Chapter 15

The first thing Tiffany thought was exactly the first thing she said: "Oh my God, you actually have an inner koala, that"s not fucking fair! My inner corgi is just imaginary!"

There was probably something else she should say. Something smart. Something insightful. But her brain was mostly caught up in "that isn"t fair!" and she was honestly having a hard time getting past that. Her boyfr—uh, her new friend, they surely weren"t in boyfriend/girlfriend territory yet (although she didn"t know what territory "so I"m a koala" fell into, to be honest)—anyway, whatever he was to her, he"d just turned into a koala, and…

And mostly, yeah, mostly Tiffany just thought that was outrageously unfair. She wanted to turn into a koala. Or a corgi. Something small and cute and fluffy, anyway. She had the incredible urge to pick the little bear-thing up and hug it, although she didn"t know if koalas liked hugs.

Of course, humans did, and this koala was also a human.

She had never had the opportunity to try to read a koala"s expression before, but she was pretty certain this particular koala currently looked relieved. "Do you—wait, can you talk?"

The koala shook its—his?—head no. For all she knew, that wasn"t something regular koalas could even do, any more than they could look relieved. "Then come back. Do your whole family turn into koalas? Oh my God! Can you teach me to turn into a corgi?!"

Ollie did come back, sitting in the exact same position he"d been in. He definitely looked relieved, although also apologetic at the last question. "I"m sorry, but no. You"re a true human, and I"m a shifter. It"s not something that can be taught."

"Aw, man!" Tiffany took that in stride, sort of. Somehow she was taking Ollie being a koala in stride, so maybe finding out she wasn"t secretly a corgi wasn"t that bad. "Wait, so does that mean the rest of them are or aren"t koalas? Oh my God. This is why you were laughing at me with the whole inner koala/corgi thing. Because you really are a koala. Wait, so are the rest of them?"

"I wasn"t laughing at you," Ollie protested. "I was wondering if I could explain it. And no. Most of them are grizzlies." Now he sounded both apologetic and also possibly a little embarrassed.

Tiffany stared at him a moment, then laughed. "The Torbens? They"re all grizzlies? That makes sense. I mean, that"s waaaaaaay too much bear for me, I"m not gonna run with the grizzlies, but that makes sense. They"re all huge. Holy shit. You…wait." Her heart lurched and tightened up all at once, sending a thrill of excitement and nervousness through her. "You said…what did you say? Fated…mates? Does that mean we"re…what does that mean?"

"It"s just what we call the person we"re supposed to be with." Ollie spoke so very softly, like he was afraid he might spook her. Given that she hadn"t fallen out of the dozer when he"d turned into a koala, she didn"t really know what he was worried about, but she loved his soft-spoken intensity anyway.

Loved it. She would have said that was impossible, even though she"d felt an incredible connection to him from the moment they"d met. Her hands were trembling with emotion. She had been perfectly happy as she was, but now she felt like she was on the verge of something so much more incredible that she thought she might fly apart with it.

Ollie, still very gently, went on, saying, "Our animal selves know, when we meet our mates. Our partners, if you like that word better. We know that we"re meant to be with that person. I know it"s a lot, Tiffany, so if you want to take a step back?—"

Tiffany threw herself forward into his arms. Ollie caught her with a grunt, his hands big and warm and comforting on her back, and his smile something she could feel against her hair. "I guess you"re not stepping back?"

"Why would I want to step back when I have you to step forward with? It"s real?" Tiffany moved back a little, trying to see Ollie more clearly, but she also didn"t want to let go of him. "This is really real?"

"It really is." He brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek, then framed her face in his hand and brushed his mouth against hers as gently as he"d moved the hair away. "So we may have to work out the details, but I"m never leaving you, Tiffany. Not if I have any choice in the matter. You, we, don"t have to grasp this one desperate night together because it might be all we have."

"What if we want to?"

Ollie smiled, his eyes suddenly bright in the streetlights. "That"s a different matter entirely."

"Excellent." Tiffany bit her lower lip, examining him from up close. "I have an important question."

"I can"t wait to hear it."

"Where do your clothes go?"

He laughed. "They go with me. Even my glasses."

"Mmmhmm. Can you make them not do that?"

Oliver made a thoughtful face, then laughed. "I might be able to, but I need you to think about that whole suggestion. Because I get what you"re going for. Sexy shifter suddenly naked beneath you, is that it?" At Tiffany"s eager nod, his grin got bigger. "Right. Yes. It sounds great. Except for the part where I have to turn into a koala to make the clothes vanish. I"m pretty confident that you don"t want to find yourself sitting in a koala"s lap, no matter how briefly."

