Page 18 of Mating Her Dragon

He didn't love that answer.

"Would you?"

Her answer came immediately, without a single second of hesitation. "No. It isn't mine."

Garrett said nothing. Instead, he filed the information away, tucked it deep alongside every other true thing he knew about her, because in the centuries he’d been alive, he had stood near a great many beings with enormous power, and every single one of them had, sooner or later, asked the same question when they encountered something they could reshape: what can I make it do?

Sydney's first instinct had been something else entirely. “Do I have the right to touch it?”

That, Garrett thought, watching her turn back toward him with the sun finally breaking over the mesa behind her, was the difference between his Mate and every twisted, hungry thing they'd ever fought. Not the size of her power– the shape of her conscience around it.

"You're not calling him," Sydney said, once they were back at the truck, watching Garrett's hand hover a fraction too long near his jacket pocket. “Carrick. You are not calling him.”

"Do we have anything new to report?" Garrett asked, mostly to himself.

"I can apparently read Magic like IKEA instructions."

"That’s the place with all the furniture from Sweden, right?”

“Yes, it is.”

“So do we have anything useful to tell Carrick?"

"Rude." But she was fighting a smile. "No threat. No new presence. Nothing hurt, nothing changed except what's rattling around in my own head."

Garrett considered that, turning it over with the same thoroughness he applied to everything, and found, for once, that there was genuinely nothing that needed saying to Carrick. It felt good.

"Then we keep going," he said.

Sydney's smile went soft and pleased in a way that told him she understood exactly what that sentence had cost him, and exactly how much it meant that he'd paid it anyway.

They found the dunes a little more than an hour after leaving the campground. Acres of pale gypsum sand rolled out in great smooth waves under a sky gone almost white with heat. They were unlike anything Garrett had ever laid eyes on in his years of living on this earth.

They pulled off. Walked. Sydney kicked her sandals off within ninety seconds of leaving the truck.

"The sand is going to be hot," Garrett informed her.

"It's fine."

"Sydney, it is white gypsum sand under direct desert sun. It will not be fine."

She yelped eleven seconds later and hopped sideways onto a shaded patch. She was laughing too hard to properly curse at him, and Garrett did not say I told you so, mostly because he was laughing too hard himself to get the words out.

He found himself, somewhat to his own surprise, fascinated by the place. The way the wind had carved the dunes into long, sculpted waves, and the strange chemistry of gypsum crystallizing out of an ancient seabed instead of the quartz sand he'd expected, fascinated him. He'd absorbed an alarming amount of documentary content since his return, and a fair portion had been geological.

"You watched a documentary about this, didn't you?" Sydney asked, watching him examine a handful of sand with genuine scientific interest.

"Three."

"Of course you did."

He let her have that one. He was too busy watching her run barefoot along the crest of a dune, arms out, yelling something at Kara that he couldn't quite make out over the wind. She had the phone raised to photograph the horizon, as she was entirely, gloriously herself.

And Garrett understood, watching her, that he'd been thinking about this wrong.

He'd known for a long time that he wanted Sydney. That part had never once been in question– not since the moment he'd first felt the Mating Bond settle into place between them, immovable and absolute. But watching her now, laughing at nothing, sand between her toes, hair coming loose from whatever knot she’d twisted it into that morning, he realized what he actually wanted wasn't simply her.

It was all of it. Coffee cups left in the sink because she always meant to wash them later and never quite did. Her belongings scattered across every flat surface of the Airstream within an hour of arriving anywhere. Arguments about feet on dashboards that he fully intended to keep losing. Finding her hair ties in impossible places for the rest of his very long life. Her books, stacked in places that made no logistical sense. Her laughter, especially the kind that snuck up and surprised her.