Page 5 of Mating Her Dragon

"You're being unreasonable already, and you haven't even told me what you're thinking."

"I, for one," Kara put in, entirely too pleased with herself as she opened the Mating Bond to be sure Garrett heard what she was saying, "would very much like to hear what she is thinking."

"Thank you, Kara."

"Kara doesn't get a vote," Garrett said flatly, without even looking like he was talking to himself, and that was progress. Nobody in the Two Wolves B&B so much as blinked at what he’d said.

A little while later, they were walking off some of breakfast, out in the sharp, clean morning air of Valentine, and Sydney couldn’t help but look around and be grateful. She was hand in hand with the man the Universe had made for her, in the kind of small Texas town that consisted of about four blocks, one blinking traffic light, and people she’d known most of her life.

Valentine was easy enough to cross in ten minutes and somehow big enough to hold a person's whole heart for as long as they wanted. It was just the kind of place they had both needed.

Lost in thought, she shook herself back to the present at the sound of Garrett’s voice. "There's no reason to pick one direction over another," he was saying, hands in his pockets, looking entirely too much like a man debating logistics rather than a life. "No threat vector pulling us east or west. No…"

Syd slid her hand from his and stopped walking.

It took Garrett two full steps to notice. He turned, saw her standing stock-still on the sidewalk, and followed her line of sight to the source of the problem.

An RV. Parked half a block down outside the hardware store. It was an old silver Airstream with a hand lettered FOR SALE sign taped in the window, gleaming a little too invitingly in the morning sun.

"No," Garrett said before she'd said a single word.

"You don't even know what I'm thinking."

"I know that face."

"What face?"

"The one that costs money and ends with somebody saying, 'This seemed like a good idea at the time.'”

Sydney grinned, and it started as a joke– it really did. A road trip. See the whole ridiculous country. Eat terrible gas station food and take pictures next to the world's largest ball of twine. Make Garrett stand in front of every roadside attraction Texas and every state along the way had to offer.

But somewhere between ridiculous idea and actually saying it out loud, she realized she meant it. Every word.

He had missed a hundred years. She couldn't give that back to him. She couldn't undo what Leviathan had stolen, couldn't hand him back a single one of those lost decades. But she could give him this one. And tomorrow's. And next week's. Mountains he'd never seen. Oceans. Cities that hadn't existed the last time he'd had a say in where his own feet carried him.

"You lost a hundred years, Garrett."

His jaw tightened. She watched him brace for the pity he couldn't stand, watched his shoulders come up half an inch in automatic defense.

"I'm not feeling sorry for you," she said quickly, before he could get a word in. "I'm saying we've both spent enough time going wherever somebody else needed us to go." She gestured at the Airstream, at the town, at the whole wide, waiting country beyond it. "Let's go somewhere because we want to. Not because Carrick called. Not because Leviathan moved. Because we woke up and decided that was where we wanted to go."

Garrett looked at her for a long moment, and Sydney realized, somewhere in the middle of that look, that she hadn't only been talking about him. She needed it just as much.

He didn't agree right away. She'd have been suspicious if he had.

"Where would we go?"

"I don't know."

"That's your plan?"

"Yes."

"You don't know where we're going."

"Nope."

"Or how long we'd be gone."