Page 60 of Mating Her Dragon

Timing. Containment placement. Council support, staged at the perimeter. A defensive layout for the bluff. He was three sentences into logistics before Sydney set her mug down and looked at him.

"We are not Mating to catch Leviathan."

Garrett went still.

"We're Mating because I choose you and you choose me," Sydney said. "Leviathan doesn't get to turn that into a military operation, you hear me?"

He absorbed that slowly and felt something in his own chest recognize its truth, even as the old instinct fought to hold its ground. They could prepare around the Mating Ceremony. They would protect it, structure the aftermath, use whatever it forced into the open.

But the Mating Ceremony itself, the choosing, the vows, the two of them standing on that bluff, stayed theirs. Not a trap. Not bait. Not one more mission in thousands of years of missions.

He needed to hear that, he realized, more than he'd known.

Later, quietly, he asked the question he'd been circling for days.

"Are you ready?"

Not can you do this. Not is the plan ready.

He knew Sydney understood exactly what he was asking. Was she ready for the Mating Ceremony, the fully opened Mating Bond, the blood, the vows, all of it, him and her and whatever came after, for as long as either of them lasted.

She looked out the small window toward the bluff. It was dark now against the last light over the water, but he saw her searching for something on the horizon. Then, she looked back at him.

"Yeah."

"Sydney."

"Yes, Garrett. I'm ready."

Something in him settled, all at once, deeply and completely.

"Are you?" Sydney asked.

The question caught him slightly off guard, and his answer came fast, automatic. "I have been ready."

"That was not the question."

Garrett stopped.

Because she was right. He'd been waiting. Wanting, for longer than he'd let himself examine closely. Assuming his own readiness because he loved her, because he'd loved her since before either of them had said so out loud, and love had felt, for a long time, like an answer enough.

But she was asking him to actually check. To choose this now, specifically, knowing everything it meant. Knowing Leviathan might be waiting on the other side of it. Knowing the completed Mating Bond would change everything, permanently, regardless of what protections Sydney built into it.

Garrett sat with the question honestly, for the first time. Then he said, "Yes."

Not because duty demanded it. Not because Fate had decided it centuries before he was born. Not because it was tactically sound.

Because he wanted to Mate Sydney Kavanaugh, more than he had ever wanted anything in thousands of years of wanting things.

"Two days," Sydney said.

Garrett's tactical brain produced, with alarming speed, no fewer than twelve reasons why that was insufficient.

Sydney watched his face. "Ceremony Face."

"There are logistics."

"There are always logistics with you."