Page 22 of Mating Her Dragon

"Traditional. Small. Clan. Private. Formal. Informal."

"Why? Are there categories?"

"Yes, there are, because decisions have to be made."

"You made a list."

Silence.

"Garrett."

He was busted. He had, in fact, made a list, and Sydney knew it the way she knew her own name. She also knew he hadn't made a list because he was trying to take the whole thing over and run it like a campaign, but because planning was simply how the man loved things. He'd planned RVs. He'd planned trucks. He'd planned pantry inventory down to the backup water for the backup water. Of course he'd planned this.

She braced herself for venue logistics and witness counts.

Instead, Garrett said, "Whom do you want there?"

Sydney blinked.

"Who do you not want there?" He went on without waiting for an answer. "Do you want Dragon tradition included, or would you rather leave pieces of it out? Do you want anything from your life before all this represented, anything human, anything that was yours before Kara?" A pause. "Do you want Kara involved separately, or as part of you?"

Something in Sydney's chest went soft and unsteady.

He wasn’t building a Dragon Mating Ceremony the way tradition usually dictated. He was trying to build their Ceremony, piece by piece, out of things that actually mattered instead of things that were simply traditional.

"What do you want?" she asked.

Garrett was quiet for a moment. He was getting better at answering that particular question, she'd noticed, but it still cost him something every time.

"You," he said finally.

"That's cheating."

"It is also accurate."

She pushed anyway. "What else?"

He wanted it small. Private. People they actually trusted, not people who simply expected an invitation. No spectacle. No Clan politics turning their Ceremony into a historical event with Elders arguing about precedent in the back row.

Sydney loved every word of it, because she felt precisely the same way. It was as if he'd read her mind and her heart.

"So, what does it actually require?" she asked. "The Ceremony. You said Bond, blood, and vow, back at the diner. When I was six, before I went to the Realm of the Ancients with Shavon, I went to a few Mating Ceremonies.” She snickered. “I was in Mom and Dad’s, but I don’t remember much except my gold dress and matching shoes. What does all the pomp and tradition actually mean?"

Garrett kept his eyes on the road, but she could feel him settling into the explanation the way he settled into anything he took seriously.

"The Mating Bond already exists between us," he said. "It has since before either of us admitted it out loud. For the Ceremony, it's consciously opened– both of us choosing, together, to let it stand fully open instead of half-guarded, the way we've both kept it since the beginning."

"And the blood?"

"A mark. Exchanged, not taken. Old tradition, older than the Clan itself." He paused. "And the vow. Spoken. Freely given after Carrick delivers the Mating Ceremony and the Commander of each Force in attendance gives us their Blessing."

"Freely," Sydney repeated slowly.

"Yes, everything has to be freely given. The Universe only recognizes the Mating if both of us choose it," Garrett said. "Not if one of us is compelled. Not if one of us is coerced, or tricked, or simply too exhausted to say no. The Magic itself requires the choice. It's built into it."

Sydney sat with that for a long moment, watching the desert unspool outside her window. Her mind was going in ten directions at a hundred miles a minute.

"What happens," she asked slowly, "if one of us says no?"