The Dragon’s E-Mail Order Menage

He was going to stand up to his friend, the one he believed to be his alpha and his superior. Maggie knew what he must be expecting to happen. He must be expecting that one roar from Levi would send him running, but that was far from what took place. Levi did roar, but Hudson could not be moved. Instead, he seemed to expand, to grow taller until his inky black form was larger by far that Levi’s gold one. And when Hudson let out a roar in response, it was loud enough that the bridge really did shake.

Unbelievably, it was Levi who backed down. They hadn’t even gotten to the fighting part and Levi was backing down. Maggie could see by looking at them both that they knew what that meant. All of a sudden, the two shifters knew what Maggie had known for some time; that Levi wasn’t the only alpha in the household. Hudson was an alpha in his own right, and a very powerful one as well.

Emboldened by his new found position, Hudson turned to Damon and roared at him as well, a sound which prompted Damon to shift immediately back into his human form. That was it. The fight was done, and she was safe.

For a moment, the four of them stood looking at each other, stunned, unsure of how they were supposed to proceed. The thing that had just happened between them had lasted for only moments, but it might as well have been an eternity. It was astonishing to Maggie how life could plod along with nothing all that important happening for years, only to break wide open and shift irrevocably within a matter of minutes. This was one of those times. She knew, she believed they all knew, they none of them would ever be the same. They had all four learned something about themselves in this altercation, some of which would change the lenses through which they viewed their worlds. It was almost too much to take in and Maggie could feel her chest heaving with her rapid breath and for a moment, she was sure that she would faint.

 But she couldn’t do that. These men, these three brave and broken men, they all needed her in one way or another and she would not fail them. Even Damon, the one who had painted himself the adversary, needed her and looking at him now she felt a different kind of love blossoming in her heart for him. It was a platonic love.

The love of a friend, the love of one being who could not bear  to see another being’s suffering without doing something to help. Hudson and Levi, the men she had chosen to meld her life with, they could wait. In these first moments after the awful things the four shifters had almost done to each other, it was Damon who needed her the most and Damon she ran to (something made slightly more difficult by the fact that he was still shackled by the cuffs he had put her in).

“Damon, dear god, Damon, are you-well are you hurt? Are you all right?”

He was looking at the gorge, at himself as if he had never seen any of it before, as if he had no idea how it was that he had come to be here in the first place. Finally, just when Maggie was beginning to worry that he was in fact not all right, his wide, frightened eyes looked up and found hers.

“Maggie? Maggie, what is this? What am I doing? What did I just try to do?”

To her horror, she watched his face crumple like that of a small child. His lip quivered in a way that showed her exactly what he must have looked like when he was a boy, and tears began to spill over her cheeks. She didn’t even think about what she was doing. She just went to him and wrapped her arms around him, wanting him to know that it was all over now.

“Don’t, Damon. You’ll only hurt yourself. It wasn’t you. You weren’t really yourself. I know you didn’t mean it. I don’t claim to understand it, but I know it wasn’t you.”

“Maggie, that’s not love, is it? What I just did, that’s not love.”

“No,” she said quietly, breaking their embrace and looking up at him with earnest eyes, “but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have love. You’re just looking in the wrong place.”

“Do you really believe that? What if I’m just not enough for any woman? I wasn’t enough for you.”

“That’s not it. I swear, it wasn’t that you weren’t enough. I was just meant for something else. And yes, I do believe it. In fact I know it. You won’t even have to look far from home to get it, if it’s what you want.”

“I don’t get it. “

“Of course you don’t,” she laughed, grateful for things finally starting to feel light hearted. “Men never do. Can’t you think of anyone? Maybe a certain sister of mine?”

His eyes stayed blank and confused for a few more moments and Maggie thought that she was actually going to have to spell it out for him. But then she saw his eyes widen and, despite the crazy state they now found themselves in, his face redden.

“Why Damon, is that a blush I see?”

“Cali? Are you saying that Cali is in love with me? Bullsh*t.”

“Nope, no bullsh*t. She loves you, all right. You might want to think about it. She’s a good girl, strong, and she’s pretty beautiful, too. You could do a lot worse.”

“I could,” he muttered, talking now mostly to himself. She could see the wheels in his head turning and she knew, another one of her feelings, that there would be something between them. Out of the nowhere she got an image of her, Hudson and Levi around the Christmas tree with Cali, Damon and a little girl that couldn’t have belonged to anyone else but that pair. She knew then that things were going to be okay for Damon. They were going to be more than okay.

***

“Well, I’ll say one thing for you, you certainly do know how to mess with a guy’s head. You did a number on that guy!”

“Ha ha, very funny. It wasn’t me, you know.”

“What does that mean?”

Maggie, fresh out of the shower and not even bothering to put on clothes as she wandered into the living room to get a drink of water and talk to her princes. She noted with a smile that neither of them had put on actual clothing either; they had both settled on robes and even as she opened her mouth to answer Levi’s question she could feel herself getting aroused at the thought of what lay just underneath those insubstantial pieces of cloth. But she didn’t have to answer him, after all. While she was busy admiring the two men’s physiques, Hudson beat her to the punch.