The Dragon’s E-Mail Order Menage

“I don’t know about you,” he practically yelled, rummaging around in his things as he spoke, “but I feel good. This is the best damn feeling I’ve ever had.”

“Ditto,” Hudson muttered lazily beside her, a yawn at the end of the sentence making the effect complete.

“Come on, you two lazy fu*kers, get up! It’s not time to sleep yet.”

Maggie and Hudson looked at each other and rolled their eyes exaggeratedly before reluctantly sitting up. When they looked at Levi he was holding a bottle of very old, very expensive tequila with three cups and a grin on his face.

“I thought we might celebrate. Maybe it’s just me, but I think this whole thing is going to be fu*king fantastic.”

***

In some ways, things went back to being the same as they were before the three shifters had taken their trip out to the tent rocks. In many other ways, things would never be the same again, couldn’t have been even if they had wanted them to be. That felt good to Maggie, it felt right. It would have been strange if they had come home and had to go through the process of getting to know each other all over again as if the weeks before the tent rocks had never happened, but it would also have been pretty weird if they had gone and nothing had felt altered.

That hardly seemed possible. At least for her, that had been a night of exploration and it had changed something inside of her for the better. That was something she would always carry inside of her.

That change, however, was not the only thing she brought back with her from that trip. Along with flashbacks of her titillating carnal experience with Levi and Hudson that could stop her in her tracks and cover her head to toe in a fevered blush, there was also the memory of the feeling she had gotten when she had first kissed Hudson. That feeling had only grown after she had taken him inside of her and now her completely certainty gnawed at her constantly, such a persistent internal voice that she sometimes felt like it might actually drive her insane.

Hudson was an alpha. She had little to no doubt about that and the only doubt she did have arose from the fact that she had no reason for knowing that; she had no proof aside from her feeling and that might not mean much to the concerned parties in  the matter.

Well, that might not be true, at least not entirely true. There was also the legend, the one that she had been told since she was a little girl. Maybe her mother had told her the story so often because it reminded her of the old country and maybe she had told her because she, little Maggie (believe it or not, which she was sure most people wouldn’t), was a direct descendent of royalty. Either way, Maggie had grown up hearing the legends of how the great dragon people would fall from grace and slowly start to slip from existence.

It would be a heartbreaking process, one in which their once great lineages slowly died out and dwindled down until the dragon people as a whole were snuffed out like a light. The thing that would save the dragon people would be a union unlike any that had been seen before. It would be a union that brought together the dark and the light. Those two things would be forged by the queen of fire. The queen of fire and her two prince lovers would be the ones to restore balance to the dragon people and their offspring would be what began to replenish the population.

Now, Maggie wasn’t completely delusional and she wasn’t so arrogant as to believe with one hundred percent certainty that she could be considered anything that was referred to as a queen of fire. But on the other hand, there were too many similarities for her to get it out of her head and after exhausting all of the resources available to her in the extensive Phipps library, Maggie knew that there was only one source that could truly shed light on this for her.

She just needed to talk to Levi and Hudson before utilizing that source, and that was something she was kind of sort of dreading. She didn’t want to do it, but after a few days it became clear to her that this was something she wouldn’t be able to just let go of (she could be the most stubborn woman alive, given the correct circumstances) and so one morning she finally bit the bullet, decided to talk to her two lovers over breakfast.

“Hey guys, I was wondering if I could run something by you.”

“Sure, ask away,” Levi answered without seeming to give it any thought or even to look up from his paper. Hudson was a different story though, and he looked at her with veiled, slightly concerned eyes.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Jesus, brother, why do you jump straight to the idea that something is wrong? Nothing’s wrong, right, Maggie? Go on, tell him nothing’s wrong before he gives himself an ulcer.”

“No,” she said carefully, wanting to choose her words wisely, “nothing is wrong, but I do need to do something and I wanted to ask the two of you if it would be all right.”

“Okay, shoot. What is it? What do you need?”

“I need to go home.”

That seemed to get Levi’s undivided attention. He put his paper down immediately and stared at her as if he couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of her mouth. She cringed, wishing she hadn’t needed to say anything at all, and looked at Hudson to see if he was just as unhappy. There she found some slight relief. He still looked thoughtful but he didn’t look angry at all and he was even nodding at her slowly like he understood. So she had one of them in her corner, which was good. She had a feeling Levi wouldn’t be quite as easy to convince.