Page 2 of Mating Her Dragon

"So," she said eventually, her cheek against his sternum, "what do we do now?"

"Eat," Garrett said immediately. "I smell bacon."

"After that."

"Coffee."

"Garrett."

"What?"

She pushed up onto one elbow so she could actually look at him. "What do we do now? As in today. Tomorrow. Next week. All of it."

Something shifted behind his eyes. Not alarm, exactly. More like a man recalculating terrain he'd thought was solid ground.

"I imagine," he said slowly, "we find out where I'm needed. Check in with Carrick. See if there is any change with Leviathan, or anything new about whatever Ginnie felt on that trail. Report in, get our orders, resume…"

"That's not what I asked."

"It's a perfectly reasonable answer to what you asked."

"It's a reasonable answer to where you're needed. I asked where you want to go."

Garrett went quiet.

Really quiet. The kind of quiet that, on him, Syd had learned to read as significant. His jaw worked once. His thumb, which had been tracing idle circles against her hip, went still.

"I don't know," he admitted finally, and something in his voice told her that admission had cost him more than it should have.

Sydney's heart cracked a little, right down the middle, in a good way and a bad way at the same time.

Because of course he didn't know. This was a man who'd spent centuries defined by duty and then lost a hundred years to a cell and a monster wearing his face like a mask. Want wasn't a language anybody had ever bothered to teach him. Orders, missions, purpose– those he knew inside and out. But what do you want, just for yourself, with nobody's life on the line– that was foreign ground.

"Fair's fair," Garrett said. Recovering, he turned the question back on her with the ease of a man deflecting a blow he didn't want to take alone. "Where do you want to go?"

Sydney opened her mouth to answer… And nothing came out.

Because she didn't know either.

Not for the reasons he didn't know– she wasn't drowning in a hundred stolen years filled with endless torture both mentally and physically. No, Sydney didn’t know where she wanted to go because for as long as she could remember, nobody had ever asked that question. Not really.

She'd been training since she lost her first baby tooth. Then she'd been the Prophecy. Then she'd been Kara's, and the Special One's, and the Ancients' business. After that, there had been missions… And finding Garrett was the best mission in every sense of that word…

But somewhere in all that ‘Becoming’, nobody had ever once asked Sydney Kavanaugh where she wanted to live.

She'd owned things. Stayed places. Belonged to people, fiercely and completely… And through it all, she’d never once built a home.

The strange part– the part that surprised her, lying there in a bed at the Two Wolves B&B in the middle of Valentine, Texas, with a Dragon Guardsman's arm around her waist– was that the realization didn't make her sad.

It made her feel almost unbearably free.

"That is either the beginning of something wonderful," Kara mused, "or a catastrophe with excellent production values, or both. Yep, it’s most likely both. Because with you, my girl, it is so rarely one or the other."

"Thanks, Kara. Real vote of confidence."

Breakfast at Two Wolves was loud in the specific way only a house full of strangers who liked each other could be loud. Forks clinked and clanked against the edge of real glazed ceramic plates. Somebody's radio played low in the kitchen, and an older couple at the corner table argued cheerfully over a road atlas the size of a coffee table.

Garrett navigated it all with the same watchful competence he brought to everything, which was to say: he was fine. He knew what a toaster was, and after one bite of peanut butter and honey toast, he was hooked. He'd figured out streaming television approximately four days after waking up and had developed strong, specific opinions about documentaries. Whatever people expected when they heard he lost a hundred years, it apparently wasn't a six-foot-four Dragon Guardsman calmly asking for oat milk, wheat toast, and raw orange blossom honey.