of me is gone and quickly being forgotten. Things I don’t
want
forgotten.”

There wasn’t much to say, at least not without really being irritating, so it was lucky for Rogue that right as the tension was starting to mount, the familiar rumble of Jill’s old Blazer turned both huge heads.

“This is worth forgetting the traditions, don’t you think?” Rogue said. “Knowing that we’ll have a future?”

As the back door swung open and slapped against the brick, King nodded. “It has to be,” he said with a half grin. “And I think it does.”

“Slate! Arrow!” Jill barked at the two cubs. She still hadn’t let them live down their legendary hangovers. And, she still hadn’t gotten over calling Arrow “Grant”, which she happily admitted she probably never would. “Bring all that stuff inside. We’ll split it up in a little bit.”

A heavy thump sounded from the kitchen, probably a hunk of beef, followed by the unmistakable sound of cans hitting the countertop a few seconds later. They always did this – she’d take the two biggest of the cubs along to whatever giant discount warehouse grocery store was two miles down the road. They’d buy a completely improbable amount of food, and split it between the four massive deep freezes – one for each house – that kept the bears fed.

Once a month, this was the ritual. And this time, it sounded like they got more than they had previously.

“Should we help?” Rogue asked King, happy for a moment’s distraction from the morning’s intensity. King, forgetting that he was wearing nothing but an open robe, didn’t bother to answer before he headed off to the kitchen.

The whistle, followed by the laugh, and then the two cubs joined in, asking about where he bought the robe because they wanted one to wear to school when they started.

Taking just a moment to himself, Rogue sipped his coffee, then finished off the steaming cup in one long swallow. He reached for King’s abandoned cup, plucked it up off the window sill where it was sitting, and stared into the murky depths.

“Goodness,” Rogue said, slightly awed that there seemed to be either coffee grounds, or possibly an oil slick on top of the liquid, shimmering in the morning sun. “Well, I mean, it’s still coffee.”

With a heavy sigh, he tilted the cup to his lips.

The first swallow went down like a gob of castor oil. The second like a slightly smaller gob of castor oil. By the time he took the third gulp, then finished the cup, Rogue was... hooked? Something about the slightly slick, slightly greasy liquid did something strange to his mind, even as it was apparently doing something funny to his stomach.

Rogue made a sour face, then belched into his closed mouth, frowned, and decided maybe it was time to help with the groceries, after all.

*

“Y
ou’ve got a lot more pep than usual,” Jill remarked, as Rogue returned from the last of the four clan houses, sweat shimmering on his forehead, and a slightly crazed look in his eye. He looked at her for a second, his eyes slightly googly, as though he were trying to concentrate but couldn’t quite manage. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone haul two hundred pounds of beef with quite that much pizzazz before. You take speed or something?”

Rogue quirked an eyebrow in her direction. “Speed? I dunno, but I don’t feel so good.”

From the other room, King bellowed. “You... you drank it all? ALL of it?”

“What’s he talking about? Or, roaring about, I guess?” Jill asked, not paying much attention to either of the bears, as she put a sack of apples into the bottom drawer of the enormous, extra-wide fridge she’d ordered for the place.

Moving from her completely normal Santa Barbara apartment to these row houses was a little bit of a culture shock for the normally quiet, usually home-bodied Jill Appleton. Signing the lease papers put a lump in her stomach in a way she hadn’t felt since a college pregnancy scare, and then once again when she bought her Jeep. That Wrangler was the first new car she’d ever owned, and if she had anything to say about it, would be the last.

But, once she settled into the idea, and realized that financially there wouldn’t be any hardship – thanks to the secretive help from her boss, who was the only person outside of Tripp, the terrible date who turned out to be a good guy who had seen the bears be, well, bears – everything was fine.

Hell,
better
than fine. Way, way better. She had Rogue and King, she had her job, and she had her life back. After the terror of running from those GlasCorp mercenaries, and escaping with a dislocated shoulder and a few broken ribs, she was glad for every day she had. She’d even mostly gotten over having shot that mutant bear to death.

