Between a Bear and a Hard Place(86)

Hot damn, Claire thought. What the hell did I do to deserve this?

“Well,” she said. “Looks like you kept up your end.”

Stone, with his golden hair and Fury with his black waves, both came to her at once. Between them, she felt the heat from their bodies, and the ache between her legs deepened. She put a hand on either man’s chest, curling her fingernails against the mark that they all shared. “What is this?” she asked. “You said you’d tell me when the time was right.”

“The alpha’s mark,” Fury answered. “Broken Pines always have two alphas. And their mate is marked with the third.”

“But Rogue and King are—”

Stone shook his head slightly, but not taking his gaze away from Claire’s. The green eye and the gold one both glittered, boring into her soul. “We talked about it. Draven thinks that since we’d been separated for so long, our bodies just... adapted. In case one pair of us was lost, the clan would go on.”

She let her glance fall down Stone’s jaw-line to where his collarbones met. The muscles of his chest rose and fell with each breath. “When we did this before, that really was you, right? I mean I know you had that thing in you, but when I looked in your eyes, when you touched me and kissed me, it—”

“Of course it was me,” Stone said softly, kissing Claire’s ear for reassurance. “No one else – no thing else – could ache for you the way I do.”

“Well,” Fury said, “there is one other person.”

Kisses enveloped Claire, up and down both sides of her neck. A blanket of safety, of security and warmth, held her tight. Her knees shook just a little, but from pleasure instead of weakness or fear. A hand went to each of her breasts, thumbs circling her sweetly aching nipples in exact time with one another.

A soft moan escaped her lips, but not before the kisses on either side of her neck brought up a wash of goose bumps that ran all the way from her neck to her tailbone. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck bristled with the brushing of Stone’s lips against hers. She accepted his kiss, and then turned her head slightly to taste Fury’s lips.

She opened her mouth to accept his second, more urgent and desperate kiss. His tongue swirled against hers as her lip rasped against Fury’s stubble. A hand – she couldn’t be sure who it belonged to – slid up her back, cupping her head and tugged slightly on her hair. The chill that shot down her back at the mixture of pleasure and pain was enough to make Claire’s breath come in shorter, hotter bursts.

As she breathed, eyes closed, awash in the pleasure, Claire held on tight to both men’s backs to keep herself from collapsing. She breathed Fury’s name, and then Stone’s, relishing the way their names felt as they slid down her tongue.

Another kiss came, but it was from Stone. His firmer grip, his harder, more forceful kiss, pushed Claire’s head back against the wall and a moment later, she moved backward just enough to feel the prickles of texture on her bare skin. Fury pushed his tongue into her mouth again, tasting her deeply, and then ran the tip of it down her chin, down her neck, and circled her nipple teasingly before nipping.

“Ah!” Claire gasped, clutching his head to her and urging him. “Suck me, more, oh yes, oh just like that, bite more!”

With a laugh, he pinched her nipple between his teeth and flicked his tongue back and forth over the sensitive tip. As her knees trembled, she slid a few inches down the wall, her skin and her heart both burning with the fire of her passion.

“Your wetness,” Stone whispered in her ear before sucking gently behind it. “Your sex, I can’t control myself.” He was starting to groan a little more gruffly than before. His words were growing deeper, his voice wilder. “Your scent, Claire, I can’t... I want all of you, I need all of you right... now... right...”

She felt the hair on his arms grow longer, thicker and coarser. When Claire opened her eyes, she was staring into Stone’s gold and green ones, but they were more feral, fiercer somehow. His power against her sent another trill of excitement from her neck down to her toes.

“I’ve never shifted,” he growled, “without meaning to do it. I’ve never felt like this, never in my—”

“Life,” Fury finished for him. The second alpha’s teeth were suddenly sharper, more wonderfully dangerous when he nibbled gently on Claire’s pink tip.

There was nothing in the world that felt remotely close to what Claire felt right then. Soaring through the clouds in that tiny airplane, the adrenaline of a fight, the rush of danger – none of it was anything like this. She ran her fingernails through the hair on the back of Fury’s head, and the fur growing on Stone’s mighty shoulder. Her nails dragged along their skin, eliciting pleasured moans from both men.