Page 33 of Mating Her Dragon

Garrett was happy.

Not safe. Not recovering. Not surviving, the way he'd spent every single day since she'd met him, in one form or another. Happy, plainly and simply, standing ankle-deep in an ocean he'd waited two thousand years to see.

This, Sydney thought. This is what I want.

Not the Ceremony, not the abstract shape of a Happily Ever After she'd been half-promised by prophecy since before she could walk. This. This exact man, laughing, his pants soaked to the knees, chasing a boot down a California beach. That was what her happy place looked like.

Later that afternoon, they found the place when they were driving farther up the coast looking for somewhere to camp for the night.

It wasn't famous. It wasn't marked as anything special on any map, and it wasn't tied to a single scrap of Dragon history either of them knew of. It was a small, unassuming stretch of bluff above a quiet cove. It was reachable by a short walk from where they parked the Airstream, and close enough to fall asleep to the sound of surf.

Sydney stepped out onto the bluff and stopped.

"What?" Garrett asked immediately.

She turned slowly, taking it all in. The grass moving in the wind, the drop to the water below, and the sky wide open overhead were spectacular. It was also flat enough and private enough for however many people they eventually decided belonged here.

No Magical revelation. No glowing prophecy unrolling itself across the sky. Nothing whispered anything to her at all.

It simply felt right.

"Oh," Sydney said.

"I have developed serious concerns regarding that word," Garrett said immediately.

She laughed. "Not Magic." She paused for a second. "I think this is it."

Garrett went very still. She knew that he knew exactly what she meant.

Ceremony Face returned within about four seconds, and Sydney watched it happen in real time. His gaze swept the bluff with the exact clinical focus he brought to everything. He cataloged accessibility, sight lines, where Carrick could stand, where witnesses might gather, wind direction, and parking for however many trucks eventually made the drive out.

"You're doing Ceremony Face again."

"I am evaluating the site."

"Slightly constipated."

"Sydney…" But then he stopped. Actually stopped, mid-evaluation, and turned to look at her instead of the terrain. "Do you want it to be here?"

Not Will this work. Not Can we make this happen. Do you want it?

Sydney looked at the ocean, at their ridiculous silver Airstream parked below, at Garrett standing there in the wind with his still-damp jeans and his whole heart plainly on his face.

"Yeah," she said. "I really do."

"Then this is the place."

That was it. No committee. No vote. No Council weighing in, no Fate stepping forward to claim credit for something two people had simply chosen for themselves, standing on a bluff neither of them had ever heard of before that morning.

The place was decided. Not the date. Not yet. But the place.

Out of habit now more than anything, Sydney looked around the bluff with her Magical sight, the same way she'd started doing everywhere without quite meaning to.

Nothing.

No black threads. No disturbed seams. No corrupted Wards, no Elven signatures buried at the base of anything. Barely any constructed Magic there at all. In fact, it was just the world itself, plain and untouched, the way it had probably looked for ten thousand years before either of them arrived.

“Nothing?” Kara asked.