by Kayla Wolf
Not that it mattered, of course. He was just here to browse.
The website informed him that the list of women’s profiles he was being shown had been carefully selected for him based on his own profile. It was surprising how many there were—women of all shapes and sizes, from all over the world… and a surprising amount from North America, too. He’d expected most women interested in this kind of mail order bride service (he couldn’t help but think of it like that, even though the website had been very clear about that not being the intention) would have been from overseas. But sure enough, here was a woman in Colorado with an arresting pair of bright hazel eyes and a smile that seemed to shine from the very center of her. Her hair fell down in waves across her shoulders—it looked incredibly soft and luscious, even in the photo, and he found himself imagining tangling his hands in it, reaching down to kiss her (according to her profile, she was a full foot shorter than him.) The image was so strong that he felt his heartbeat picking up—a little embarrassed, he kept scrolling.
But none of the other images hit him the same way, and it wasn’t long before he’d scrolled back up, curious to learn more about the hazel-eyed woman from Colorado. She worked as a PA in the fashion industry, the profile said—that would explain the gorgeous dress she was wearing—and she wanted the real thing. A man who wanted to settle down and commit to building a life together. There was an odd tingle in his body as he read, for all the world like he was about to shift into his dragon form… a kind of electric pins-and-needles feeling that almost made him worry his body was about to change forms without his consent. That hadn’t happened since he was a kid… should he be worried?
But he remained resolutely human. He finished reading the woman’s profile, taking note of her name as he did so—Jasmine, the profile said. No last name without a commitment.
And maybe it was the long, exhausting day he’d had, or maybe it was his lingering feelings of loneliness, or even the strange, dizzy, electric feeling that was still tingling across his skin… but before Bryce could even think about it, before he could stop himself from doing something so impulsive and ridiculous, he’d hit the button at the bottom of the profile that was marked, in a curly, flowing font: “Propose.”
When the confirmation that his profile had been sent to Jasmine for her approval popped up, he recoiled from his laptop as though it had shocked him. Horror sank into his gut. Had he actually just done that? Had he seen the face of a pretty woman online and sent her a marriage request? There had been a lot of terms and conditions in the sign-up section that he’d just clicked through… just what had he gotten himself into, exactly? What if she turned up on his doorstep the next day?
He forced himself to breathe, trying to find his calm. It wasn’t like him to get so panicky. It was just a silly website, that was all… nothing legally binding about it. Just a bit of fun. She’d get his profile, probably giggle over it with her friends… then press delete. Why would a woman like that, a gorgeous woman in the peak of her life with an impressive career, want to come live on the tip of a barely-inhabited peninsula in northern California?
He tabbed back into her profile, feeling the same odd tingling feeling in his skin as he looked at her pictures again. God, she was truly something… but it wasn’t just a physical attraction he was feeling, a kneejerk reaction to a pretty girl. He knew what that felt like, and while there was plenty of that here, there was something else, too. A desire to talk to her, to spend time with her… to hold her in his arms, to protect her and make sure that she was safe for the rest of her life. And along with all of that, the strangest sensation that he knew her. Not that they’d met before, but that he somehow… knew her. That they’d both been waiting all this time to come together.
”You’re losing it, Bryce,” he murmured to himself, shutting his laptop firmly and heading into the kitchen to start putting together some dinner. “Mom used to talk like that.”
His mother had been possibly the most romantic woman he’d ever met. She was obsessed with love and romance, always telling him story after story about the shifters she’d known and how they’d found their soulmates. She was a firm believer in soulmates, his mother… his father always tolerated her storytelling with amusement, smiling down affectionately at his mate as she gushed over whatever couple she was most recently enthralled with. She loved novels and plays about star-crossed lovers… he often wondered how she’d feel about Hollywood. It was a tragedy, really, that she’d passed away before cinema had really taken off the way it had.
He hadn’t thought about his mother for a long time, he realized a little guiltily as he chopped a batch of fresh vegetables from his garden. The chicken he was going to stir-fry for dinner was from the grocery store on the mainland, but he hoped that his chicken coop would soon be producing enough extra birds to feed at least a few of the members of the settlement. It was his mother who’d taught him to cook, all those years ago. He supposed in a way he remembered her every time he cooked… though she hadn’t come to his conscious mind in a long time.
What would she have thought of this website, he wondered? If she could have even made heads or tails of it, that was. Would she think it was cynical, scrolling through profile after profile to find a prospective mate? Or would she have found it romantic, another way of seeking out your one true love? And how did that work exactly, anyway? If your soulmate was out there, but you never managed to find her, then what was the point? Would you both die alone and miserable? Perhaps you’d be united in the afterlife… a kind of consolation prize for spending your lives without one another. He chuckled to himself.
Soulmate, he thought. It was just such an unlikely prospect. But if he allowed himself to believe it for a moment… did that mean that the odd pull he’d felt to Jasmine’s profile meant she was his soulmate? That there was some kind of destiny at play here? His mother would think so, he knew that much. The instant his eyes had fallen onto her photo and he’d stopped scrolling, she would have been singing love songs at the top of her lungs and probably knitting the poor woman a scarf to welcome her to the family. The pull he’d felt to her had been electric, he had to admit. It had almost felt like possession when he reached out and clicked ‘Propose’ on her profile… it had certainly been the most reckless, impulsive thing he’d done in the long years since his crazy life on the road.
