Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Broken Pine Bears Book 1) (12 page)

He scoffed a laugh, thinking of Rogue reciting some saccharine love poem. King though, he was no poet. He didn’t have the energy or the time, or... If he was being honest, the ability to feel the highs and lows of life the way Rogue did. Where Rogue was a tempest, King was a placid sea; if King was the calm, Rogue was the storm.

But it worked.

That’s how it
always
worked. Hot blood and cold mix to make better decisions. Impulse makes action, and quiet thought makes it useful.

Without one, there could never be the other. Hot and cold, soft and hard.

King watched Rogue as the younger bear shifted and disappeared into the woods. Without Rogue, there was no King. He sighed, heavily, waiting for the cubs to stir and the day to begin.
Two are one in us,
he thought, before shaking his head.
No, not two. Now there are three
.

Instead of a sigh, that thought brought a wave of warm fingers running out from the center of King’s chest and down his sides. Then, he smiled.

*

T
he afternoon sun overhead heated the forest to the point of dew steaming on the leaves. Rogue was hot, his fur a blanket of insulation that he wished he didn’t have, but he was thankful for his thick hide and coat keeping the briars from cutting into him, and keeping the leaves and sticks out of his eyes.

When he ran, he felt free. With every branch that snapped, every fallen trunk he cracked, he felt more alive, more at home.

King avoided shifting if he could. He said it made him lose control to some small degree, and of course, control was the one thing King wanted to keep at all times, at all costs. It wasn’t losing control for Rogue though, it was letting his instincts take over; it was letting his brain stop overanalyzing and calculating for a few precious moments.

And anyway, he found a long time before that his instincts were usually more trustworthy than his thoughts. Leave the strategies and the tactics to King. Rogue was at home with hot passion, at ease with the unreason.

A chopper, the sound throbbing through his body, gave Rogue a moment’s pause. It was close to the ground, he thought, even though he couldn’t locate it. With a canopy as dense as this one, the thing would have to go right overhead, and anyway, at the moment he was just a bear. A really big one, of a kind that wasn’t supposed to exist in these parts for a couple hundred years, but no normal person would know that.

That’s when the
scent
hit his nose.

Jill? You’re here?

The bear looked all around him, in something approaching a panic. Why was she here? What was she doing with a helicopter so close to the ground? She couldn’t be involved in any of this, could she?

Rogue shook his huge head, trying to calm his nerves. Carefully, he crept forward as the throb of helicopter blades grew slower, more even in pace. It had landed, and not far away.

Smelling the air again, the scent of Rogue’s mate had been subsumed by the stink of fuel, and the rotten aroma of –
food?

Sure enough, in a clearing that he could barely see, Jill was approaching a helicopter, and having some kind of shouted small-talk conversation with the man inside. This chopper wasn’t like the ones Rogue had seen before. This one was a gentle color of green and had a very plain identification number stenciled onto the tail of the craft.

In the safety of his tree cover, Rogue watched his mate throw her brown hair back, and then pull it into a curly ponytail. Her long, slender form – which had a least a foot on the stocky, bearded man who hopped out to help her with the things he was handing off – drew a hot, longing breath from Rogue’s chest. He wanted her.

No, not want – he needed her, longed for her, ached to feel her skin against his, to explore the curve of her hips with his fingertips, to taste her, to caress her... to possess her.

But he couldn’t. Not right then. Rogue might be brazen and almost dangerously brash, but to charge out and sweep his mate up in his arms right in front of someone? That was a touch of crazy even Rogue didn’t have in him. For all he knew, Jill had been bound in a human marriage and this was her human mate – he didn’t know.

By the time Jill began to trek back into the woods, with her companion in tow, both of them loaded down with bags, packs and whatever else they were carrying, the day began to darken. Night was coming, and even though the lupines had been calm for two nights straight, that wouldn’t last forever. If he heard howls, he couldn’t stalk his mate, no matter how much he wanted. If howls came, he had to watch them, had to try his best to contain them.

