The Wolf’s Contract Marriage by Layla Silver

Chapter 18 – Teagan

I couldn't believe we'd done it.

We'd actually saved Tavi from her evil witch of a mother.

It all seemed like a dream, but as I watched Caelum's little girl devour her hamburger and giggle as she got the hiccups, I realized it was completely true.

We went on to see the new Disney movie after the burgers and ice creams, and by the end of it all, Octavia was fast asleep in the back seat as we drove home. She looked peaceful and content, more than I'd ever seen her before.

“So,” Caelum said quietly as he pulled into the driveway, “don't you have something to tell me?”

I'd been dreading this, from the moment I promised I'd tell him everything after the court case was over. “I do,” I replied, just as quietly, “but for now, I think we should get Octavia into bed.”

“Can't argue with that.” Caelum stopped the car, but kept the headlights on while he gently extricated a sleepy Octavia from the backseat.

“When did I fall asleep?” she mumbled as she yawned and rubbed her eyes. Caelum lovingly held her in his arms while I unlocked the front door ahead of them.

“About halfway home,” I replied as I finally got the door open. “I'll go get your stuff from the car.”

“Thank you, Mommy.” I barely resisted the urge to burst into tears at being called the maternal name before I headed back out to the car. Through misty eyes, I fished Tavi's luggage out the trunk, and locked the car behind me, before heading up to the spare room that was now Octavia's.

“So Teagan is really going to be my new mommy?” I heard Octavia ask as I stopped just outside the slightly ajar bedroom doorway.

“Yes. If you want her to be, and a great one at that.” The pure determination and love in Caelum's voice was making it even harder for me to resist the temptation of bursting into loud, ugly sobs.

“Here's your stuff, Tavi,” I announced as I barged into the bedroom, stopping any more conversation that might turn me into a puddle of goo.

“Yay! Thank you, Mommy,” Tavi said as she unzipped her bag and pulled a pair of pink pajamas and a matching toothbrush out of it. Then she disappeared into the en suite bathroom, leaving Caelum and me to ourselves for a few minutes.

“Are you okay?” Caelum asked as he rushed over to my side.

“Yes, I'm fine, why?”

“You look like you've been crying.”

I ducked my head, unable to meet his eyes. “I may have gotten a little misty-eyed at being called 'Mommy'. I never thought I'd be called that, least of all by Octavia.”

“Ah.” Caelum nodded and pulled me into a tender hug. “I know the feeling. It can be a little overwhelming at first, but you get used to it.”

We stayed like that, hugging each other tightly, until Octavia reappeared, after which we pulled apart, but didn't stray far away from each other.

“Goodnight, Tavi,” Caelum said as he tucked her into her bed. “I never thought I'd get to say that to you ever again.”

Octavia sat up and kissed her father lovingly on the cheek. “Goodnight, Daddy. I love you.”

“I love you too, honey.”

I blew the little girl a kiss as Caelum walked out of the bedroom and hovered in the doorway.

“If you need us, we're right across the hall,” he said to her, and Tavi nodded sleepily.

“I know,” she murmured as she sunk deeper into her pillows.

“Goodnight,” Caelum whispered one last time, before he flicked the light off.

There was no answer from Tavi, so we crept on tiptoes into Caelum's room, and gently closed the door.

This was it. There was no more putting it off anymore.

“I have to show you something,” I told him quietly as I led him into his en suite bathroom.

“What, in the bathroom?” Caelum looked around the brightly lit room like he'd never seen it before.

“No, we're in here because I was a kid once, and I listened at doors. The last thing I want is for Tavi to overhear this.”

“Okay... you're kind of freaking me out.”

“You ain't seen nothing yet,” I replied as I pulled my shirt off and over my head in one smooth movement. Then I shucked my shoes and trousers off until I was standing in my underwear before him.

“I know you've been wanting to experiment in different rooms, but you could've just asked before stripping your clothes off.”

