The Dragon’s E-Mail Order Menage

“God, I’m an asshole, I never even invited you in.”

“No sir,” she said with another pretty little laugh, “you did not.”

“Would you like to? Come in, I mean? Unless you want to stand out on the front lawn, in which case you are more than welcome to do that, too.”

“No. No, inside is good. It’s an awfully nice front lawn, but inside is good.”

Progress. Slow, painful, but progress none the less, which was something to be grateful for. He stepped aside for her to pass, wondering if this experience was  turning out as intense for her as it was for him. He had been around plenty of other shifter women, of course he had. Santa Fe was a town full of them. There was a hell of a lot of history in New Mexico, plenty of history and magic in Santa Fe, and it wasn’t all because it was the enchanted state.

People wondered when they came to visit what it was about New Mexico, about Santa Fe specifically that made them feel so different than they did at any other place on earth. They wondered why they came for a couple of days and never wanted to leave again. They would never get their answers, either, because they didn’t have the first clue where to look. They would never even consider the actual answer to the feeling of magic, because it wouldn’t occur to them that it might actually be magic.

 But in reality, there was a hell of a lot more to Santa Fe than the mountains. It had been a shifter town for the better part of a century and the place was populated by more shifters than humans. There were all kinds of shifters: bears, lions, wolves. Dragons were the least common simply because there weren’t as many of them still in the world, but Hudson and Levi were not the only dragon shifters in town, but they were the only male dragons in town.

This Maggie had come from somewhere outside of Santa Fe, something that was definitely not uncommon in New Mexico. It was a place for shifters to put down roots without being bothered and without having to be tethered to a town. People didn’t bother each other here. That was something that most definitely worked in the shifters’ favor and it made it easier to live what was for them, normal lives.

Still, sometimes that life could be just a little bit lonely. Hudson didn’t know if it was normal for shifters or if he and Levi were just exceptionally picky, but he had never met a girl in town, either human or otherwise, who got under his skin the way that this girl did in only the first moments of them meeting. Did she feel it too? Was he insane, stupidly hopeful to think that she might be experiencing the same kind of shock to the system right now? For one crazy minute he thought that he was going to ask her, to just come right out with it and ask her if the feeling was mutual or one sided, but luckily he was able to get ahold of himself before he opened his big, fat mouth. That would be a really good way to bring her straight back to thinking he was totally crazy, to thinking that her coming here at all had been one colossal mistake.

“Good god, Hudson!”

“What?! What’s wrong?”

He had kept his mouth shut! What could possibly be wrong? He had kept his mouth shut despite his unfortunate tendency to hemorrhage words and yet somehow, without him having any idea what was wrong, she was exclaiming so loudly it almost made his ears hurt.

He had no idea what was wrong or how he had managed to mess things up, but he had no doubt that if they were messed up, it would somehow be his fault. In his experience when things went wrong in circumstances like this it was almost always his fault. There was one thing he knew for sure, which was that Levi wasn’t going to like it if he got her in the house only to freak her out and send her off running in the opposite direction. He wasn’t going to like it one bit.

“What? What do you mean? Nothing’s wrong, at least I don’t think it is. Why? What do you think is wrong? I’m not going to lie, you look totally freaked out right now.”

“What do you mean? I thought you were freaked out. Isn’t that why you said good god?”

“Oh man,” she laughed, so hard this time that it looked like she might pass out, “we really are off to an interesting kind of a start, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know. That depends on what’s going on here.”

“What’s going on?”

“Yup. I just need to make sure that I didn’t do something… I don’t know, just something, and then maybe I can agree with you.”

“Oh! No, you didn’t do anything wrong at all! I was just reacting to your house. It’s completely amazing! Seriously, I’ve never been inside of a house anywhere close to this nice. This is insane!”

“Uh, thanks, I guess. But Maggie-”

It was too late. Now that she was inside the house, Maggie Wallace was all of the way inside. She didn’t seem nearly so shy now that she had set her mind to exploring. Hudson wasn’t entirely sure what to do about it. On the one hand, he was thoroughly enjoying how excited she was. Her looks of delight and open admiration sure beat the hell out of the guarded, slightly afraid expression she had worn a few minutes ago when she had first arrived and before she had started to get used to the whole idea of  being there at all.

On the other hand, he wasn’t all that keen on lying to her right after first meeting her and this was not his house. Sure, he did live there, but it was in no way his house. It was Levi’s house. It was his amazing house full of his amazing things and very little, or any of it, belonged to Hudson in any kind of way. He should tell her, he needed to tell her, but then she wouldn’t look at him the way she kept glancing at him now.