Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Broken Pine Bears Book 1) (11 page)

King’s sucking kissing, his wet fingers, teased her entire body, her soul, to life. White light flared inside her, and as soon as Rogue’s pulsing finished, she urged King up to replace him.

With her hands closed on him like an axe handle, she pumped fiercely, wildly, hungry.

“Ah!” he grunted.

She hissed out loud as Rogue’s tongue replaced King’s, slowly circling and coaxing out the very last of her climax. King’s didn’t take long to follow. His heat on her cheek, dripping down her neck, filled Jill with a sense of security, and a sense that everything was... right.

They lay still, breathing each other in.

Jill smelled their sex on the air, the sweat of her two mates, the musk of their bodies, and the lingering hints of earth and leather on Rogue’s skin. King propped himself against the wall, with his legs splayed out on either side of her. She curled up between them, stroking the soft hairs lining his muscled thighs, just breathing it all in.

Her entire body tingled, but not just from physical pleasure. “Something changed,” she said as Rogue returned. She hadn’t even noticed he’d gone until he returned to the side of the bed, a hot towel in his hand, that he stroked against her legs, and then between them. “I feel different. Not good or bad, just... different.”

King curled her hair around his finger, pulling a curl tight and then letting it spring back as the other alpha slid the warmth of the towel up Jill’s belly, cleaning off sweat, sex, and cooling her skin.

She let out a soft purr, and then smiled. Her hair fell around her nose, and rather than displace herself enough to move it, she just let it stay there, tickling her nose, until she sneezed. The two bears stared at her for a second, and then both cracked laughs.

“What?” she said, curling up between the two of them, and then stretching one of her long legs out and looping it around Rogue, who finally sat down when he was satisfied at having cleaned the sticky sweetness from his mate’s perfect skin.

Rogue shrugged, and King gave him a short glance. “You’re very tall,” he said, in his plain-spoken way.

Jill wiggled her eyebrows. “You just now noticed? That’s usually the second thing anyone says to me, right after talking about how intimidating I am.”

“Why would you intimidate someone?” Rogue asked. “Unless the intimidated person was a werewolf, and you had a gun trained at his head.”

Jill expected to feel emotion overwhelm her after he said that, but instead, she felt purpose. She felt hard and cold, but at the same time, she felt like she was... home?

King shifted his weight and lifted her head from his lap. “I must go,” he announced in that stilted, lovable way he had of speaking. “There are things at home that need attention. The cubs are restless; the youths are trying to range too far, I... I’m afraid with the lupines rampaging, and the helicopters,” he shut his mouth quickly enough to be audible. Then, he shook his head.

“Helicopters? What are you talking about?” Jill asked. “How the hell can something have gone
this
crazy
this
fast?”

Rogue cracked a smile at that. “You mean you’ve completely adjusted to reality with a war between werebears and werewolves, but now helicopters are what make a situation crazy?” The dimple in his cheek and the little glimmer of his blue eye in the lamplight made Jill a little crazy. For a split second, all she could think is how badly she needed him again – needed both of her alphas again – but then she shook her head.

“No,” she laughed softly. “No, helicopters aren’t weird. Are you sure it wasn’t the one that flew me in? My next food delivery isn’t for a few days, now that I think about it, but—”

“No,” King said, his voice flat. “It isn’t. It’s one we’ve known for a long time. One that’s haunted my people for years. One that,” he fell off, not able to finish. “I have to go. I have to make sure the cubs are safe.”

Before anyone could say anything more, King was out the door – completely naked of course – and vanished into the night.

“That was, uh, abrupt,” Jill said, trying to hide her sudden attack of nerves. It probably didn’t do much good, and Rogue almost certainly wasn’t falling for it, but he played along. “You get used to it,” he said. “That and the loincloth.” A smile cracked his lips. “You can take the bear out of the forest, but you can’t take the...” he scrunched up his face.

“No, that’s not right. You can’t take the... whatever. He’s wild, he’s different. But that’s why we’re the perfect pair.”

“Pair?” Jill asked. “Last I counted, there were three of us.”

