"Oh my God. You guys are…" Ollie shook his head and stepped back, letting his second-oldest cousin into the room, then peering after him into the hall. "You left Charlee behind?"
"She's in the middle of the breakfast rush," Steve said guiltily. "If I'm not back in fifteen minute she's going to eviscerate me."
"She'sworkingthe day before her wedding?" The question chorused from everybody in the room as Ollie closed the door.
Steve grimaced. "She wasn't going to, but she finds cooking soothing and she's really freaked out about the gazebo right now."
"It'll befine," Ollie said. "Tiffany won't let you down."
"I told her Tiffany's your mate and that reassured her a little," Steve said, back to being guilty. "I mean, she's in the family chat, but the voice message disappeared before she could see it, so?—"
Someone else knocked on the door. Several someones, from the sound of it. Ollie froze again, and this time did glance through the peephole.
To his intense dismay, none of the people outside the door were Tiffany. Theywerehis mother, aunt, and uncle, who allhad exactly the same eager expression his cousins had arrived with. He opened the door and said, "Yes, mymate," before any of them could speak, and watched their faces run through crestfallen at not getting to ask, amusement that he'd beaten them to the punch, and then outright laughter as they realized his hotel room was chock full of large men. "Go ahead," Ollie said with resignation. "Come on in."
His father had been the koala shifter in the family; his mother, Lily, was a true human, about five eight and silver-haired these days. Her sister Heather, Oliver's aunt and mother of the Torben brood, wore her short hair blonde and had biceps almost as good as Tiffany's, from carrying beer steins for forty years. His uncle Pete was a burly grizzly shifter who had passed his size on to all his sons. They all crowded in, with Aunt Heather saying, "So your Tiffany, does she have any sisters?" brightly as she squeezed toward the back of his room.
"I told you!" Laurie caroled.
Ollie half-yelled, "No! She's an only child like me! Which means she's not used to dealing with a hundred people stuffed into five square meters!"
A brief silence fell while the Americans—who were everyone but himself and his mother—tried to convert that into numbers that made sense to them, and then Aunt Heather sniffed. "Please, this is a very comfortable hundred and fifty square feet or so. In fact, I think it's bigger than Pete's and my room."
"Itoldyou to book the rooms earlier, Mom," Steve said with a note of real anguish. "Virtue's gotten more tourists ever since what's his face, the fashion designer, came home for a while. People are still hoping they'll see another celebrity land a helicopter in the town square!"
"This is a much more exciting town than anybody mentioned," Ollie said into the general cacophony. The entire clan had all started talking at each other, mostly about thelimited number of hotel rooms, but also about fated mates, breakfast service at Steve's gastropub, and whether the celebrity in question had actually landed the helicopter on the lawnhimselfor if it had been a different pilot.
Steve, looking guilty again, cast Ollie an apologetic look and tilted his head to indicate he was going to make his escape. Ollie nodded a goodbye—the last thing Steve needed was his bride having another reason to be upset—and took a moment to consider the rest of the family, who completely failed to notice that Steve had left.
They probably wouldn't notice if he went and took a shower, either, even if they were all inhishotel room. He snagged clothes out of the closet—nobody else he knew used the closets when they stayed in hotels, but Ollie preferred to have his things tidy and put away—went into the bathroom, showered, dressed, and came back out again with wet hair. The discussion had moved on, and now everyone was discussing whether they should go over toHold My Bearfor breakfast or whether the hotel's breakfast would do. Ollie said, "It doesn't seem like adding work to Charlee's plate would be very nice," into the general noise, which immediately started a debate on whether that was true or not.
His mum slid him a little sideways grin, then squeezed through the family gathering to murmur, "There's areasonI moved to Australia," which made Ollie laugh.
"They couldn't have been that bad back then," he replied as quietly. "Only Bill and Steve had even been born then, right?"
"Don't forget your uncle Pete has two brothers and two sisters," his mum whispered. "Believe me, it was alot. Even before I knew they were bears! Congratulations, sweetie. I can't wait to meet her. Tiffany, right?"
Ollie snickered. "Tiffany Wright."
"That's what I said."
"No, w-r-i-g-h-t, her last name is Wright."
"Oh. Oh!" His mother laughed, too. "Oh. Well, look, that's a good way to start off a relationship: you know she's always Wright."
Oliver laughed out loud, which somehow still didn't drown out the sounds of the rest of his family's enthusiastic debates over…everything. Literallyeverything, he thought. He was looking for a polite way to get them out of his room when his phone buzzed. He picked it up to read a list from an unknown number that beganmatcha latte,2 black coffees, 1 black coffee with sugar,and went on for another nine drinks. He stared at it a moment, baffled, then yelped loudly enough to finally get the attention of his extended family.
"Out!" He held up the phone, not that anybody could see the screen. "Everybody out! I have a coffee delivery to make!"
A theatrically dramatic gasp ran through the room, and then, to his relief and amusement, everybody flooded out, leaving him to collapse on the bed in relief for three entire minutes before he got up to get coffee for Tiffany's crew.
CHAPTER 11
Sunrise came early in upstate New York in June. Like, much too early to actually have the crew on the jobatsunrise. Not because they wouldn’t—Tiffany had never met a construction worker who didn’t like overtime—but because heavy equipment and power tools at 5:30 a.m. wouldn’t go over well with the locals no matter how much one of them needed the gazebo the next day.
Six a.m., though, that was fair game. Mostly because the town square didn’t seem to have very much in the way of actual housing around it. There was the B&B up at the corner, but one end of the square was mostly the town hall, and the other end was dominated by the church. The left side had the long row of businesses stretched along it, including Kate's Cafe, and the right side, where the B&B sat up on the corner near the town hall, had a scattering of other businesses and some homes.
So with apologies to the people at the B&B and the handful of other homes, Tiffany’s team got busy at six. Measuring, mostly, because that wasn’t loud. Some hammering, which wasn’t too bad. By seven, when people other than early-morning joggers were starting to move around town, the team was just aboutready to get the new beams cut, including for the roof repairs the town planner had asked them to do.