But there was a rational explanation too, wasn’t there? Putting aside all belief in soulmates or destiny… she was a beautiful woman, and he was a lonely man who’d been thinking an awful lot about settling down and starting a family with someone just like her, someone who wanted that just as much as he did. Someone, for example, who was willing to marry a stranger if that was what it took. Was it any wonder that on a website like that, with all its talk of commitment and being together forever, that he’d found a woman with a gorgeous smile who’d caught his interest so thoroughly? He was just lonely, he tried to tell himself, frowning a little. Not exactly a good look, lonely. Would Jasmine sense that when she looked at his profile? The website had said that both partners had to look at each other’s profiles and okay the match before anything official would go through. Perhaps she wouldn’t be interested.
But what if she said yes? His heart did a backflip at the very idea. He’d made it clear he wasn’t interested in moving—Jasmine’s profile stated that she was willing to move anywhere within the continental U.S. to meet and live with her potential husband. So if she said yes…. she’d be moving in with him, here. He stared around his cottage with mounting alarm. Was there room for a wife? His bed was certainly big enough for two… but would she even want to sleep in the same bed as him? What if she hated it here?
And more importantly… what about her species? Nothing on the profile had asked whether he was human… human websites so rarely did. Shifters were a closely guarded secret from human society (with a few rare exceptions.) Could he really marry a woman who didn’t even know that dragons existed, let alone that her new husband was one?
No, he thought, shaking himself. It was a ridiculous idea. And it was all academic, anyway. This was never going to happen. This was just a rather embarrassing accident that had befallen him—a temporary burst of insanity that had taken hold of him. In a few years, maybe he’d tell the story to the guys and laugh about it. For now, the best idea was to forget about the website completely.
As well as the woman with the gorgeous hazel eyes.
Chapter 4 – Jasmine
The whole weekend was a bust, basically. Jasmine had had such great plans for the weekend—she was going to deep-clean her apartment, go to a yoga class in the morning, get her meals prepped for the week, maybe even watch those films she’d been meaning to catch up on… but somehow, it was already Sunday afternoon, and she’d barely gotten out of bed. It was her job… it lurked on the horizon like some horrible killer whale, waiting to bite. She’d gotten a dozen texts from Grant already, even though she’d tried to make it clear that she wasn’t going to do any work when she wasn’t on the clock, and if he wanted her to respond to his messages on her weekends he was going to have to pay her for her time. He didn’t like that one bit. Explained why he kept texting her, she thought sourly, glaring at her phone as it buzzed.
The one productive aspect of the weekend had been her reading. She’d finished her book and started another… and now, lying in bed with a block of chocolate, she was just about to finish a second. It felt rather decadent, finishing a full-length novel in a single weekend, but she honestly needed the boost. In the whirlwind romance on her glowing Kindle screen, there were no shitty, sexist bosses with patriarchal beauty standards. There were just rugged, brooding men with secret hearts of gold, and the brave, plucky heroines who were bold enough to discover them. She wasn’t ashamed to have picked up another title from the mail order romance genre. It was her guilty pleasure—why shouldn’t she have exactly what she wanted?
Her phone buzzed yet again, and she groaned, half wanting to throw it across the room. Grant had a way of texting her right in the middle of the saucier scenes… it was a real buzzkill. But she frowned as she picked up her phone to put it on silent. For once, it wasn’t a message from Grant. It was a new email, from an unfamiliar site. Spam, maybe? She got plenty of that… but no, her full name was in the email, as was her date of birth, her star sign, even her address. Her eyes widened as she continued to read the email, and when she had finished it, her romance novel was the last thing on her mind.
With shaking hands, she dialed Elena’s number.
”Hey, babe.” The woman sounded half asleep—she’d either caught her in the middle of a nap or the middle of her night of sleep. Impossible to tell, with Elena. She never minded being woken up, though.
”Hi, Elena. Got a computer question for you. What the hell is ‘Forever-Now’, and how would they have gotten all my information? Did I get hacked?”
There was a long silence at the end of the phone… and all of Jasmine’s suspicions were confirmed in those few seconds. Elena wasn’t the kind of woman who wouldn’t have an answer to a question about hacking… not unless hacking wasn’t the problem.
”Listen, don’t be mad.”
”What the hell did you do, Elena?” Jasmine tried to keep herself calm, even as her heart pounded furiously. “What’s this site? Did you—did you sell me to someone? What the hell—”
”No! Nothing like that! Look, I—are you at home? Let me come over and explain.”
”I think you’d better,” Jasmine said coldly, then hung up, her heart still pounding. She was never that harsh with Elena—there had been real fear in her friend’s voice. Well, she’d probably earned the right to a bit of anger. She scrolled through the email again, re-reading it carefully, hot tingles of embarrassment and shock rushing through her. Congratulations, happy bride, you’ve been selected by your gorgeous husband-to-be… click here for details of where he’ll collect you to carry you across his threshold… what the hell was this?
