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He pressed his lips together and blew his breath out his nose, looking off to the side as if searching for patience. “I’m referring to some extra ‘encouragement’ or anything that would persuade him or influence him to give you such a thing.”
“Like what? Are you…surely you aren’t talking about sexual favors?”
He lifted one shoulder in what looked like a very French gesture—at least I thought it was, according to some television shows I’d seen. I’d never been to France or much of anywhere else, for that matter.
“You tell me.”
“No! I have never done any such thing, and neither did my grandmother.”
“I see. I wonder, then, if my uncle could have possibly been under the influence of some type of…magical spell? This is Valleywood, after all, a town steeped in magic. All dragon shifters are well aware of its reputation.”
I gasped aloud at his suggestion that I or my grandmother had used magic against his uncle, but before I could answer him, he put his damn sexy feet on the floor and leaned forward, his seductive scent washing over me. It was clean, like soap and shampoo and some lightly scented cologne, but it was more than that. It was unique and I thought he smelled like fresh-baked sugar cookies, of all things. The kind with sprinkles and frosting, like the holiday cookies I had already started selling in my shop, even though it was only mid-November. Christmas seemed to come earlier every year. I wondered if he’d been eating Christmas cookies just before I came. I began to feel a little dizzy as the delicious scent wafted over me.
“I understand my uncle and your grandmother had an extremely ‘close’ relationship. I also understand that despite her rather advanced age, she was still quite beautiful. Unnaturally so.” He looked me up and down again in a way that made me think he was angry again.
“Like you, yourself,” he continued. “Could it be possible that you’re asorcière? Awitch, by any chance, Mr. Jordan? Like your grandmother before you? Did one or both of you take unfair advantage of my uncle? Are you attempting to do it now, tome, by any chance?”
At that statement, both bodyguards came to stand beside his chair, giving me hostile glares. If the situation hadn’t been so frightening, it would have been funny. I got to my feet too, and started backing toward the door, feeling threatened and a little terrified. After all, I was faced by not one but four hostile Alphas.
“What are you talking about? I never did a magic spell in my life. I wouldn’t know where to even start!”
I hated the accusation, and I hated that word, “unnatural.” It made my grandmother sound evil. Me too, for that matter. The word had even been used about my mother too, on occasion. And though my female relatives had both been extremely beautiful women, and I was nice enough looking too, I suppose, none of us had any special ‘powers’ at all, beyond what we had been born with. Even if we had, we weren’t despicable enough to use them to defraud an old man.
The two bodyguards and the assistant were still glaring at me. I tried to ignore them, though it was pretty hard. I kept my attention focused on Mr. Bousset, and somehow that helped a little. I began slowly edging toward the door.
“My grandmother was a good person. How dare you speak of her that way?”
Mr. Bousset sighed and stood up then too and took a step toward me. He towered over me. As intimidation methods went, it was pretty effective, though I didn’t get the feeling he was trying to scare me. I was surrounded by too much Alpha energy though, and I began trembling ever so slightly. I put my hands over my face before I realized it, and to my horror, a little whimper escaped my throat.
It was totally involuntary, and I pulled my hands back down as soon as I could, but it was too late. They could all see they had scared me. Bousset’s eyes softened a bit, and the bodyguards took a few steps back.
“Sit down, Mr. Jordan,” he waved a hand toward the sofa. “Please. No one here will harm you, I assure you.”
“Please” was a rare word coming from a powerful Dragon like Bousset, but I still glanced nervously over at the two other men who seemed to be guarding him. Without turning his head, he spoke to them in rapid French. They immediately nodded and filed past me to leave the room and go out in the hallway.
“Now,” Bousset said once they closed the door behind themselves. He gestured again back to the sofa. “Won’t you have a seat so we can talk this over? It seems we may have gotten off on the wrong foot.”
