Page 35 of Mating Her Dragon

Moonlight lay flat and silver across the water, the bluff a dark shape a little way off where their future– their Ceremony, their vows, their choice– was already quietly waiting for them, whenever they were ready to claim it.

Kara was with her, quiet in the way she'd been since the beach.

Sydney thought about all of it. The Special One. Realm seams and black threads and Ancient Elven signatures. Keevandrie. Leviathan. The Mating, sitting there now like a door they'd chosen to open on their own terms, in their own time.

Then she looked back through the small Airstream window at Garrett. He was asleep, one arm flung across the empty space where she usually slept, and all of it went very simple again.

“Are you afraid?” Kara asked.

Sydney considered the question honestly, turning it over.

“Yes.”

“Will that stop you?”

Sydney smiled out at the dark water, at the bluff, at the whole enormous, uncertain shape of everything still ahead of them.

“Not even a little.”

She looked toward the spot on the bluff where they'd someday stand, and let herself feel, for just a moment, the full weight of what she'd chosen.

For once, Sydney Kavanaugh wasn't waiting for Fate to show her where she belonged.

She'd found the place herself.

8

Sydney woke to the sound of the ocean and the quiet, constant warmth of the Mating Bond humming somewhere behind her ribs, exactly the way it always did.

She lay there a while, listening to Garrett breathe beside her, feeling that steady presence she'd felt every day for months. It was as familiar as her own heartbeat, so woven into the fabric of her that she'd stopped noticing it the way a person stopped noticing the weight of their own bones.

For the first time since any of this had started, a single thought slid in sideways in her mind and wouldn't leave her alone. “What does it look like?”

"Oh," Kara said.

"Don't you start using that word too," Sydney muttered, not moving.

But Kara wasn't teasing this time. Sydney could feel the difference– a kind of genuine stillness in the back of her mind, the particular quiet of someone turning over a question they didn't actually have the answer to.

"I have felt the Mating Bond from your side for every day of your life. They are unique, special to the individual," Kara said slowly. "I understand Dragon Mating Magic better than almost any being alive. I have witnessed thousands of Matings across thousands of years."

She paused, thinking.

"But I cannot see it. Not the way you can see other things now."

Sydney lay very still, feeling the itch of that settle into her fingertips. It was the same itch she'd felt looking at the Ward, at the seam, at every piece of constructed Magic since New Mexico. That low, insistent pull to simply look.

She didn't. This wasn't a Ward on a fence line, or a Charm on a chapel door.

This was Garrett.

He woke a while later to find her staring at him, propped up on one elbow, and Sydney watched the exact moment he recognized her expression.

"You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Thinking something I'm not going to like."