Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (7 page)

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?”

The two bears exchanged a glance. “Not sure,” Fury said.

“Never noticed,” Stone added, a little quicker than was probably necessary. “That’s odd.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

There it is again,
Claire thought.
That birthmark. What the hell is going on with this birthmark?
Once again it was tingling, and once again she had no idea why. “What is it?” she asked again. “What are you trying to hide? Why did I get all tingly back there and suddenly have all that courage and strength? Oh my God, I killed someone!”

It hit her, one thing after another. It was like a landslide of memories piling into Claire’s head and then running down, out of her ear and pooling on the floor at her feet. There was too much to process, too much to think about. And was it all true, anyway? Or was her memory playing strange tricks on her and in a few seconds, she’d sit, bolt upright in her lonely, empty apartment, just like always?”

“I’m the one who killed him,” Fury said. “If it helps ease your mind any.”

Heat flushed Claire’s cheeks. “No! No, it doesn’t. He’s still dead, he was still my boss, and people are going to come looking for me. If I go back, I’ll go to jail or, or fucking prison or wherever it is I’m going to go. I didn’t
want
any of this,” she protested. “I didn’t ask for it, didn’t dream about it, I just got a call over the PA, and went downstairs. I figured I was going to copy some bullshit off a clipboard and go back up to my desk and back to reading about Kim Kardashian’s sex life and screwing up the thirty-eighth level of Candy Crush.”

Both bears were looking at her with a slightly confused, but mostly concerned expression. “Candy...?” Fury started, Stone put his hand on the other bear’s shoulder as he shook his head.

But her heart was racing as quickly as her thoughts. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked, her hands shaking and her hair hanging limply in front of her sweat-streaked face. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“We had to escape,” Stone said. “And we weren’t going to leave you. After the mess Fury made, the only way out was the way we took.”

With a huge, deep breath, Claire let out a long, trailing sigh. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? And why can’t I stop imagining the two of you naked? I mean, aside from the fact that you are.”

The racing words kept her thoughts on track. “Why can’t I stop thinking about being with you two? I’m not that kind of girl, you know, I’m not the sort who just shacks up with whatever comes her way. Hell, I’m not the sort that even dates anyone more than twice because I can’t stand the idea of settling down and—we have
got
to get back to town because I have to take care of Cleo, she’s my dog, and—”

Before she could finish her tirade, Fury grabbed her wrist, yanked Claire to him and enveloped her mouth with his. Whiskers rasped sweetly on her lips as she desperately, urgently kissed him back, sucking at his lips and letting his tongue swirl into her mouth, against hers.

“I’ll get your dog,” Fury breathed into her. “But can she wait for a little longer?”

As she nodded, Claire’s breath seemed to come quicker and hotter and shallower, and when she felt his heartbeat reverberating through her body, she almost lost control. She scratched at him, not to try and get him away but because that was the only thing she could think to do to keep her hands busy as this beautiful man ravaged her with kiss after kiss.

The brush behind them scratched at her ankles. Moments later, she felt the rough, crackly bark of an old oak tree scratch her back through her shirt. The cotton hung up on the trunk, her shirt slid up her back. Hands – but not Fury’s – warmed her bared skin from behind. Stone was on the other side of the huge tree, his arms wrapped around it, his hot fingers leaving streaks of heat where he explored Claire’s belly and just a little further down.

She pulled a deep breath through her nose as Fury hungrily sucked at her lips, feeding off her kiss. The scent of man – of musk and earth and sweat and wood smoke – filled her nose, then her lungs. When she finally let out that breath, it trembled from her lips. Opening her eyes for the first time in what felt like eternity, she found Fury staring straight back, his golden eye and green eye both shimmering in the shadows.

“I can’t... what’s happening?” Claire asked. “I don’t do this sort of thing, I don’t—”

When Stone’s fingertips plied underneath her jeans, and he slid his fingers down her body, along either side of her surprisingly wet, tingling sex, her words turned to mush, her knees went weak.

“I don’t know,” Fury said in between another round of increasingly hungry kisses, “what that mark is. I don’t know why we have the same eyes. But I do know that I’ve never felt like you make me feel.”

“Forever, there were only two of us,” Stone said, moving around the tree and taking one of Claire’s hands. He laid her back on the blanket of pine needles and leaves and sheets they had taken from the lab. “I knew there was a missing piece.”

Fury touched her chest, his fingertips burning through the limp cotton of her shirt that was soaked through with sweat. Stone’s finger pushed her apart, and tested her entrance with a tentative gentleness that took her by surprise.

A gasp spilled from Claire’s lips, followed by a groan and she clenched her fist, crushing a handful of leaves and dirt against the palm of her hand before raising it and bracing herself against Fury’s massive arms.

Her entire world was nothing but the pressure between her legs, the gentle prick of pine needles coming through the hospital-quality sheet, and Fury’s hands rasping over her chest, her breasts.

“We don’t always ask for what we need,” Fury said in between breaths, between kisses sucked gently on Claire’s full bottom lip. He traced the curve of her belly and the bulge of one of her hips as she tried to buck against Stone’s hand, which cupped her sex. “But when it comes along, there’s no reason to fight it.”

She nodded, biting her lip and trying not to snort as the big bear’s palm ground against her clit. Claire managed to unbutton her jeans before they got torn, which was good as it was her only pair. With them discarded carelessly to the side, the smell of her sweet sex mixed with the two bears in her nose. She was on a cloud, floating helplessly in a bath of warmth and security. She was wrapped with her favorite blankets, she was halfway through a bottle of Malbec with no intent to stop before she—

“Oh!” she grunted. “Oh my... oh my God! You’re making me... I can’t stop,” her breath came in hard, confused bursts. “Squeeze,” she urged as she grabbed Fury’s massive hand and crushed her breast with it. “Pinch my... nipple... twist...”

A wave of tension pulled every single one of the muscles running from the top of Claire’s neck to the bottom of her feet. Her entire body was, for one split second, completely rigid and stiff, and then in the next, all of that tightness exploded with a wave of sticky, sweet heat.

“Claw me,” Fury demanded, as she did it anyway. Her fingernails digging into his tanned skin, Claire felt her whole body draw up again as Stone pulsed his fingers so deep inside her she could hardly believe it. He turned his hand, keeping pressure on her clit, but at the same time swirling the tip of his finger against the spot right on her front wall. Every nerve flared, every sense she had exploded to life.

She couldn’t see, couldn’t think – she didn’t want to or need to, though. Everything she needed was right there with her, holding her tight, comforting her and kissing her. Lips traced the line of her neck, fingers kept turning, and then when the wave finally broke, and she opened her eyes to see both of the bears staring down at her?