Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Broken Pine Bears Book 1) by Lynn Red Page B

species of bear or another.
    “Hmm?” he let out, in a soft, questioning grunt. “Why do I need a license to rub someone?”
    She giggled under her breath. “You don’t get out of the woods much, do you?”
    “More than my brother,” he said, his voice still absent and hollow. Rogue’s fingers dug deep into her neck and Jill whimpered softly before the knot he worked at vanished under the pressure.
    Then it hit her.
    “Brother?” she asked. There’s no way. No possible way this is...
    “Sworn brother,” he said. “We’re the Broken Pine alphas. There are always two of us to keep one from going insane and enslaving everyone. That may have been a problem in the distant past, so trust me, this way makes sense.”
    “Yeah,” Jill said. “Makes perfect sense.” She was talking to cover up her astonishment, and, for the moment anyway, it seemed to be working. “What kind of clan?”
    “Bears,” he said simply. For a moment, Rogue paused and watched her face, studying her lips, her eyes, and the curve of her earlobes. One of his thumbs slid up the back of Jill’s neck, tracing a line along the base of her skull, and then down her jaw. All the while, he stared deep into her eyes, not letting his gaze fall away. “We keep to ourselves mostly.”
    Another swirl of his thumbs on either side of her neck sent a surge of tension sliding down Jill’s neck, and again, prickled her nipples up hard and stiff. It was like a cool breeze blew across her while she was lying naked on the beach, listening to the monotonous beauty of waves crashing against a sandbar.
    Outside the forest birds sang, the leaves of the trees rustled against the small wood-framed cabin. To her surprise, another sound joined the chorus – a small, but sweet, tinkling.
    “What’s that?” she asked. “Sounds like a wind chime?”
    A smile crossed Rogue’s lips. He got up off the bed, and vanished for a second before reappearing with a delicate collection of carved chimes. “While I was waiting,” he said. “I wasn’t going to leave you while you were helpless.” He handed the instrument to Jill, who took it from him and turned it around in her hands, studying the smoothly sanded, perfect chimes.
    “How did you do this?” she asked. “Without any tools, I mean. It’s perfect.”
    “I had tools,” Rogue smiled. “The forest is its own tool, you mean machines, which you’re right, I don’t need.”
    His brusque confidence was a breath, a taste, that Jill had always wanted to experience. Back in civilization, this sort of guy just didn’t exist. Excepting, of course, the part where the guy can turn into a goddamn bear whenever he wants .
    “This is real, isn’t it?” Jill asked, out of nowhere, as she stared at the chime and slid a finger along the cool, cylindrical wood. “I’m not hallucinating?”
    “Why would you think that?”
    Jill thought about it for a second, but it was hard to put into words, especially when the reasons for not doubting him were so many and so obvious. Finally, she decided to go with the simplest path: just spurting it out.
    “It just... well okay, I’m a scientist, right?”
    Rogue nodded, slowly.
    “So I have to test things, I have to observe and fiddle with them, and see what happens.”
    Rogue smiled and narrowed his eyes in a way that warmed Jill in places she didn’t, right then, want to be warm. “I can fiddle,” he said.
    “Ha! Oh, yeah, well I’m sure you can.” Jill started talking quicker, and higher, the way she did when she was either nervous or excited, or both. “Not right now though, I have to explain this to you.”
    He paused, hovering over the side of the bed, pushed up on his huge arms. Rogue’s triceps were cut and hard, his shoulders flexed through the thin fabric of his loose-fitting open-collared shirt, and with every breath, his chest rose and fell, tight and hard and perfect.
    “So what I was saying is that, I, uh, I’m a scientist, and—”
    Rogue hushed her