Page 21 of Mating Her Dragon

Garrett huffed out a laugh despite himself.

"She will say yes," Han offered, quiet and certain, deep in their Bond.

“That isn't the point,” Garrett thought back.

A pause. Then, unexpectedly: "I know."

Garrett sat with that for a moment, something settling warm behind his ribs. His Dragon King, understanding.

That night, at their next campsite, Garrett stepped outside to check the hookups one last time– old habits. He'd made his peace with the fact that some of them were never fully going away– and paused at the sight of Sydney through the small Airstream window.

She was moving around their tiny temporary home in the lamplight. Her hair was piled in a knot atop her head that was already coming loose. She was barefoot. There was a coffee cup in hand despite the late hour, and she was singing something under her breath that was, charitably, terrible.

Garrett stood there a long moment, just looking.

The Mating Ceremony was ancient. Sacred. Powerful enough to bind two souls together for the length of however many centuries the Universe saw fit to grant them– and on into the Heavens when they were called to ascend.

But this– this small, ridiculous, perfect scene through a camper window– was what he wanted it to actually mean. Not ownership. Not prophecy fulfilled. Not the Universe finally checking some cosmic box it had been waiting thousands of years to close.

This. Her. Their absurd silver Airstream parked in the middle of nowhere. A road ahead with no orders waiting at the end of it. A future built entirely out of small, ordinary days he had never once let himself believe he'd get to have.

For the first time in all of his centuries, Garrett wasn't waiting for Fate to tell him what came next.

He was waiting for Sydney.

And for the first time, that felt like exactly enough.

5

Sydney woke up the next morning and immediately regretted opening the door she'd opened the day before.

They were back on the road by mid-morning. Garrett drove, checked mirrors on schedule, and kept immaculate following distance. Sydney had her coffee. Everything was, on the surface, entirely normal.

Except she could not stop thinking about the Ceremony.

Not in some swoony, bridal-magazine way, either– not veils and flowers and most definitely not what color are the napkins. More like: Why did I say not yet? Why did he say every day? Why am I suddenly wondering who would even stand up with us?

"You are thinking about it," Kara observed, entirely too pleased with herself.

"No, I'm not."

"You have been thinking about it for forty-seven minutes."

"You are an invasive houseguest, you know that?"

"You are not being forced, my girl," Kara said, and something in the way she said it made Sydney go still.

"I know."

"That is precisely why you cannot stop thinking about it."

Sydney turned that over slowly, watching the desert scroll past the window. Kara was right, damn her. Nobody had handed Sydney a destiny this time. No prophecy had written this on a wall somewhere before she was born. She'd opened the door herself, with her own two hands, and something about that made it impossible to stop thinking about it.

"What kind of Ceremony do you want?" Garrett asked, entirely too casually, eyes on the road.

Sydney nearly inhaled her coffee. She'd thought they were still at the stage of talking about talking about it. Garrett, apparently, had moved directly to requirements gathering.

"What do you mean, what kind?"