by Wolf Specter
Especially since I hadn’t been with a man since I’d ended things with my last boyfriend, Jason, months ago.
I blinked, a little shocked as I realized how long it had actually been.
“I need to get laid,” I said. Maybe that was the problem. Sex might help with the annoying dissatisfaction I’d felt lately with… well, with everything.
“Sorry. Straight,” Ty said, raising his hand as if he’d been called on in school. “Can’t help you there, dude.”
“Can’t help with what, Tee?” Wes asked his brother, walking in with his one-year-old daughter, Elise, on his hip.
“Maks is fuck—, uh, horn— er, lonely,” Ty said, putting his beer down with a grimace as he stumbled over his words in an effort to make it a G-Rated answer. He reached for his niece.
I laughed at Ty’s ongoing struggle to watch his language around Wes and Dane’s daughter. Given that he was a man who typically dropped a minimum of two F-bombs per sentence, I had to admit that the outgoing soldier was doing much better than the last time I’d seen him. Elise wasn’t talking much yet, though, so it was yet to be seen if he’d been successful enough.
The little girl giggled happily as her father handed her over to her uncle, patting Ty’s cheek and launching into an intense, babbling monologue that didn’t seem to include any four-letter words—or really any recognizable words at all. Ty seemed to follow along just fine, though, nodding and talking back as if his niece was telling him the most interesting things in the world.
The sight of the normally foul-mouthed Ty getting all gooey-eyed over my friend’s daughter gave me an unfamiliar ache in my chest. Not for him, of course, but for that. I’d never had the desire for a family of my own, but I was beginning to see the appeal after spending so much time with Dane’s.
I really needed to quash the part of me that had suddenly become impatient to have what Dane had found, though. I was the youngest dragon on the continent, and I couldn’t expect that out of all the human men who had ever lived, my one-and-only would suddenly appear just because I was feeling a little jealous of my friend’s happiness.
Dane had waited four hundred years to find Wes. My friend Ben was even older, and still unmated. Ben was the child of fated mates himself, and his dragon shifter father, Anik, had been over a thousand years old before he’d met his human fated mate, Mikkel.
I needed to be patient. It could be centuries before I found mine, and I would drive myself crazy if I kept dwelling on it.
“Lonely, Maks?” Wes asked me now, his eyes sparkling with suppressed laughter as he responded to his twin’s comment. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you stay alone for long, much less get lonely. Dane was just telling me the other day how dangerous it was to go anywhere with you, what with the risk of tripping over all the men who fall at your feet.”
I laughed along with him. He was right. I should just go pick up some pretty young boy to fuck for the weekend and stop yearning for things that were out of reach. I was only going to be in town for a few days, anyway. I’d flown in for Elise’s first birthday, and I really had no reason to stay here in Washington State longer than that.
Even if there wasn’t anything to rush home to.
“This is a ‘museum?’” I asked, looking around the spacious building swarming with children. I was following Dane up the staircase that led to the second floor, my arms filled with brightly wrapped presents. The stairs wound around a treehouse-themed slide that looked like it would be a lot of fun if I were about three feet shorter… and not hung over.
Dragons should not get hung over, I thought grumpily.
After Ty had left and Dane and his little family had gone to bed the night before, I’d headed out to try and find some companionship. It shouldn’t have been hard, and I’d definitely found men. Lots of men. Beautiful men. To my intense irritation, though, I’d found myself supremely uninterested in all of them—no matter how much I’d tried to talk myself into feeling otherwise.
I’d settled for vodka instead. Too much vodka, if the truth be told.
Being a dragon shifter meant that my body healed quickly, which normally included recovering from the effects of over-indulging. But apparently I’d over over-indulged the night before, and even my dragon-metabolism was struggling to recover from it.
And I’d still gone home alone.
I couldn’t blame it on lack of opportunity, but even though my cock had been telling me to just pick someone and fuck them, I’d found myself turning away from one obviously-interested man after another.
The worst part was that I couldn’t really say why I’d been so picky. The dragon inside me was usually pretty quiet, but every time I’d started checking someone out the night before, my otherself had intervened, finding fault with them.
I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t like it. It was making me cranky.
Especially when we entered the birthday party room and I caught Dane looking across the room at his mate like he wanted to lick the man.
