“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.