Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Broken Pine Bears Book 1) (7 page)

As soon as she was reclined back onto the bed, Jill pulled her covers up, over her embarrassingly hard nipples, and Rogue drank her in.

“Your scent intoxicates me,” he said. His voice was deep, and booming, but he spoke so softly that his speech reminded Jill of a fading roll of thunder when a storm was far in the distance. “I’ve been watching while you sleep, and I can’t keep my thoughts off you when I’m not here.”

Jill’s stunned silence apparently spoke volumes, because he stared at her for a moment. “But,” he continued, “you said you don’t shift. So I don’t know how this is possible, but you have the mark.”

About seven hundred million thoughts began swirling through Jill’s head.
The mark, the fate, a mate? What is he talking about? What is happening?

She grew dizzy, and as soon as she did, she tasted salt in the back of her throat. “Urk, bucket,” she croaked. “Quick!”

Moving like quicksilver, Rogue grabbed something, and held back Jill’s hair. She spat for a moment, and then relaxed back to the bed, breathing heavily. “That,” she said softly, “hurt a lot more than it usually does.”

A soft laugh escaped her lips, and she closed her eyes. A moment later, a warm, soft, wet cloth caressed her lips, and the sides of her face before going back underneath her head. Gently, Rogue massaged her neck and her shoulders with patient motions.

“And on top of dashing good looks, a dimple in his cheek, and beautiful brown hair, this man who watches me sleep is a licensed massage therapist? What did I do to deserve this?”

Jill’s thoughts about, well, about everything, seemed to vanish into one pinpoint of light. One beam of energy pierced her chest and went out the other side, relaxing her muscles as heat radiated from her core all the way to her fingertips. She closed her eyes, arching her neck slightly, and moaning as Rogue’s powerful hands took out the kink of sleeping for however long she’d been unconscious.

“If only you could do those same things other places,” she whispered, feeling herself speak before she heard the words coming out of her mouth. She blushed furiously, but when she opened her eyes to correct herself, she noticed that Rogue wasn’t paying any attention.

His eyes were fixated right where he massaged. It was the sort of focus she got when she was puzzling through some complex biological problem, staring at some unknown organism on a slide, or trying to identify some little-known species of bear or another.

“Hmm?” he let out, in a soft, questioning grunt. “Why do I need a license to rub someone?”

She giggled under her breath. “You don’t get out of the woods much, do you?”

“More than my brother,” he said, his voice still absent and hollow. Rogue’s fingers dug deep into her neck and Jill whimpered softly before the knot he worked at vanished under the pressure.

Then it hit her.

“Brother?” she asked.
There’s no way. No possible way this is...

“Sworn brother,” he said. “We’re the Broken Pine alphas. There are always two of us to keep one from going insane and enslaving everyone. That may have been a problem in the distant past, so trust me, this way makes sense.”

“Yeah,” Jill said. “Makes perfect sense.” She was talking to cover up her astonishment, and, for the moment anyway, it seemed to be working. “What kind of clan?”

“Bears,” he said simply. For a moment, Rogue paused and watched her face, studying her lips, her eyes, and the curve of her earlobes. One of his thumbs slid up the back of Jill’s neck, tracing a line along the base of her skull, and then down her jaw. All the while, he stared deep into her eyes, not letting his gaze fall away. “We keep to ourselves mostly.”

Another swirl of his thumbs on either side of her neck sent a surge of tension sliding down Jill’s neck, and again, prickled her nipples up hard and stiff. It was like a cool breeze blew across her while she was lying naked on the beach, listening to the monotonous beauty of waves crashing against a sandbar.

Outside the forest birds sang, the leaves of the trees rustled against the small wood-framed cabin. To her surprise, another sound joined the chorus – a small, but sweet, tinkling.

“What’s that?” she asked. “Sounds like a wind chime?”

A smile crossed Rogue’s lips. He got up off the bed, and vanished for a second before reappearing with a delicate collection of carved chimes. “While I was waiting,” he said. “I wasn’t going to leave you while you were helpless.” He handed the instrument to Jill, who took it from him and turned it around in her hands, studying the smoothly sanded, perfect chimes.

