Page 78 of Mating Her Dragon

"That's not the question."

He almost laughed at that, because she had just handed his own lesson back to him with the precision of a blade, and he supposed he deserved it. So, he checked, honestly, the way she'd taught him to. Desire– obviously, unmistakably, had been there since the moment he first saw her in that dress. Concern– absolutely, real and present and worth respecting. Choice…

Yes.

"Still yes," he said.

Then, because it mattered just as much, he asked, "You?"

"Very yes," Sydney said, and the way she said it settled any argument left in him.

He hesitated one more time anyway. Not out of fear of the last step in their Mating, not Leviathan's ghost, nothing left over from any of that. He was afraid, simply and completely, of hurting her when she had nothing left to give.

Sydney saw it. Of course she did.

"I'm tired, Garrett," she said. "I'm not fragile." Then, softer, her hand tightening around his, she winked and added, "And I want my Mate."

The word landed on him differently than it ever had before. No technicality left in it. No prophecy standing behind it. No almost, no waiting for some future completion. Hers. His. Chosen, freely, by both of them, twice now in one day, and he stopped hesitating.

He kept expecting the moment to feel enormous. Monumental, the way everything else had been– vows and Mating Bonds and Hell itself. Instead, it felt intimate, small in the best possible way, the two of them alone in a tin box by the ocean with nothing left standing between them.

Sydney laughed when he got tangled in the hem of his own shirt, and he found he didn't mind at all, laughing right along with her, some tension he hadn't noticed carrying finally draining out of his shoulders. He stopped, more than once, simply to look at her, and was struck by the plain, staggering fact that she was there, that she was his, that none of it had been taken from him after all.

She touched the old scars without flinching, without pity, without the careful avoidance some part of him had braced for even now. Her fingers traced one along his ribs like she was reading something precious rather than something ruined, and when he tensed, she just looked up at him.

"I've already seen these," she said. "I already know. Nothing about you has ever disgusted me. Nothing about you ever will."

He believed her. That, more than anything else that had happened, undid him completely.

He treated her like something precious without ever once treating her like something fragile– she made that distinction very clear, more than once, in ways that left him thoroughly convinced. They talked. They asked. They answered. It had never once been clinical between them, not the rules on the bluff, not making love. For them, asking still yes had become simply another way of saying I love you, woven so completely into who they'd become that it never once broke the moment, only deepened it.

"Still yes?" he asked once more, low, against her ear, somewhere in the middle of everything.

"Garrett," Sydney said. "Yes."

He believed that too. Completely. The Mating Bond deepened around them as they moved together, and for a long while there was nothing but that– her breath catching against his throat, his name in her mouth, the slow build of something that had been a hundred years coming. He'd meant to go slow. He'd meant a lot of things. But she was arching into him, asking without words for more, and some old, careful part of him finally let go completely.

Needing to be buried deep inside his Mate, Garrett drew his fingers from her, and when she made a small sound of loss, he was already moving– on his feet, leaning over her where she lay bare and golden in the low light. He laid his lips to hers, kissing her with the fierce, unguarded want of a Dragon who had finally stopped fighting his own heart, then slid his hand beneath her hip while he whispered against her mind, "Roll over and get on your knees, Mo chridhe."

She moved before he'd even finished the thought, and his heart stumbled, the air gone thin in his chest, when she rocked back against him, slow and deliberate. He caught her hips before she could do it again, though it cost him something to stop her. His incredibly sexy, sassy Mate only tossed her long blond curls over one shoulder and looked back at him, smoldering, daring. "Come on, Dragon Man," she said. "Make me yours forever."

Garrett answered her with a roar that felt torn loose from somewhere ancient in him, and when she rubbed against him again, unrepentant, he let himself feel exactly how much she trusted him– her body open, offered, certain of him the way he was certain of her. Looking at her like that, undone and waiting, he said the only true thing he had. "You will always be the most spectacular woman I've ever seen."

Then he filled her, carefully, completely, and she took him like she'd been made for exactly this– like hand and glove, like the one place in all the world he was always meant to end up.

He stopped, seated fully inside her, just to feel it. Sydney's head dropped forward. Her hands twisted into the comforter, knuckles white, holding herself up through sheer will– until she moved, just slightly, and that small motion shattered whatever control he had left. He leaned in, gripped her shoulders, and found their rhythm.

Her moans rose with every stroke, and she met him for every one of them, until what had been rhythm dissolved into something faster, less coordinated, more desperate. He tried, once, to slow them down. She wouldn't let him. Faster, harder, she rocked back into him until there was nothing left to do but follow where she led.

He felt it building in her– felt it about to take them both under– and he slid one hand from her shoulder to her breast, finding her nipple, giving her exactly the pressure she needed. They came together, in the same heartbeat, the way they were learning to do everything now.

He folded over her, chest to her back, breathing her in, letting himself sink into everything they were together. His arms banded around her waist to hold her up when her legs gave out, and he pressed his mouth slowly up the line of her spine, feeling himself stir again where she still held him.

Sliding from her warmth, Garrett pulled Sydney into his arms. Rolling over, he gently moved her one more time when his back hit the mattress, positioning her across his chest where he could look into her eyes.

It was all there: emotion, presence, want, love; it rose warmer and richer between them until Garrett felt Kara humming at the edges of Sydney's joy and Han, steadily and quietly, present at the edges of his own. He had never in his life been this physically close to another person while this emotionally unguarded. For a man who had survived a century by locking every single door in himself, that was enormous. That was, he understood distantly, its own kind of Mating.

Somewhere in the middle of it, he felt Sydney pause– not physically, just a flicker through the Bond, quick and private.