"Oh! Oh no!" Tiffany recoiled. "Everything else aside, I"d squish you!"

"Everything else aside," Oliver agreed. "So maybe we should just get rid of the clothes the old-fashioned way?"

"Yes. Well." Tiffany nuzzled his mouth, suddenly hungry for a kiss. "Well, if you want to know the absolute truth of the matter…"

"I do." Ollie lifted his hands from around her waist to her face, meeting her mouth with his. More an offer than taking control, Tiffany thought, and remembered, with a vivid flash, that he"d promised to do anything she wanted him to, or something enough like that to count. She slid her hands to his face in turn, deepening the kiss, feeling him shiver and relax beneath her, accepting her desire as his own. When she had him gasping and lifting his hips beneath hers, she smiled against his mouth.

"The truth is that I wasn"t really planning on taking many clothes off in the first place. Can"t have public indecency in a nice town like Virtue, right?" Tiffany slid her hand between their bodies, finding the fastener for his slacks.

Ollie"s hips rose again and a thrill of excitement set Tiffany"s entire body alight with need and desire. He whispered, "There"s no public here," hopefully, and she nipped at his lower lip, still smiling.

"No, but we"re pretending. So we have to be discreet." She unzipped his fly and explored his underwear with her fingertips, making him gasp and throw his head back with hopeful excitement. Tiffany kissed his throat, then pushed aside both his underwear and her own so she could claim him with the slick heat of her body. Ollie cried out, trying to muffle the sound, and she covered his mouth with another kiss, listening to his gasps and feeling the desperate strength of his hands on her hips as they moved together with increasing urgency.

They were both laughing with the desperation to remain quiet as their pleasure crested together, arms wrapped tightly around each other as if they were promising one another that they would never let go. Tiffany felt as if she floated in a haven of safety, completely happy and sure of herself, of him, of everything in her world. She mumbled, "Perfect," against Ollie"s skin, and for a while, was happy to drift there.

Then her knee started to ache from being crammed into the back corner of a bulldozer"s seat, and, with another soft laugh, she kissed Ollie again and whispered, "Come on. I bet we can find somewhere more comfortable to spend the rest of the night."

"I think that"s an amazing idea." Ollie sounded like he, too, was floating. "As long as it"s your room, because my entire family knows my room number."

Tiffany fought off laughing out loud, and brought him back to her room for the night.

When her alarmwent off at 5:30 a.m., Tiffany could in no way realistically pretend she"d slept. Napped, maybe. She wasn"t sure if it counted as a nap, exactly, when it happened between two and five in the morning, but given how groggy she felt, she was absolutely confident it couldn"t be counted as sleep.

Ollie, who had obviously not had even one minute more sleep than she had, made a sad bewildered sound when her alarm went off and she rolled out of bed. Tiffany bounced off a wall on her way to the bathroom, grunted an agreement to his sadness, and sat on the toilet much longer than she needed to because she couldn"t remember what she was supposed to do next. She was almost certain she knew this one. She did it every day. Get up, go to the bathroom…

Shower! Right. Showering. That was important. Tiffany was almost sure she hadn"t fallen asleep on the toilet while trying to figure that out. Ollie, from the bed, croaked, "Is there a reason you"re up at dawn?"

"Uh-huh." It took two tries to remember how to turn the hotel shower on, and a blast of cold water narrowly missed Tiffany"s head when she finally managed it. "Thingy. Inspection. Gazebo." She didn"t even know if Ollie could hear her over the shower, but she crawled into it anyway and mashed her face against the wall, leaning and letting the hot water slowly wake her up.

The scent of coffee met her when she turned the water off several minutes later. Her heart actually leaped, and she emerged from the bathroom with more enthusiasm than she"d imagined possible. "Did you make coffee? You"re my hero!"

Ollie was sitting cross-legged in rumpled bedclothes, shirtless and curled around a cup of coffee, himself. His hair was a disheveled mess, and because his glasses were on the bedside table, he gave her a sleepy, squinting smile. "It"s terrible. Instant stuff. But it is caffeinated."

Tiffany picked up her cup, took a sip, and, with genuine sincerity, said, "This might be the best cup of coffee I"ve ever had." It was all right, as far as instant coffee went, but he"d gotten up and made it for her, which made it better than ambrosia. "Thank you. Why are you drinking caffeine at this hour? You could go back to sleep."

"It takes more than half a cup of instant coffee to keep an Australian from going back to sleep," Ollie promised. "We like our coffee strong. Although I"m supposed to be up by seven for the wedding breakfast anyway."