I nodded stiffly, still upset about what he’d said about me and my nana. She’d been good to me, the only person in my family who had ever taken any real interest in me that I could remember. I was a green dragon, born into the smallest of the dragon species and one not particularly well-regarded in the Dragon world. Dragons didn’t run in packs, like some shifters did, so there wasn’t any kind of pack mentality among us. No one was any higher than anyone else in rank, except when it came to Alphas, who were our leaders, and omegas—who were the ones who had the dragon babies. We were the lowest on the social scale and looked on as little more than property in our world.
The wealthier dragon families used their omegas to make connections with other rich families, and the omegas were basically sold to the highest bidder. Oh, the Dragons had other names for it, of course, to make it sound better. Marriage contracts, dowries and “omega tokens,” they called them. It was an ancient and well-established tradition among Dragons. Beautiful omegas were proudly shown off as a symbol of a dragon’s wealth. They were considered to be part of a dragon’s treasure, like a prized and beautiful jewel.
But no matter how you looked at it, it was still money paid by an Alpha or his family to the family of the hapless omega he had chosen to bear his children. Omegas were bought and paid for, and they had no free will. If they were lucky, their new husbands were good to them, or at least he didn’t beat them. But far too many omegas weren’t lucky at all.
Omegas got to live out their lives in comparative luxury, but they served as a kind of brood mare to their Dragon mate. There was a high mortality rate among them, leading to rumors that we were all frail creatures who had to be “handled” correctly. My own omega mother had died young, having been far too beautiful and delicate, it was said, for the harsh dragon shifter world. In reality, she had been pregnant again, after her doctor had warned my father she wasn’t strong enough to have another child. It would have been her fifth child in as many years.
I had also been born an omega—an extremely rare, but not unheard of, male omega who could bear little dragon babies, to my father’s ever-lasting embarrassment and shame. He’d never let my mother forget what a disappointment I was. His male pride was hurt by the idea that someone as “macho” as he could have such a son, though he had other “normal” sons too. The only thing that probably saved her from a severe beating after my birth was the fact that he knew he’d at least be able to get a lot of money for me one day at auction.
Omegas brought a high price eventually, but not until they were twenty-one years old, and they could be sold at the annual Omega Fair, an omega auction for dragons. Until then, they required close supervision and care. My father liked the idea of the money, but he didn’t want the trouble in the meantime, and he was still plagued by the idea that I might be some kind of reflection of weakness or unmanliness on his part.
My mother had checked out of the whole situation early, when I was not quite three years old, so I didn’t remember her at all. She left me with my father and my older brothers, all of whom were decidedly Alpha males in personality, if not in actual hierarchy.
In the meantime, my father had been happy to allow me to go live with my grandmother when she’d asked. She had offered to help raise me for him. To get his agreement, my grandmother had implied that one day soon I’d be able to help her with lifting heavy trays in the bakery too. A flimsy excuse at best, but he was glad enough to be rid of me, because it took me out from underfoot and spared him the chore of seeing me every day, though I felt sure that if he’d known I’d spend my days with her learning to cook and bake, he would have keeled over dead.
We kept that our secret, and since he rarely visited, it wasn’t difficult. When Nana was diagnosed with terminal cancer, soon after I turned twenty, she made a will leaving all her worldly possessions to Mr. Bousset, because omegas like me couldn’t own actual real estate. She had negotiated a lease arrangement with Mr. Bousset for me, however, for both her house and the shop, for when the time came.
Though I mourned her deeply after she passed, I leaped at the chance for some independence, and I couldn’t wait to be on my own and start earning my own way in life. If I could make enough money, I was really hopeful my father would agree to let me buy out my own contract. That way I could avoid the omega auction, a fate I looked on as worse than death.
With the less wealthy Dragons, like my family, omegas were auctioned off to the highest bidder at the huge yearly Omega Fairs. They added a new one recently, though—a special auction to take place just before Christmas and that was even part of the advertising. The slogan was “Treat yourself to an omega for the holidays.”
