Between a Bear and a Hard Place(19)

After a short pause, Stone stood up, right next to the other bear. Fury was wirier, slightly wilder looking, with a more harshly angled face. Next to him, Stone stood taller, and was thicker around the shoulders, waist and legs. When they both looked in Claire’s direction, she couldn’t help but be taken in by the sparkling, shimmering, impossibly entrancing eyes that they shared.

“Why do you both have the same eye colors?”

The two bears exchanged a glance. “Not sure,” Fury said.

“Never noticed,” Stone added, a little quicker than was probably necessary. “That’s odd.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

There it is again, Claire thought. That birthmark. What the hell is going on with this birthmark? Once again it was tingling, and once again she had no idea why. “What is it?” she asked again. “What are you trying to hide? Why did I get all tingly back there and suddenly have all that courage and strength? Oh my God, I killed someone!”

It hit her, one thing after another. It was like a landslide of memories piling into Claire’s head and then running down, out of her ear and pooling on the floor at her feet. There was too much to process, too much to think about. And was it all true, anyway? Or was her memory playing strange tricks on her and in a few seconds, she’d sit, bolt upright in her lonely, empty apartment, just like always?”

“I’m the one who killed him,” Fury said. “If it helps ease your mind any.”

Heat flushed Claire’s cheeks. “No! No, it doesn’t. He’s still dead, he was still my boss, and people are going to come looking for me. If I go back, I’ll go to jail or, or fucking prison or wherever it is I’m going to go. I didn’t want any of this,” she protested. “I didn’t ask for it, didn’t dream about it, I just got a call over the PA, and went downstairs. I figured I was going to copy some bullshit off a clipboard and go back up to my desk and back to reading about Kim Kardashian’s sex life and screwing up the thirty-eighth level of Candy Crush.”

Both bears were looking at her with a slightly confused, but mostly concerned expression. “Candy...?” Fury started, Stone put his hand on the other bear’s shoulder as he shook his head.

But her heart was racing as quickly as her thoughts. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked, her hands shaking and her hair hanging limply in front of her sweat-streaked face. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“We had to escape,” Stone said. “And we weren’t going to leave you. After the mess Fury made, the only way out was the way we took.”

With a huge, deep breath, Claire let out a long, trailing sigh. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? And why can’t I stop imagining the two of you naked? I mean, aside from the fact that you are.”

The racing words kept her thoughts on track. “Why can’t I stop thinking about being with you two? I’m not that kind of girl, you know, I’m not the sort who just shacks up with whatever comes her way. Hell, I’m not the sort that even dates anyone more than twice because I can’t stand the idea of settling down and—we have got to get back to town because I have to take care of Cleo, she’s my dog, and—”

Before she could finish her tirade, Fury grabbed her wrist, yanked Claire to him and enveloped her mouth with his. Whiskers rasped sweetly on her lips as she desperately, urgently kissed him back, sucking at his lips and letting his tongue swirl into her mouth, against hers.

“I’ll get your dog,” Fury breathed into her. “But can she wait for a little longer?”

As she nodded, Claire’s breath seemed to come quicker and hotter and shallower, and when she felt his heartbeat reverberating through her body, she almost lost control. She scratched at him, not to try and get him away but because that was the only thing she could think to do to keep her hands busy as this beautiful man ravaged her with kiss after kiss.

The brush behind them scratched at her ankles. Moments later, she felt the rough, crackly bark of an old oak tree scratch her back through her shirt. The cotton hung up on the trunk, her shirt slid up her back. Hands – but not Fury’s – warmed her bared skin from behind. Stone was on the other side of the huge tree, his arms wrapped around it, his hot fingers leaving streaks of heat where he explored Claire’s belly and just a little further down.

She pulled a deep breath through her nose as Fury hungrily sucked at her lips, feeding off her kiss. The scent of man – of musk and earth and sweat and wood smoke – filled her nose, then her lungs. When she finally let out that breath, it trembled from her lips. Opening her eyes for the first time in what felt like eternity, she found Fury staring straight back, his golden eye and green eye both shimmering in the shadows.