Between a Bear and a Hard Place(16)
Rogue cocked his head to the side.
Still not quite up to snuff on idioms, I guess. “Like a housewife from the 50s. Donna Reed? June Cleaver? I know you’ve seen those shows because I sat in a hotel room with you two while you drank half the liquor in Santa Barbara, laughing at Leave it to Beaver re-runs.”
When they’d beat their hasty escape, Rogue, King, Jill, and all twenty-three of the remaining Broken Pine cubs – all boys – were lucky enough to be put up in a hotel owned by someone Jill once went on a very bad date with. But it turned out, he was a pretty all right guy after all. He wasn’t even mad about the messes they left, since Jill agreed to another date with him.
Poor guy.
He’d just about shit his pants when he walked in on a half-shifted bear-cub trying to get out of a locked bathroom, but he was oddly easy to convince that he hadn’t seen what he thought he saw. It all worked out. It always does.
“But why pearls?”
Jill sighed heavily, trying hard not to laugh, because laughing would really degrade how serious she was acting. “They wore pearl necklaces.”
Rogue started giggling – or as close to giggling as massive bear can get. “Pearl... necklace? Like...?”
“Oh right, of course he understands that. Shut up and go calm King down, will you? I can’t handle this idiot. I went to bed with him pacing, woke up to him pacing.”
Suddenly, the look on Rogue’s face got a bit stormier, more worried. “They were gone all night?”
“I guess?” she shrugged. “They went out, they never called. They live half a block away.”
Speaking of things working out, when it came time to get out of the hotel, it just so happened that Jill’s friend had a line on a handful of row houses that backed up to a little pond. It wasn’t cheap, but it was doable. Then again, they hadn’t actually finished buying them yet. The closing date for the mortgage was in a week and a half, and Jill wasn’t entirely sure what to do about a couple of bears who were citizens of the United States in only the strictest sense, one of whom had taken almost a month to leave behind his penchant for loincloths.
Rogue nodded, but his eyes were still dark. “This could mean trouble,” he growled. “They wouldn’t stay out all night. Not unless—”
“They... got drunk and passed out on someone’s couch? They’re the same age as people graduating from college. And, being honest with you – which probably will say a lot about our colleges – they’re probably more responsible than most of those.”
Rogue grunted a laugh.
“I just don’t understand!” King threw his hands up in the air. “How could they have been kidnapped like this? How did we let them out of our sight?”
“That’s quite a step,” Rogue side-mouthed, to Jill. “King,” he called out, “they’re cubs. Both of us did things just as irresponsible when we were... Okay, probably you didn’t. I certainly did, though.”
“And that’s supposed to calm my storming nerves? My roiling stomach?”
Rogue let out a sigh and placed his hand on his sworn brother’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said, consciously calm. “There’s almost no chance they’ve been kidnapped. No one knows where we went, no one has been watching us, and no one has followed any of us anywhere.”
Jill sauntered into the room, nursing a cup of coffee she’d plucked off the countertop. “GlasCorp headquarters is halfway across the country.”
The word stung her throat. GlasCorp – the shadowy, mysterious organization that on the surface was a simple pharmaceutical company – turned out to be in an even darker business. They’d been the ones to kidnap the Broken Pine clan, and done horrific experiments on them, leaving Rogue and King alone with the cubs. Understandably, the two bear alphas were both rather... cautious, to put it lightly, about the possibility of their having been found.
“Draven is safe, brother,” Rogue said flatly. “If anyone was being hunted, it’d be him. And he makes no secret of himself, at least, not so far as I could tell. He seemed unconcerned. Perhaps we should calm down?”
King resumed pacing, shrugging Rogue’s hand off his shoulder. “You calm down,” he growled. “You be calm. I’ll be realistic.”
“He’s starting to sound like you,” Jill said to Rogue. “Can’t blame me for the fretting.”
Rogue narrowed his eyes and moved past her, once again grabbing King by the shoulder. “Why are you so worried? Explain that, at least.”
“Because!” the larger alpha shouted. “Because they’ve never left like this! They’ve never gone quiet and not called, not answered. Something is wrong, Rogue. No matter how badly you want to think it hasn’t, something has gone wrong. I feel it in my bones.”