“It’s the Hands-On Children’s Museum, and Elise loves it here,” Dane said, and it took me a minute to remember that he was answering my earlier question about the place they’d chosen to host their daughter’s first birthday party at.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Hangover or not, it wasn’t like me to feel so irritable. I tried to shake it off and focus on why we were here. Dane was like a brother to me, and even if it wasn’t by blood, he was the closest thing I had to a family of my own. At least, any family that I wanted to claim an association with. His family was the reason I’d come to the Pacific Northwest, I reminded myself—not to try and hook up with yet another human whose name I would just end up forgetting in a few months. Today was about Elise and her fathers.
“The museum is more about having kids learn by doing hands-on things, rather than just by looking,” Dane was saying as he set his own armload of gifts down on a glittering table in the heavily decorated party room. The place was an explosion of sparkling pink-ness, further evidence of just how much my formerly-brooding friend’s life had changed. “Wesley brings Elise here a few times each week for activities and classes with other toddlers her own age,” Dane went on without taking his eyes off his mate.
This was getting ridiculous. I could barely stand to look at the two of them and their ongoing infatuation with each other. The hot looks Dane was shooting across the room were making me even crankier, and I suddenly wished that I had taken someone home the night before, after all.
Wes was standing near a tower of pink-frosted cupcakes, holding a wobbling Elise by the hand while the little girl babbled at another toddler who clung to her pregnant mother’s leg. “…you should start to have more energy now that you’re past the first trimester, Sarah,” Wes was saying, clearly trying to ignore the smoldering looks Dane was sending him. His flaming cheeks were a sure sign of just how aware he was of his mate’s heat, though.
“That’s how it was when I was pregnant with Holly,” the young woman replied, nodding. She didn’t seem to notice the erotic by-play of the two men. She had dark circles under her eyes, and rested her hands on her baby bump as she spoke. “But with this one, it’s already my sixteenth week and I’m still exhausted.”
“Well, you do have to run around after a toddler this time. If your Holly is as energetic as our Elise is, that alone would wear you out, even if you weren’t expecting again.”
“That’s true,” she said, smiling tiredly. “Although my husband is such a help with her. I don’t know what I would do without him.”
I turned back to Dane, determined to give him a hard time about his ongoing obsession with his mate, when suddenly the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. The air in the room shifted, and my otherself woke up with a vengeance. I was vaguely aware of Dane giving me a curious look, and of the ongoing buzz of conversation in the room—“Here he is now. Have you met Devin, Wes?” the pregnant woman, Sarah, was saying—but all of those things ceased to matter.
&n
bsp; I turned, my attention pulled to the doorway as if by a magnet.
A man had just walked in, and part of my brain made note of the unimportant things—he was young, and small-ish, with dark hair and light eyes behind rimless glasses. He had a dimple in his chin, and a vein pulsed near the base of his throat. It was beating faster and faster as I watched it, and I wanted to taste it.
The man was beautiful. My dragon recognized him. This man belonged to me.
He was my fated mate.
“Honey, come meet Wes and Elise,” Sarah said, crossing the room and hooking her arm through my mate’s. She pulled him over to the ridiculous pink cupcakes, and the little girl who had been holding onto her leg earlier lit up, beaming and reaching up toward him with chubby arms. “Wes, this is my husband, Devin,” Sarah said as my mate scooped the toddler up in his arms and kissed her on the cheek.
My fated mate was named Devin.
But Devin was married. He had a child, and a pregnant wife, and he stood a few feet away from me, holding his daughter, and chatting with Wes, and ignoring me completely.
As if the whole world hadn’t just shifted on its axis.
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About the Author: Wolf Specter
Maine's North Woods are home to mighty moose, wily red foxes, and Wolf Specter. Growing up, Wolf believed there was a ghost in his attic. To this day, he still believes that ghost creeps out of the shadows from time to time. He wishes it would say hello.
Wolf's stories explore the complicated, sensual bonds between men. There are always happy endings just as there is always a dash of otherworldly delight.
His work is exclusive to Amazon. Read as much as you like with Kindle Unlimited.
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About the Author: Angel Knots
Angel Knots is the pen name of a rabid Omegaverse fan who also happens to be a writer.
In real life, Angel goes by another name and pens contemporary gay romance stories when she's not chasing after the two small humans she spawned during the last decade.
She knows that the fans of her contemporary books may not appreciate knotting, soul-bonds, and male impregnation as much as she does, so with the flick of a pen she created a new identity and happily started filling blank pages with stories of men who are more than they seem and the fated mates they are destined for.
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