Page 65 of Mating Her Dragon

He started to say something automatic. She suspected he was going to say, always. The word was already halfway out. Then he stopped himself, visibly, the way she'd stopped herself a hundred times over the last couple of weeks. This entire road trip had taught them both, over and over, not to answer today's choice with yesterday's certainty.

He looked at her instead, actually looked, and answered the question she'd actually asked.

"Yes."

They did not sleep separately. Human superstition be damned.

"Are we supposed to sleep apart?" Sydney asked, only half seriously, climbing into the Airstream's small bed beside him anyway.

"Why would we do that?"

"I don't know. Humans do weird shit before weddings."

"This is not a wedding."

"Good. Because I'm not sleeping without you."

"Agreed."

She woke sometime deep in the night, not from a nightmare, not from any sound at all. From pressure.

Somewhere far beyond the edge of everything she could see or touch, something pushed, slowly and deliberately, against a boundary that wasn't fully built yet, like fingertips testing a door that hadn't been locked, simply because it hadn't yet been hung.

Sydney opened her sight without fully meaning to.

The consent architecture wasn't active. It couldn't be, not until tomorrow, not until the Mating Bond itself opened and gave it something to hold. But she could see the scar. The road beside it, quiet and old. And, impossibly far away, that slow, patient pressure was testing.

Garrett woke because he always woke, some instinct in him tuned permanently to the exact frequency of her going still.

"What?"

"He's there," Sydney said quietly, watching the pressure hold, then, slowly, withdraw.

Garrett came fully alert, every trace of sleep gone from his face. "Can he cross?"

Sydney studied the road a long moment. Then looked at Garrett.

"Not tonight."

"Tomorrow?" Garrett asked, low.

Sydney smiled. She wasn’t being reckless. There was no bravado. It was a simple smile born out of certainty, all the way down.

"Tomorrow," she said, "he gets to find out whose door it is."

15

Garrett was already awake. He had been awake for hours.

That wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that he wasn't checking the perimeter.

He lay still instead, on his side, watching Sydney sleep in the gray light before dawn. Her blond curls were strewn across the pillow in more directions than he could decipher. One hand was curled loose near her face the way it always ended up by morning, no matter how she fell asleep. In a few hours, she would stand in front of Carrick and either choose him again, in front of everyone who mattered, or she wouldn't.

He found, lying there, that he could live with either answer.

That would have terrified him before he met Sydney. A Guardsman who could accept losing the thing he wanted most wasn't a Guardsman at all, by every rule he'd been raised on. But he'd learned, somewhere on this road trip, that the wanting only meant something if she was free to walk away from it. A choice that couldn't survive her saying no wasn't a choice. It was just Fate wearing his face… And he’d had enough of that bullshit to last the rest of his very long life.

Han stirred beneath his skin. The Dragon King was awake too, watchful in that early-morning way that had nothing to do with threat.