“How did you do this?” she asked. “Without any tools, I mean. It’s perfect.”

“I had tools,” Rogue smiled. “The forest is its own tool, you mean machines, which you’re right, I don’t need.”

His brusque confidence was a breath, a taste, that Jill had always wanted to experience. Back in civilization, this sort of guy just didn’t exist.
Excepting, of course, the part where the guy can turn into a goddamn bear whenever he wants
.

“This is real, isn’t it?” Jill asked, out of nowhere, as she stared at the chime and slid a finger along the cool, cylindrical wood. “I’m not hallucinating?”

“Why would you think that?”

Jill thought about it for a second, but it was hard to put into words, especially when the reasons for
not
doubting him were so many and so obvious. Finally, she decided to go with the simplest path: just spurting it out.

“It just... well okay, I’m a scientist, right?”

Rogue nodded, slowly.

“So I have to test things, I have to observe and fiddle with them, and see what happens.”

Rogue smiled and narrowed his eyes in a way that warmed Jill in places she didn’t, right then, want to be warm. “I can fiddle,” he said.

“Ha! Oh, yeah, well I’m sure you can.” Jill started talking quicker, and higher, the way she did when she was either nervous or excited, or both. “Not right now though, I have to explain this to you.”

He paused, hovering over the side of the bed, pushed up on his huge arms. Rogue’s triceps were cut and hard, his shoulders flexed through the thin fabric of his loose-fitting open-collared shirt, and with every breath, his chest rose and fell, tight and hard and perfect.

“So what I was saying is that, I, uh, I’m a scientist, and—”

Rogue hushed her with a kiss. Slow and patient and soft at first, he didn’t go in deeper until she grabbed the back of his head and pulled him against her. Their teeth clashed gently, and then a split second after Jill opened her mouth to let him in, Rogue explored her with his tongue.

Holding her head gently in the crook of his arm, the huge bear swirled his tongue against Jill’s before he came up for air. When he did, he paused only inches from her. Every inhale, every exhale, she felt. Every time he breathed, or she breathed, their chests rose up and touched.

“It hurts here,” Jill said, trying not to smile, and pointing at her side.

Rogue, very seriously, nodded. “Ribs are cracked. At least one of them. I think that’s why—”

“You’re supposed to kiss it and make it better,” she whispered. “Whenever I was little, and I hurt myself, my mom would always kiss whatever it was and make it better. And also it happens a lot in romantic movies.”

“Even a wound? Like a cut?” Rogue squinted, apparently trying very hard to understand this alien concept. “Wouldn’t that make a mess?”

“If I’m supposed to believe werebears and werewolves exist,” Jill whispered in his ear, pulling him close, “then quit thinking so much.”

He smiled, and let out a soft groan, right next to her ear. A second later, he kissed her, pulling her earlobe between his teeth, and sucking gently.

“That’s not where it hurts,” she said, smiling playfully.

Slowly, Rogue kissed down the side of Jill’s body to where she was bandaged, and warmed her skin with his lips. “Like this?” he asked.

“Uh-huh, but now it hurts here.” She touched her chest, right below where her collarbones met.

“You weren’t hurt there, you—”

With a finger on his lips, Jill hushed him. “Just kiss,” she said.

“Don’t think,” Rogue said. “I’m good at that.”

One place after another, she pointed and he kissed until she ran out of places to tell him to kiss that wouldn’t get her
way
too excited for her present condition. Rogue went along with it, never going too fast, or pushing her too far. At some point, after the third or fourth kiss, it became clear that he understood – and enjoyed – the game they were playing. His heavy breathing and the thickness that Jill felt against her whenever he’d bend over to kiss some other place gave him away.

When he finally settled down, after Jill started grimacing a little from the wiggling she was doing, Rogue was staring at her, like there was something he recognized.

“Dreams?” they both said at the same time. “Have you—?”

Both of them cut off short when they realized the other was talking. Jill fell quiet cocked her head to the side. “You too?” she asked.

“Both of us,” Rogue said, emphasizing the ‘both’ part.

“You mean you and me?”

He shook his head. “King,” was his answer.

“You’re a king?”