When the first baleful moan broke through the slightly misty dusk, Rogue damned his luck.

Duty first,
he thought, turning back toward the lupine pack den where he’d watched a butchering a few nights past.
Duty first, love second
.

Although, even as he loped along the path to where he knew he needed to go, he began to seriously question his priorities.

––––––––

W
aking up, alone, in her own bed, was just about the last thing Jill expected. After being awakened two separate times by werewolves, and after a couple of really good, sweaty nights with those bears?

Nothing she could do took the bears off her mind. She’d considered running back to society... hell, she’d considered a lot of things.

But she knew she couldn’t do it. She knew this was where she belonged, that this forest, these bears, they were her family.

She rolled over, still a little sore from some injury or another she managed to sustain at the hands of a now-dead pile of wolf fluff. Otherwise? She was intact, she wasn’t hurt, and more – most? – importantly, she knew that all those things she had been dreaming? They weren’t just dreams.

She sighed, thinking back to those impossible nights, to Rogue and King, and the way they had seemed to be two souls in one body. Rogue with his easy smiles and worldly way of speaking and King with his immense power, his quiet confidence, and... well, and a sort of Tarzan-like way about him. They were two alphas, and Jill? Apparently just got herself
two
boyfriends so big they made her feel like a normal girl.

Boyfriends? Jeez. No, boyfriends don’t do the things they did. Boyfriends don’t talk about alpha marks, about mating and bearing baby bears,
she chuckled to herself.
And boyfriends usually don’t come onto me two at a time and make me...

Just about the only thing Jill knew for sure is that she’d never, not once in her life, screamed and writhed and pulsed and groaned like she had the night before. Then again, she’d never been with a pair of enormous werebears, either.

The sun was already burning hot in the Appalachian forest. Steam rose in gentle wisps from evaporating dew. She looked over to where the wolf had lay dead.

“Gone?” she asked the empty room. “Just like that?”

She stood up, cautiously approaching the exact spot the creature slumped over and disintegrated, like she expected something to hop up and grab her. None of the quicksilver fur, not even the bone, was left. Jill reached over and plucked the flattened bullet she found among the mess – she set it on the desk the night before, but hadn’t thought much about it until just then. She climbed out of bed, still holding the silvery disc, and stooped over, crouching down with her feet flat on the ground. When she did this she thought she probably looked a little like a slightly-gangly chimpanzee, all legs and arms, and all folded up. She’d been doing it since she was a little girl.

As she stretched, Jill turned her trophy over, examining the lines that appeared on impact. The half-dollar sized hunk of silver was smashed out like a metal pancake. She held it in her palm, letting the silver cool her skin, as she cracked open one of about a thousand super-caloric army rations that Jacques delivered. This one was marked “TUNA CASSEROLE AND POTATOES” but when she opened it, it was just sort of a lumpy, gray mass with a sheen of what might’ve been fake butter on top.

It tasted all right, though a little salty. She took a chunk of what was either potato or meat, and chewed slowly, trying her best to avoid smelling the can. The taste was fine, but getting a nose full of that strange, almost cat food-like aroma was definitely not conducive to eating, she’d learned.

Something about the shape, and the afterglow she felt, took Jill back to about halfway through her sophomore year at MIT. She’d gone on scholarship, and if it weren’t for that, she wouldn’t have gone at all. Not that she grew up poor, but because her father was the sort who believed people only value what they earn for themselves. At first, she’d resented it a little. Her friends didn’t have to work as hard as she did, or they had more spending money or free time, or whatever.

After a while though, she started to understand. She ground herself into dust those first two years of school. She had to, if she wanted to keep up. She’d never been any sort of natural talent. She wasn’t ever the smartest or the fastest, and to her mind, she most certainly wasn’t the prettiest.

The one thing she did have, that even she couldn’t deny, was tenacity. Once Jill got her mind set on something, she never relented until she met the goal, or aced the class or... well, or fought to get the grant that had put her right here in the middle of the woods – in the midst of her destiny.