––––––––

“N
o, Rogue,” King said to his brother as the two effortlessly plowed through the undergrowth. They’d done this same thing a thousand times and would do it a thousand more. Dodging roots and ramming through underbrush and talking was as natural to the two bears as jogging with a stroller and talking on a Bluetooth headset was to a suburban mom.

“She’s not one of us, she can’t know our secrets.”

“Listen to yourself,” Rogue shot back, dodging under a branch. “She shot two werewolves, hell, she even dealt with
your
bad sense of humor. And now you’re going to question her?”

“Not me, but the cubs. Why would they trust a human? What would make them believe her, after what they’ve lived through?”

Rogue thought for a second. It was a good point, but still, the mark on his chest and more importantly, the way his heart skipped a beat when he thought of Jill, told him otherwise. “You know just as well as I do that she’s the one. Why do you fight this when you take every other ridiculous prophecy and tradition without a second thought?”

“Doesn’t it bother you that you think you know the man who shot you?”

King’s question surprised Rogue, mostly because he never remembered saying anything. But, when you have a drug dart in your butt, odd things tend to come out. “It was just a vague memory, probably nothing. Anyway, with all the drugs that were running through me, I doubt I should believe my own eyes. I’d probably seen the face in a dream.”

I know I’ve seen that man before, but I don’t know where.
It gnawed at him even though he wouldn’t ever admit as much, at least not to King.
He’d probably figure out some way to twist it back on me going to human towns and chugging down Fat Tire by the barrel.
“I could use a beer,” he said, to try and lighten the mood.

King barked a laugh, and slid over a knee-high root. “I’ll never understand you and that stuff. Honey wine is better than any of it.”

“You’d never know, you haven’t tried any.”

“Don’t need to,” King said. “I know the best when I taste it.”

Like Jill,
Rogue wanted to say, but decided not to press the issue, at least not right then, as the two were bounding over a hill that, when they got to the top, would give them a view of the largest lupine pack den anywhere around. “I’m sure you do,” was all the smaller, thicker bear said, with a wry grin.

“There,” King said, pointing down to the valley below as the bears crested the hill. “Look!”

Down below, in a depression that the lupines had dug down to a crude mixture of bedrock and dirt, the wolves were circling. The sides of the den – which was more of a pit than anything resembling a home – were lined with sticks, bones from hunted animals or hunted people. They hadn’t always been like this, but neither Rogue nor King could very well remember the time before the lupines went insane. The wild, undulating, pulsing dance of death that Rogue and King witnessed was the closest thing the lupines had to a tradition.

“They’re grotesque and brutal,” King said, a sneer marking his face.

“Says the bear who has strangled how many of them to death?”

The two smiled, but only briefly.

“This one! This one abandoned his kin!” A particularly large wolf was shouting above the din of the crowd. “This one ran from a human girl, one he was told to capture! He saw his packmate die by her hand and ran instead of fighting!”

“I thought there was only one body? I mean, two separate attacks, but there was only one corpse after the second one. Or am I imagining things?” Rogue asked.

King just shrugged. “Might’ve thought better than to mess with a frightened human holding a pistol?”

Rogue turned to his brother. “You’re getting better at this humor thing all the time.”

King smiled grimly and nodded. Below, the wolves were getting more rowdy by the second. The big one in the center, shouting, wasn’t so much commanding them as he was letting the crowd’s emotions decide his words. When he talked about killing, or death, or punishment, they whipped faster, harder, like one spirit drove all of them.

“Should we let him live in shame?” the wolf cried, almost screeching his voice was so strained. “Or pay for blood with blood?”

If the yelling before got them excited, the thought of killing this chained up, hissing wolf was
really
amazing. The one staked up, bound in chains that bit into his flesh, burning and sizzling, was smaller by a head than the pack spokesman, but he had a good bit of muscle on him. Still, with all of the wolves shifted partway between wolf and man, the prisoner wasn’t impressive compared to the rest.

King made a move to stand up. Rogue placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, holding him in place. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Even if he is a wolf, this barbarism can’t stand,” King said.

