The Dragon’s E-Mail Order Menage

She must have just been nervous, just the same as he was, or else she would have known why he knew who she was. Fu*k. This whole thing was going much differently than he had expected it to. That was the thought that kept running through his mind. Weren’t shifters supposed to be a little bit more suave than this? A little bit more together and above the relationship style bullsh*t that felt like being thrown straight back into high school?

 Levi had that “it” factor that most shifters had. He was an alpha, so there was that. Most people, when people thought about shifters at all, didn’t consider the idea of dragon shifters having alphas, but they did. Sh*t, even humans had alphas. They just weren’t willing to admit it because they didn’t like how much like animals it made them feel. They didn’t like thinking about the fact that they weren’t as much better and set apart as they liked to tell themselves.

But dragons had hierarchies just like any other group and that included alphas. Levi had come from a long line of alphas and he had all of the money and confidence that came along with that. He and his parents didn’t always see eye-to-eye, a lot of which centered around their unhappiness with the life decisions he had made (or failed to make; they wanted him to get himself a wife and an heir and they wanted it sooner rather than later), but he had been set up with the trust fund to end all trust funds regardless. From that he had jumped off and made his own millions and at this point he had to be richer than god. He was completely comfortable and confident in his status as an alpha.

Levi should have been the one to open the door to this girl they were bringing into their lives. Not Hudson. Not the guy who didn’t even know who his parents were, who couldn’t possibly be an alpha. He couldn’t be. There was no way he could be an alpha and feel this completely unsure of himself.

But whether he felt sure of himself or not, whether he felt like it should have been Levi answering the door and not him, Maggie was still standing there, looking at him uncertainly and every minute he spent still buried inside of his own head instead of opening up his mouth and talking was another minute for her to convince herself that she had made a mistake by coming here.

He didn’t want that and it wasn’t only because he knew it would piss Levi off if she left (a pissed off Levi wasn’t someone you wanted to deal with). She was beautiful, so beautiful it was almost painful to look at her, and he wasn’t ready for her to go. They had already taken the step of logging onto the social network and making contact. They had already taken the first step down this mail order path and there was no sense in backing out on it now. Maybe it was naïve of him, but he had a funny feeling that maybe the hardest part of the whole ordeal was over. It seemed to him that a lot of times just starting a thing was the hardest part of doing it.

“Hold on, hold on just a minute. It isn’t anything strange or anything like that. It was on the site, remember?”

“On the site?”

“Sure, on the site. You had a profile picture, same as me. That’s why I knew who you were. That’s all. It wasn’t anything weird. I wasn’t stalking you, nothing like that.”

“Oh god,” she said with an embarrassed laugh and a pretty blush that made the usually dormant dragon inside of him start to stir, “I am such an idiot.”

“Now why would you go and say a thing like that about yourself?”

“Well because, it’s true. At least in this case. You would think I would remember something like a profile picture, right? I don’t know where my head is today. I guess I’m just flustered. This isn’t the kind of thing a girl does every day. At least not this girl.”

“Ha! Well I guess that’s a good thing to know. For the record, if it helps at all, I’ve never done this before either. I didn’t even know there was a network until pretty recently. But I’m glad.”

“Glad?”

“Yup, glad. I’m glad I found the network. I don’t know. It was a stupid thing to say. I guess I meant because I got to meet you.”

Sh*t. Sh*t. He needed to stop talking. He was making a total ass out of himself and the only way to stop the bleed was to shut his fu*king mouth. He knew that much was true and he clamped his mouth closed so abruptly in response to the thought that he could hear his own teeth rattling in his head. It was a good thing he didn’t accidentally bite down on his tongue or something. With the force behind his moving jaw he was pretty sure he would have bitten it clean off.

He couldn’t even imagine what the look on his face was right now and he half expected Maggie to go running in the opposite direction the way he had thought she would right at the beginning. But instead, miraculously, she laughed, a laugh that sounded musical and genuine and like magic in his ears. Even more amazing, she was moving closer to him, moving closer to coming inside of the house. That was good. It was better than her running away. Closer to coming inside the house was good.

And that was when he realized that he hadn’t ever actually invited her inside, which made him feel like a monumental idiot all over again. Jesus, he was glad Levi wasn’t in here to watch this conversation happening. He knew he could hear it, Levi’s hearing was just about the most amazing out of any shifter around, and there was no way he wasn’t hearing how much of a mess he had made out of this whole introduction but at least there was nobody else here to actually see it.