Wolf's Pack (Wolves Next Door #3) - Auryn Hadley Page 0,192

me to turn my back, so maybe she'd faked the submission? Not that it mattered. I still knew I'd won. It may have taken longer if she'd kept fighting, but I would've still won.

Once we were both clean, Seth guided me to Lane's bed. I fell into it still wrapped in a towel. Seth lay naked beside me, and then Lane took his turn. While he was still in the shower, Trent came to join us. Pax arrived just as Lane turned off the water. When Lane walked out of the bedroom, he paused at the sight of all of us lying naked in his bed - and then the front door opened.

"In here!" Lane called out.

Ian made his way in with wet hair of his own. "Hey, I stopped by your place to get..." He chuckled when he rounded the corner and saw us. "Seems we all had the same idea." Then he flicked a finger at Lane. "Your bed. Might as well carve out your spot. I'll be right back."

"Where are you - " I tried to ask.

But Lane wedged himself in beside me. "Know what I think?" he asked. "My room is big enough for one of those super-sized king beds. If we moved things around, it could become yours. A nice place where you could have as many or as few of us here as you wanted. Sometimes to sleep, others to, well..." He chuckled. "Do other things."

"Move Gabby into mine," Trent said. "It's right by the bathroom upstairs, and it's pretty private for the hall. Also harder to sneak in Roman if he has to walk through all of us."

"I could make the den into another room," Lane pointed out. "Would just need to fix up some walls." He paused as Ian returned, then kept going. "It's not like we really use that space, right? It's empty unless we have company."

"Guys?" I asked. "Are you trying to say something? I mean, I live next door."

"We have more room," Seth pointed out. "And I like you always being with us."

"I miss you when you're not," Pax added.

Ian just moved to the foot of the bed. "It makes sense, doesn't it? I know next door doesn't seem that far, but sometimes it feels like miles. I love seeing you half asleep in the morning - even if you didn't spend the night with me. I want this thing between us to be a little more permanent, Elena. We all do."

I heard him. I really did, I just wasn't quite sure where he was going with this. "Are you asking us to move in?"

"No," he breathed, casting his eyes across the rest before crawling up to sit beside my legs. Then he turned his hand to reveal a small white box. Slowly, he opened the hinged top. "Elena, I'm asking you if you'll marry us."

"All of us," Lane added. "Legally him, but to the pack, it would be all."

"I know it's kinda soon after your divorce," Seth added, "but we're all sure."

"And if this house isn't big enough," Pax told me, "we can build one just for us. Even when Ian retires, we still want us to be together."

"But if we stay here," Trent pointed out, "then when Gabby's old enough to move, she can have your place. Right next door, so we'll always be there to help but not prevent her from growing up."

I had to scoot back and sit up so I could see them all. The whole time, my eyes hung on the pair of rings in the box. A perfect princess-cut stone was the most obvious. It was yellow, but in a shade that almost perfectly matched Lane's eyes. It was the color of a wolf, I realized. Then there was the band that went with it. Five stones, made obvious by the alternating aqua color and clear diamonds, curved around it. The set was amazing, small enough to be tasteful, large enough to be impossible to miss, and designed in a way that fixed everything that had ever bothered me about my first one.

"You want to marry me?" I asked, knowing I sounded like a parrot. "What about Gabby? I need to talk to her first."

"We asked," Ian assured me. "Before we bought the ring, we asked her permission. Elena, I also asked if she'd consider allowing us to adopt her if you said yes. She agreed. Dad can handle all of the legal paperwork, and Gabby will officially become a Langdon, but