Beside her, Rogue started making a sound very similar to that of a cicada rubbing its wings on its sides. Only, the noise was coming from his teeth. And, when Jill turned to look at one of her two mates, she saw his eyes going slightly golden, the hair on his arms beginning to grow little by little.

“Rogue?” Jill put a hand on his trembling shoulder. “Are you okay? Seriously, did you take something? Medicine can do weird things, even to someone as big as you.”

“N...n-n-no,” he finally managed, teeth chattering. “Didn’t take... anything”

“Something’s going on,” she said. “Unless you’re getting wildly aroused by the way I’m putting coffee creamer away, I—”

He lurched forward, gripping the countertop.

Squeezing a little harder on his shoulder, Jill felt the muscles under his shirt harden, thicken, into iron bands, taut with power. “Seriously, I’m starting to worry. Talk to me, Rogue.”

Off in the living room, King was still grumbling about someone having drunk all of his coffee without asking. He was stomping toward the kitchen – not angrily, but because it was hard for him
not
to stomp on the hardwood flooring – and as soon as the footsteps went from thumping against hardwood to patting against the tile in the kitchen, Jill heard King let out a single, booming “HA!”

“King!” Jill shouted, over the lurching, groaning, slightly thrashing Rogue. “What’s wrong with him? Why are you laughing?! You’re not the one who laughs. You’re serious all the time. I’m not sure my heart could take it if you suddenly started in with a bunch of jokes.”

“Serves him right,” King offered, with a grim look on his face. He set his coffee mug on the countertop with a heavy thunk of ceramic on granite. “Bastard drank my coffee.”

To exhibit what he meant, King lifted the mug and turned it upside down over the sink. With exaggerated slowness, a single drop of almost syrup-thick coffee slid down the side of the cup and dropped into the metal basin with an audible report.

“That’s... coffee?”

King narrowed his eyes. Rogue’s were still rolling around in his head, and the hair on his arms and the tops of his feet had become a 1970s club fashion choice of coarse golden fur. “He’ll be fine.”

“Fine?” Jill was starting to get worried that somehow caffeine was going to kill one of her mates, although the other was just looking on with a slightly irritated, but mostly bored, expression. “He looks like his heart is gonna explode. How do you make this shit anyway? This doesn’t look like any coffee I’ve ever seen.”

She held onto Rogue, trying to guide him to a chair, which she finally did. The huge, furred-up, half-bear slumped over into one of the chairs with a groan – though it was hard to tell if it came from the bear or the chair, or the floor. He draped himself over the arm rest, and started breathing a little more evenly, if still alarmingly ragged.

“Just like you do,” King said, still unimpressed with his co-alpha’s apparent agony. “I fill the pot with coffee, then pour in water. Turn it on until it boils.” He shrugged. “Suits me fine, if a little bitter.”

“You
what
?” Jill squawked, surprise tinging her voice along with the concern for Rogue’s continued existence. “That’s not... no, you... I can’t even...”

“See?” King said, nodding toward Rogue. “He’s getting better.”

Better
was a fairly loose definition for what was happening to him, but at least the green hue on his face was beginning to reduce somewhat, and his eyes seemed to focus. At least a little bit.

“God damn,” he grumbled. “What... what happened?”

Jill, fists digging into her hips, stood with her feet slightly wider than shoulder width apart, and regarded King coolly. “Why don’t you tell him what happened, King?” she asked. Her voice was exaggeratedly irritated, but she
did
feel a little irked at the big bear for just standing there laughing – in his own way – as her other mate rolled around going crazy. “Why don’t you tell him exactly what happened?”

King sat down and faced Rogue, very obviously trying not to laugh. This levity was both cruel and at the same time, pretty funny – especially coming from the super-serious Broken Pine alpha. “I told you not to drink my coffee,” he said.

“That stuff wasn’t bad,” Rogue finally sputtered, laughing a little. “But how the hell did it make me... well, whatever it made me do?”

“I make it strong.”

Before either of them could come to terms with what was going on, entirely, the ancient, hardly-working flip-phone that Rogue insisted on using instead of anything made in the last twenty years, started buzzing.

“That thing could be a sex toy,” Jill said, slightly irked at the buzzing.