She sighed heavily and stood up, her knees popping as she straightened. Jill tossed the bullet onto the sheets she’d slept on top of – another remnant of her childhood – and got busy stretching. A few squats, a handful of deep knee bends, and then a long time spent bent over with her knees straight and her palms flat on the ground had her all limbered up.

With another sigh, this one of relief at how much the stretching helped, Jill sat down at her desk, flipped open her massive, ancient laptop and jotted some notes. She knew whatever she recorded was going to be subject to all sorts of review – hell, she’d promised at least an article about these bears if not a full book – so she had to be judicious about the details she shared.

Lupines in the area are aggressive,
she noted.
But not abnormally so. They howl at night, they carry on for hours, as wolves tend to do. The bears I’ve come to study continue to
– she at first typed ‘amaze’ and then deleted it.
Continue to evade me. So far, no sign of the new sub-species of Ursus arctos appalachia, aside from standard remnants – scat, some fur left on tree bark, that sort of thing.

She wanted to write so much more. She wanted to tell everything about these incredible creatures and whatever it was that was truly their nature, only she couldn’t. She wouldn’t do anything that could ever possibly turn unwanted eyes on this forest, on her bears.

I better watch out. Thinking like that’s going to get me feeling like a mama...
Jill laughed at the mere thought of being a mama bear, but there it was – and she’d never felt anything stronger.

Daily notes made, daily half-truths recorded, Jill closed her laptop and pulled out the notebook she kept in the desk. This was where she wrote the
real
truth.

It rips me up,
she began.
Hell of a way to start a journal entry.
She chewed her lip, laughed at the melodrama of what she’d written, and then smiled, accepting it as truth.
Lying about all this. Pretending I’m not seeing what I’m seeing. These creatures are incredible, they’re amazing, and they’re utterly, completely impossible.

That word – impossible – stuck in her mind as her pen scratched across the paper.

Not impossible, just... not supposed to exist. They can change shape apparently at will, they are led by two massive, beautiful alphas, and
, again, she trailed off, tapping her pen on the desk. Writing these things made them feel more permanent, more real.

Back in graduate school, when she was finishing her dissertation – a long examination of the effects of illegal human involvement – known to the normal human world as poaching – bear populations in Wyoming, she managed to keep cool and detached. Jill was a scientist after all, and she knew feelings were fleeting, emotions often untrue. Except... now? She was beginning to question everything she’d ever thought she knew. Sticking a missive about her personal biases in an article was one thing, but personally mating with the population she observed? That might be a little tough to sell to
Science
.

The safety, the relief, she felt, when Rogue and then King appeared the night before were more intense and incredible than any experiment she’d done. There was no observable variable, no experimental constant, just raw terror that was replaced by raw... love? She shook her head, smiling again and then laughing at herself, as if laughing at her feelings made them easier to swallow.

The two alphas came to me in the night. One of them came during the day, taking care of me as I healed from a bunch of bruises, strains and scrapes I got when I’d been surrounded by wolves and attacked on my way in. That one is called Rogue. Whether that’s really his name, or just what he calls himself to humans, I’m not sure.

Then another thought occurred to her. Was she really the first? The first human that had ever been a part of their clan?

Rogue left a gun. He left me alone when the wolves started howling. He told me to take care of myself, and I sure did. A wolf tried to break in, so I opened the door and shot him. Shot him right in the chest with a silver bullet.

Reading back over her words, she laughed again.

This sounds like a crazy person rambling at some late night talk radio show host. But unless I’ve gone from completely sane to completely bat-shit nuts, all of this is actually happening. I actually shot two fuckin’ werewolves with silver bullets. One of them just sizzled and disappeared. The other turned into a man first and then went through the same deal. They’re gone. The one called King – he’s bigger than the other one, but not by much – he seemed either amazed or upset that I was a human. He went on and on about mating this, fate that. And then he said something about how he didn’t know how I was going to be able to carry his children.