The Dragon’s E-Mail Order Menage

Chapter 2

Damon Jenkins, the man (boy, there was no way she could call him a man, was there? No way she could think of him as anything other than a boy) Maggie Wallace had met at the tender age of ten. That’s right, ten, at least for her. He had been almost thirteen and she had thought he was nothing but a big bully. That was pretty standard for a ten year old girl, wasn’t it? For her to think of an older boy as just a big ‘ol bully?

And even now, thirteen years later, when she looked back on it she knew that was exactly what he had been, but she also knew the reasons for his (what she had gone home day after day and described as awful, just awful) behavior now that she was no longer a child. She had been uncommonly pretty even as a child and Damon, in the ridiculous way that was the only way teenage boys knew, had been trying to get her attention from pretty much the first moment he laid eyes on her out in the schoolyard.

There had been all of those typical interactions: him pulling on her hair, messing with her things, knocking her books out of her hands as she had passed. She had detested him, had brought that fact up frequently and with no small amount of relish, up until she hadn’t any more.

Maggie wasn’t exactly sure when things had begun to change between her and Damon. She had gone over it in her mind what felt like thousands upon thousands of times and never really been able to pinpoint the moment when the tide had turned. She didn’t know why, could not have begun to explain it if anyone had asked, but not being able to find the moment when things had started to feel different between her and Damon was something that really bothered her.

It bothered her far more than it should have and the logical part of her knew that she was being crazy, but it didn’t stop her from feeling unsettled by it. Maybe it was too much exposure to the plethora of movies that told her that the important moments stood out in life like shining beacons in the port of a storm, that the turning points of a relationship (especially the relationships that started with intense dislike before morphing into something else) were as clear as photographs.

She kept thinking those photographs must be there for her, too, some stack of polaroids put away neatly in a drawer somewhere in the back of her head where she hadn’t thought to look. But no matter how hard she looked, she just couldn’t find what she was looking for and eventually she had to accept the fact that there was nothing to find.

Not that the knowing changed things. Whether she could pinpoint the exact moment of change or not, at some point the feelings between the two of them had begun to change and by the time she was sixteen and he was nineteen she had been almost sure that the sun rose and set with every word that came out of his lips. Oh, her mother wasn’t wrong on that front. She had been beyond excited, almost in a frenzy, every time she thought there was even a chance of getting to spend time with him.

They had been engaged in the beyond intense love affair that could only truly be experienced by the young, who had just the right cocktail of over the top, out-of-control  hormones in their head to experience that “have to have you or I’m going to die” kind of relationship. Damon Jenkins, the most amazing guy she had ever met (what a funny thing for a sixteen year old girl to think; who had you really met at that age, anyway?), and he belonged to her. He was handsome in an easy going kind of way, with sandy blonde hair that always looked like he had forgotten to comb it before he got out of bed and deep blue eyes that were always lit with some kind of a joke that only he was in on. He was considerably taller than her, something that had made her feel safe, and he had the strong, muscular body of a person used to manual labor. And he was a dragon shifter, too. There was that.

“Maggie! Sugar, are you planning on staying up there for the rest of your life?”

“No, Papa, not for the rest of it.”

“Just for a couple of years?”

“I would say two, tops.”

“That’s my girl. No point in overdoing it. Still, you might want to think about coming down to for supper sometime soon. I believe I just heard Damon’s truck pulling up, and from the look I saw in your mamma’s eyes, if you don’t make an appearance soon she very well may come up there and burn the door down. You know that look.”

Maggie wiped the fog away from the bathroom mirror, looked at herself, and smiled. Yes, she did indeed know that look, and while the look itself was nothing to smile about her father’s characterization of it was. There was no other person on the planet that could have spoken about Rose Wallace like that, and with her right in the next room nonetheless, but Caleb Wallace was an exception. Caleb Wallace, the man who had given Rose his name and her children, the man who knew how to navigate the stormy weathers of a spirited woman better than most, and why shouldn’t he?

He had done so with his wife for decade upon decade and then continued to do so with his daughters. Especially with Maggie, if those overly dramatic sighs and lamentations of his were true, but it didn’t seem to bother him all that much. Quite the contrary, actually. He seemed to enjoy the feistiness of the women in his life and that made him that much easier to love. It definitely made Maggie feel better. The way her father handled things made it so much harder for her to take herself seriously, which was a good thing. Taking yourself too seriously rarely led to anything good.

“Maggie, sugar? Was that a smile I heard up there?”

“I don’t know, maybe. A small one, though, so don’t get too cocky.”

“Hey, beggars can’t be choosers, am I right? Now go on, go ahead and get yourself ready for supper. Hanging out up there isn’t going to put the world on hold, much as you might want it to.”

“I know, Papa. I’ll be right down.”