Between a Bear and a Hard Place(18)

“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.”