Rogue’s glittering eyes went cold. “Would they do the same for you? This might not look like justice, but it is to them. And besides, what’s one less lupine for us to deal with when they go berserk?”

The taller bear relaxed, but not much. He knew his brother was right, but he hated to see purposed cruelty like this, no matter what the reason. King turned his back. “We go,” he said softly. “Leave them to their bloodlust. If this is what all the noise is from, they’ll tear into that helpless one and drink themselves senseless.”

King turned and started back toward the clan home, but Rogue lingered just long enough to see his brother’s words come true. When the wolves turned on the prisoner, they left little more than a red mist staining the post. Rogue turned, without a sound, and followed the path his brother took moments before. When he caught up to King, the two shared a glance, and a look, but no words needed to be spoken.

*

T
hree days passed in relative tranquility.

After their gory festival, the lupines were quiet, as always happened. King was too absorbed in planning for the coming winter – still months away, but when a bear clan is thirty strong, it’s never too early to prepare. Rogue ranged, but only in short rounds that ended every night at camp. His heart burned to be with Jill, his spirit yearned and ached for her, but he knew that she needed time to come to terms with reality, and the truth is, so did he and King.

The two alphas spoke little, but only because there was nothing much to say. It wasn’t that Rogue and King disliked each other, it’s that they’d been so close for so long that either one could easily anticipate what the other would say, how the other would react to something. Surprises were very, very rare between the two, but whenever Rogue thought back to his dour, humorless brother attempting a joke, he couldn’t help but smile.

His thoughts drifted as they always did when he was stationary for any time at all. He thought of Jill, and the wolves going nuts, and of the man in the helicopter whose identity was right on this tip of his tongue.

“King?” he’d asked, one of the few times they spoke. “Do you remember any big, bald bears being taken from us?”

King had looked at him sideways. “Why?” he’d asked.

Rogue had just shrugged. “No reason, really, just thinking. I know I recognize the guy in the helicopter before.” He’d been gnawing his lip, like he always did when he was lost in thought. “What was that one bear’s name? He was older than us, but not much. He had the scars on his face, he...”

“Madix?” King had asked, without much interest. “But why would he shoot you? It wouldn’t make sense for him to be involved in this. Of course, it wouldn’t make sense for him to be in a helicopter in the first place. Don’t you remember his fear of heights? One of the biggest, strongest bears in the clan, and he’d never go all the way up a tree, even for the biggest beehives. He’d always refuse to look down off of cliffs, he’d...”

King had fallen silent like remembering the past had become too much of an emotional burden for him just then. Rogue looked past the other alpha, out at the cubs below and tried to banish the thought that maybe it
was
Madix in that helicopter. Once his brother gave him the name, memories flooded the smaller bear, but none of them lined up.

Madix had scars, sure, we all do, but nothing like the guy in that chopper. And why would he shoot me? It hardly makes sense.
That night, he had banished those memories with enough honeywine to kill a normal person – or any
person
really. But to him, there was almost no effect past a little bit of pleasant dizziness and a full night of sleep.

For a time – a blessed time, no matter how brief – the clan was normal. The cubs hunted and fished, Arrow gathered berries, Slate tried to sucker other bears into wrestling matches.

One day stretched into two and then into three before there was any hint that change was coming. On the third day, Rogue took off before light, to “see if the wolves had calmed.” King bid him farewell with a curt nod and a gaze that lingered slightly longer than normal. Something was bothering Rogue, but there was no telling what, exactly.

As Rogue left camp, his brother stood, thinking about calling after him, but then decided against it. If something
was
on Rogue’s mind, King knew he’d never get it out by asking. Rogue was never much for talking, especially about his own feelings. The older, bigger alpha remembered how Rogue took eight years before he shed a tear over the kidnappings.

King knew he hurt, he knew that his brother probably hurt more than anyone. Along with his deep, passionate connection to his animal nature, Rogue also seemed to
feel
everything more keenly and sharply than any of the other clan members. He never showed his emotions, or outwardly let them affect him, but despite his gruffness and rough, slightly vulgar attitude, King knew that if any one of their number was a poet, it’d be his sworn brother.