“This isn't about sex, Caelum,” I replied as I stepped out of my underwear. I didn't miss the hungry glint in his eyes, or the way he licked his lips.

“Could've fooled me,” he muttered as he watched me free my boobs from the confines of my bra.

“No, this is me trying to fulfill the promise I made to you in the casino. I need you to concentrate, all right? Just for a few more minutes, and then we can have as much sex as you want to. Provided you still want to have sex of course.”

“Why on earth wouldn't I want to... oh.”

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply through my nose as I willed the change to come. Shifting, for me, always came along slowly, and then way too fast. The first few times I did it, I didn't like it much, but after a while and many shifts over the years, I'd gotten used to the feeling.

“What the fuck?” Caelum breathed as I turned from a naked woman to a honey-colored wolf in the blink of an eye. “Teagan, is that you?”

I looked up at him through my wolf's eyes and nudged my head reassuringly against his hand. I could still smell his slight arousal at the sight of my naked body in the air, along with his soothing cologne.

“Holy shit. What does this mean?” he asked as he leaned down to rub between my ears.

I closed my eyes as the feeling of the itch that never went away behind my wolf ears was slowly scratched before I realized that he probably wanted some answers.

“It means,” I replied once I was back in my human form a few seconds later, “that I am a shifter. I belong to a pack, normally, but I walked away from mine when I was eighteen. The only problem now is that I'm longing to reunite with my family so much that it's like a tangible ache in my soul.”

Caelum was staring at me with his mouth open, presumably still trying to work out how I went from woman to wolf to woman again.

“I never wanted to lie to you,” I found myself saying as I picked up my underpants and looped them over my legs. “I've just never really accepted this part of myself. But a guy at the casino said something that made me reclaim my pack, and now I'm having all these... feelings. However, I promised you that I'd stick around, for both you and Tavi, and I don't break my promises.” Once my panties were resting on my hips, I picked up my bra. “I won't walk away, not if you still want me, even though you now know my true self.” I clipped the bra behind my back and bent down to scoop my shirt from the floor. “If you don't want me, however, I'll understand. I can fake my own death. I know people who can make it happen.”

“Don't bother putting on any more clothes,” Caelum growled a few seconds after I stopped talking.

“I'm sorry?”

“Stop getting dressed. Now.”

I was unable to argue with the dominating tone of his voice, so I let my shirt flutter to the floor.

“Now why would you think I wouldn't want you after you turned into that beautiful wolf right in front of my eyes?” he asked rhetorically, as he picked me up and put me on the bathroom counter. We were at the perfect height where I could feel his straining erection sitting in the perfect spot for him to enter me, if only our clothes weren't in the way.

“Some people are freaked out by shifters,” I replied with a shrug as Caelum pushed his pants and underpants to the floor in one smooth movement. I'd never seen him harder than he was in that moment. Why did me shifting into a wolf turn him on so much?

“Not me. In fact, I'm wildly turned on by you.” At first he tried to push my underwear to the side, but after he realized they were too tight to do that, he just ripped them off my body.

“I have no idea why,” I murmured in reply as I tightened my grip on the edge of the counter. I had no doubt that this was going to be something of a wild ride, in every sense of the word.

“You're gorgeous, Teagan, no matter what shape or form you're in,” Caelum replied as he traced his finger down the side of my face lovingly. “Now shut up and let me fuck you.”

I didn't reply, only opened my legs as wide as they could go.

Caelum shuffled forward and slammed into me so hard that I ended up smashing my back into the mirror on the wall behind me.

Luckily, nothing broke, but at that moment, I wouldn't have cared anyway.

“Oh, God, Caelum,” I moaned as my head fell backwards and my eyes fluttered closed with pleasure. “Don't stop.”

“I'm not going to stop until the neighbors know my name,” he replied savagely as he kept pumping in and out of me at a brutal pace.

In that moment, I had absolutely no doubt that he meant every word.

Epilogue — Caelum

After we won Octavia back from my ex-wife, life became somewhat busy, passing in a blur of packing the house up and moving to New England.

