Page 32 of Mating Her Dragon

The Pacific Ocean.

Huge. Impossibly blue, deepening toward the horizon in bands she didn't have names for, running out and out until it simply became the sky.

Garrett pulled the truck over without a word.

Sydney didn't say anything either. He got out first. She followed suit but stayed by the truck a moment longer. She suddenly understood, watching him walk toward the edge of the bluff and simply stop; this was his.

He'd crossed oceans centuries ago, the old way, weeks at a time, water that had never once asked whether he wanted to cross it or not. He'd crossed an entire country for duty more times than she could count. He'd lost a hundred years to a cell and a monster wearing his own face and come back to a world that had rearranged itself into something he barely recognized.

And now he'd come here– to this exact stretch of coastline, this exact water– because he wanted to.

Sydney's throat went tight, watching him stand there, utterly still, looking at something he'd thought was almost conceptual. Something he’d seen as a word on the far edge of a map that had nothing to do with him.

It had everything to do with him now.

They eventually found their way down to the beach, a rough trail cutting through scrub grass to the sand below. Garrett sat and pulled off his boots. Then his socks. It felt, somehow, like an important escalation.

"Careful," Sydney said. "The water's cold."

He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. "I grew up on Skye."

"Right. Sorry. Forgot you're basically part seal."

He stepped in anyway. The first wave hit his ankles, and Garrett laughed.

Not the startled jackalope laugh from the gravel lot back in Texas. Something quieter. Astonished, almost. It sounded like a man rediscovering something he hadn't realized he'd missed until the exact second it touched his skin again.

"We made it," Han said, his deep rumble echoing through the Mating Bond.

Simple. Just that. Not We arrived. We made it, the way a person said it about something they'd genuinely doubted they'd survive to see.

Then it hit her like a ton of bricks. Han had lost those hundred years too. Every bit as much as Garrett had.

Kara, for once in her long immortal existence, said absolutely nothing at all. She knew exactly when to shut up, and Sydney was grateful.

Garrett reached back toward Sydney without turning around. She crossed the wet sand and took his hand. They stood there together, ankle-deep in the Pacific, the water impossibly cold and neither of them caring at all.

"Worth it?" Sydney asked.

"Yes." No hesitation. Then, after a moment: "Thank you."

"For what?"

"Asking me where I wanted to go."

Sydney's whole chest cracked open. That single sentence was the entire road trip, distilled down to nine words. She didn't say anything back. She just went up on her toes and kissed him, quiet and unhurried, the ocean cold around their ankles and the whole enormous sky doing nothing in particular except existing above them.

The next wave was significantly bigger. It hit Sydney square in the calves, hard enough to nearly take her off her feet.

Garrett laughed– actual, delighted laughter this time– and Sydney, with great dignity, splashed him directly in the face. That was, in retrospect, a mistake.

Dragon Guardsman retaliation commenced within roughly one and a half seconds. Within another thirty seconds, Sydney was soaked to the thigh, Garrett's jeans were plastered against his legs in a way he clearly hated with his entire soul, and her phone had nearly gone into the surf twice trying to document the whole disaster.

"Your boots," she gasped, laughing too hard to actually warn him properly, watching one of his abandoned boots drift a few inches down the wet sand toward the tide line.

Garrett lunged for it with the same grim focus he brought to campground safety inspections. Sydney laughed so hard she had to sit down in the wet sand to keep from falling over.

And watching him– soaked, disheveled, chasing down a runaway boot, laughing at himself in a way she'd genuinely never seen before– Sydney understood something with complete clarity.