“No, well, in a way I suppose, but bears will, er, bare, no kings.” Rogue smiled to himself. “King is the second alpha. We’ve both been,” he trailed off, concerned by the color draining from Jill’s face.

Outside, as dusk grew deeper, something howled. Something distant, but that made Rogue immediately sit up and take notice.

“They’ve returned,” he said, obviously perturbed. “Too quickly, too soon. I only hope the lupines aren’t warning me of something worse coming over the horizon. What am I saying? There’s always something worse coming over the horizon.”

Jill didn’t have time to process what he was saying. Hell, she didn’t have time to process her own thoughts. She’d barely started believing all this was real. She just turned her head from side to side, opening and closing her mouth like a confused bass about to go headfirst into a blender.

“Okay,” Jill half-heartedly squawked.

“I’ll be back,” he said, “and in the meantime, speaking of my familiarity with your tools, check the desk.”

With haste, he turned toward the door, but spun on his heel at the last second. “Oh, and by the way, I understand how dressers work. I just didn’t want to put them in the wrong place. I’ve made that mistake enough times to learn my lesson.”

The smile he threw her way as he turned and left put a herd of wild butterflies inside Jill’s stomach.

“Do you need me to lock the door?” Rogue called from outside.

“I got it,” Jill answered, pushing herself up on the bed, and then standing. Somehow, it hurt less than the last time she’d tried this, though nothing much had changed.

Maybe those kisses really do make things feel better
, she thought, smiling despite the howls.

Howls which were growing louder, and closer, but seemed more communicative than aggressive. She knew enough about wolves to know when they were calling to each other over vast distances, their howls telling of danger or prey. Whatever they were discussing, it was far enough away that it didn’t concern her, at least not right then.

She shuffled over to the desk, opening the drawer as he’d instructed. The shadows in the room were too heavy for her to see, but when she stuck her hand inside, she didn’t find anything immediately.

Some paper, some pens, but that couldn’t be what he was talking about.

There
, she thought, as her fingers wrapped around a rubber grip with indentions that seemed made just for her fingers. She pulled the snub-nosed revolver out of the desk, and closed her hand around the grip. She checked the action, flicking her thumb across the catch, and then returning it to ready position.

I wonder if that whole silver bullet thing is a load of crap?
She stared into the cylinder, and counted six. She stuck her hand back into the drawer and fished out a very old ammunition box. Plucking out a round, she turned it around in her fingertips, feeling the cool, smooth metal slide against her skin. “That’s incredible. Handmade bullets?”

Flicking on the lamp, she saw that the tip of each one was marked with a deeply carved groove. She’d seen enough cop shows to know that was done so the bullet would spread whenever it hit a target. They were cold and hard, too, much different from the lead bullets she used when she and her dad went target shooting all those years ago.

“Silver,” she said to herself, shivering as another howl broke the night. “Guess not.”

––––––––

I
t wasn’t the first time she’d drawn the hammer back on a revolver, but it
was
the first time she did it with the intent of killing something.

Jill gritted her teeth and cocked the hammer into position, listening to the howling outside her door. It was all distant, but still haunting and awful. Rogue left a slight ache in her stomach when he’d gone, but the chills that ran down her back every time a wolf howled quickly replaced the yearning.

“What the hell did I get myself into?” she asked her empty cabin. Squeezing the pistol in her hand, the mixture of hard rubber and cold metal was reassuring. The heft of the weapon gave her a sense of peace that was fleeting, but at least present for a moment. “I thought this was just supposed to be a year in the woods watching bears.”

The last word lingered on the tip of Jill’s tongue. She touched the spot on her chest that burned every time she thought of Rogue, said his name, or looked at him. She didn’t know what was going on, or if the stuff he’d said was a big load of shit, but at the moment? It sure didn’t seem like it was.

In the distance, the lupine howls were broken by what sounded like a struggle. Jill clenched her pistol tighter, but the only thing she thought of was how badly she wished for Rogue to be back, and in one piece.

Whatever hit her door banished that thought.

Something, she didn’t know what, and didn’t particularly want to think about it very much, banged against the door to her cabin. It held, but for how long she had no idea. There
was
a deadbolt, but after all, it was only a wooden door standing between her and whatever horror was trying to get at her.