"Who does a wedding breakfast? Especially after how much food there was last night?" Tiffany felt herself waking up by the sip, and when she"d finished the coffee, came over to kiss Ollie. "Thank you. I think I can function now. Tell Charlee we"ll have the whole thing ready for her by noon, or I"ll…I don"t know. Eat my hat, or something."

"Your hat is hard," Ollie said in dismay. "You"d break your teeth."

Tiffany laughed. "Then we better get the job done."

She wasn"t actually surprised,fifteen minutes later, to find that the bulk of the repairs had been completed the night before. She was almost certain her crew had knocked off at sunset, like they"d been told. But that had given them another four hours or so to work after she"d left, and the truth was, in the grand scheme of things, rebuilding a gazebo wasn"t hard.

All that was really left was some minor feature work and repainting the whole thing. Tiffany crawled around all the scaffolding, checking the work but smiling the whole time. They"d done good work, which she"d expected, but which still pleased her. She did take a minute to go wipe down the bulldozer"s seat, and by the time her crew showed up at seven, she"d hand-cut a bunch of trim and beveling, and was back on the scaffolding, nailing pieces into place. "Sure, now you show up," she called. "Here I am, working my fingers to the bone from dawn, and you lazy guys just wander in hours later…!"

That got exactly the kind of mock-offended "And who left early last night?" kinds of responses she was hoping for, and everybody was in great spirits even before Ollie showed up at a quarter after eight with another dozen coffees to hand out to the team.

They were taking the scaffolding down by then. Eric and Parker had already started the new paint job on the far side of the gazebo, where they hadn"t smashed it, but everybody stopped to come have coffee, and Pauline eyed where the guys had started painting. "Do we have to repaint the whole thing?"

"Obviously." Eric sounded shocked. "If we don"t, the side with the new paint will be much brighter and newer than the other side, and that won"t be any good at all."

"I"m just sayin" it better be the fastest-drying paint known to man," Pauline muttered.

"We don"t have to do the floor or most of the railings right now," Eric argued over his coffee. "It"ll be touch-dry for the wedding, and nobody"s going to be walking on the new paint. It"ll be fine, and we can finish it later and then we can put safety fencing up around the gazebo for a couple weeks while it finishes curing."

Pauline looked faintly annoyed, as if this was all an excellent argument that she hadn"t considered, and she hated being wrong or caught out about things. Tiffany laughed. "No fighting, kids. Thank Ollie for the coffee, instead."

A dozen people said, "Thank you, Ollie," politely, and Tiffany grinned at him. "Thanks, yes. I didn"t expect coffee today."

"I figured everybody deserved it." Ollie beamed down at her. "By the way, I have an invitation to extend to you and your crew."

Everybody had started moving back toward their work, coffees in hand, but they all paused and looked back at him, curious. "Charlee and Steve would like you all to come to the wedding this afternoon," Ollie said happily. "You"ve gone to a massive amount of trouble to get this sorted for them, and they"d like you to be there to celebrate with them."

Absolute astonishment broke out over the crew. Somebody said, "But we broke it!" and Ollie laughed.

"I know, but look, it was an accident and you really have gone out of the way to fix it. It"d really make them happy, so…think about it?"

"You know the fanciest clothes most of us have with us are clean jeans, right?" Pauline asked dubiously.

"It"s an outdoors afternoon wedding with people who think inviting the construction crew at the last minute is a good idea," Ollie retorted. "I think whatever you"ve got to wear will be good."

"Well, hell," Parker said into the following silence, "I guess we better get this show on the road, folks. We"ve got a wedding to go to!"

Within thirty seconds, everybody"s coffee was finished and they were back on the job, the scaffolding coming down as fast as Tiffany had ever seen it, and the paint going up with skill and patience. A couple of the crew started taking down the safety fencing, and Tiffany, smiling, turned to Ollie. "Was this your idea?"

"It wasn"t! But I thought it was a good one." His eyebrows furrowed above the rims of his glasses. "But I"m not sure I can exactly ask you to the wedding as a date. I"m actually performing the ceremony."

Tiffany"s own eyebrows shot up. "You"re a priest?"

"What? God, no! I got one of those online ordination things so I could do it! We thought it"d be cool!"

"Oh." Tiffany laughed. "Well, I guess I"ll just go stag to the wedding and see if I can hook up with a hot online ordained minister later."

"I assume you"d go corgi, not stag."

"under the circumstances, maybe I"d go koala!"

"This conversation is getting completely out of hand, isn"t it?"

Tiffany grinned up at him. "Yes. And I have to get to work, because apparently we have a wedding to go to this afternoon, so I"ll see you in a few hours."

Ollie bent to kiss her, murmured, "I can"t wait," and left her to do her job.