By the time Elena arrived half an hour later, she’d clicked through to the website and had a full understanding of what her friend had signed her up for. She’d even found the profile she’d made for her… Elena had chosen her best photos, she had to admit, but she was still furious about the breach of privacy. Elena raised her hands in supplication.
”Babe, you have every right to be angry with me, okay? I just… the way you talked about it on Friday night, I couldn’t help myself. I was seriously only going to check the website out and then send it to you, but it wouldn’t let me look at the guys unless I made a profile, so I just sort of… made one for you with some of your Facebook pictures… and by the time it was all set up, I was kind of hoping some guy might reach out to you.”
”That’s insane, Elena,” Jasmine said flatly. But the look of misery on her friend’s face was so acute that she couldn’t help relenting a little bit. “Okay. Come and sit down and let’s… let’s have a conversation about boundaries and privacy, and showing my damn Facebook photos to everyone on the planet…”
”Everyone on the planet can already see your Facebook photos,” Elena said frankly. “Your privacy settings are trash, babe. Just having a Facebook profile is a privacy nightmare, so if that’s what you’re worried about… well, that horse has already bolted, you know?”
Jasmine sighed. It was true that she’d had a few unpleasant experiences with people looking up her pictures on Facebook… usually to be unkind about her size. “I probably should fix that, hey. Change my settings, take some of the photos down…”
”Oh, it’s much too late for that,” Elena said brightly. “If anything, the mail order bride website is a lot more private than Facebook. There are only a few thousand users, instead of millions and millions—”
”A few thousand?!” Jasmine was shocked. “Seriously? I wouldn’t have thought there’d be that many…”
”Lots of weirdos out there,” Elena said, settling herself more comfortably into the couch. “Not that the guy who picked you is a weirdo! I saw his profile when I was scrolling through. He seems like a good guy. Likes: cooking, building things, the beach.”
”You mean the guy who bought me? Like—like a new shirt or something? Ordered me delivered to his house like a pizza!”
“Are you a shirt or a pizza?”
”I’m a human being!”
”Of course you are!” Elena was laughing, and Jasmine couldn’t help but giggle a little too, for all her anger at her friend. The woman was just impossible to stay cross with for any length of time. “Did you check him out?”
”No, I was too busy figuring out how the hell my details got onto a mail order bride website, Elena.”
”It’s not technically a mail order bride website,” Elena pointed out fastidiously. “I mean, no money changes hands. Except for the sign-up fee, but I got around that.” She wiggled her fingers in a rapid typing gesture—classic Elena shorthand for whatever nefarious tactics she used to game the system. “But he didn’t buy you. He simply proposed to you. And you’re not locked into anything, see? You have to press ‘I Do’, or nothing will happen.”
Jasmine had to roll her eyes at the rather cloyingly sweet font that adorned the elaborate button labelled ‘I Do’. “Couldn’t it just say ‘accept proposal’ or something?”
”I thought you were a romantic.”
”This isn’t romantic! This is… this is a website! This is like the Russian Roulette version of Tinder. What if this guy murders me?” Jasmine rolled her eyes. “Why am I talking like I’m even considering this batshit crazy idea?”
“I actually read a lot of their safety info the other night. It’s surprisingly thorough. An agent comes to meet you at whatever airport you fly into to meet the guy, makes sure everyone is who they say they are. You have check-ins with them by video call every few days so they can make sure nobody’s gotten kidnapped, they install tracking software on your phone to make sure you’re always where you say you are… there’s a whole system of code words you can use to i
ndicate something’s not on the level… very extensive.”
”That doesn’t make me feel safer,” Jasmine said, narrowing her eyes. “That they feel the need to put all that stuff in place.”
”They probably don’t use it much! It’s just—there. Just in case. Besides, I don’t think the guy who picked you is a murderer. A murderer would make a slicker profile.”
”The guy who picked me,” Jasmine muttered, feeling an odd little thrill run through her… then feeling mortified at that feeling, at whatever desperate part of her felt happy to have been selected by some guy on the internet. “What was his name? Bryce?”
”You didn’t read his profile?” Elena hesitated, her eyes aglow with a sly spark. “Are you sure?”
”I may have glanced at it,” Jasmine said stiffy, opening the email again and clicking through to the profile of her so-called husband-to-be. The whole thing was so ridiculous that she was inches away from laughing at it… it was only the fact that she still wanted to keep Elena feeling guilty about what she’d done that stopped her from smiling. “Oh! He’s… not gross-looking.” A wave of hot energy flowed through her as she stared at the photo. “Not gross-looking at all…”
Broad shoulders, close-cropped dark hair, a pair of striking pale blue eyes set in a face that was exactly the right amount of rugged… a strong jawline, thick, sensuous lips… Jasmine cleared her throat. Elena was peering at her, clearly trying to read her mind, and Jasmine scowled at her.