I'd decided to accept a job there, working for the mountain resort. It didn’t take Teagan very long to find a job either; as an art teacher at the local college, when she wasn’t taking care of whatever pack business was needing to be taken care of.

Pack business.

I never thought that shifters existed, but after Teagan turned into a wolf before my eyes and the red hot sex that followed... I was now a firm believer in all things supernatural, that was for sure.

Octavia was thriving and happy in New England, with our little family of three, the forest that bordered our property that she explored as much as she could, and horseback riding lessons that she insisted on before we'd even unpacked the first moving box. I couldn't have been happier that she was so happy.

“I’m so glad that matching you two on MatchMeUp worked so well,” Tavi had told us happily one morning not long after we’d settled in our new house.

I’d wanted to build our home from the ground up, but the hurried nature of us leaving Las Vegas had prevented me from doing that. So instead, we were in a roomy rental, while I worked on architectural plans for our home in my spare time.

Teagan and I exchanged astonished glances.

“What was that, baby?” I asked her in a voice hushed with shock.

“Alice got in contact with me and we came up with a plan,” Tavi continued like I hadn’t said anything. “She helped me set you and Teagan up.”

“Alice!” I slapped a palm to my forehead. “That explains why she seemed to know more about what was going on than she should have.”

“And why you, Tavi, seemed to be so accepting of me so quickly,” Teagan chipped in thoughtfully.

Octavia nodded, and grinned at each of us in turn like she was the cleverest person in the entire world.

“Well… I’m glad that’s cleared up,” I managed to say eventually. “And I’m sending Alice a damn fruit basket next time I see her.”

“Just invite her to the wedding,” Tavi replied with a naughty twinkle in her eye.

“She’s first on the list, trust me.”

A few days after Tavi’s bombshell, Teagan reunited with Ainsley and Grayson, as well as Kaia, the new pack leader. She was taking a while to settle into her new role in the pack, but was doing incredibly well all the same. Teagan was also going out for regular shopping trips with her sister, which seemed like a step in the right direction to me.

I was kept on my toes, what with preparing for breaking ground on the ski resort project. Renly, Bastian and Kaia knew exactly what they wanted, and I was trying my best to listen to their needs. So far was so good, if the way they hadn't fired me yet was anything to go by. They were all wonderful people, though, and it was great to work with people I liked, while they, in turn, respected me.

Life was busy, but happy.

When we weren't helping the pack or drawing up building plans, we were working out how we were going to get married. I only had two simple requests; that Teagan and Octavia be there. Seeing as how Teagan was my bride and Octavia was a bridesmaid, everything was working out perfectly for me.

A few weeks after we'd finally unpacked all the boxes and settled into our rental house and lives in New England, Teagan came bouncing through the front door with a massive smile on her face after another shopping trip with Ainsley.

“Hey babe,” she called, and I turned around in my swivel chair to face her, “think Tavi would like this?”

It was a pink shirt with black writing on the front. “Soon-to-be Big Sister” the shirt said, and my brain was finding it hard to process the information that was being shown to me.

“Yeah, but isn't it a bit big?” I asked stupidly.

“I bought a size up,” Teagan answered with a nod, “but Tavi's going to be bigger once the baby comes.”

“Not that much bigger.” I got to my feet and walked over to my fiancée, before I rested my hands on her hips.

“Well, it won't be that much longer.” She looped her arms around my neck and kissed me gently. “Only about eight more months or so.”

“Are you sure?”

“The stick doesn't lie. And with all the sex we've been having lately...”

“But you're on the pill?”

“They aren't one hundred percent protective,” Teagan replied with a shrug. “Are you okay with this, though?” Her confident demeanor turned into more of a worried slump of her shoulders.

“Are you kidding?” I replied excitedly as I placed my hands over her stomach, “I'm thrilled!”

Teagan grinned and kissed me again, and, not for the first time, I found myself wondering how I'd gotten so lucky.

THE END