Page 64 of Her Dragon Daddy Disaster
“My dear, dragonsmate. For life.”
“We get married,” I said somewhat defensively.
She snorted. “Divorce is a thing. Marriage is not based on something more than hormones, pheromones, and general compatibility of personalities.”
“And mating is?”
“Yes. Mating is about finding theliteralother piece of yourself. The one your dragon recognizes and can’t live without. Our dragons are a part of us and us them, but we are distinctly two pieces in the same body in a way. The beast is locked within. I feel her. She calls to me, talks to me in her own way. Not in words, but in emotions, desires. She’s a part of me that is not me. A symbiosis, in a way. So, when my dragon found Darhell, well, she knew that within him was the other half of herself.”
“So, it’s love at first sight?” I asked, confused.
Yolandi threw her head back with laughter. “Oh, goodness, my child, absolutelynot. Ihatedhim at first. He was all sorts of not right for me.”
“What changed?”
“Everything. Nothing.” She shrugged. “Sometimes you dislike someone because they’resoright for you, it’s boring. Too easy. You don’t want to like them because everything tells you that youshould. Then you find yourself thinking about them here and there. A little more. A little more. Next thing you know, you’re thinking about how you dislike them so often, you find yourself wanting to see them. You say it’s ‘to tell them how much you dislike them. But then they make a joke, and you laugh. They smile, and you’re smiling back. Next thing you know, you have children together, and it’s been forty years.”
The love she felt for her mate poured into her words, mimicked by the slow upward pull of her mouth as she smiled, the memories of a lifetime shining through bright and happy.
“What does all this have to do with Levi not feeling betrayed, though?” I asked, throwing back to the original question.
“Lydia didn’t reject Levi. She didn’t choose Malakaiinsteadof him. There was no debate, no choice. If they were mates, then that’s just it. They must be mated. She didn’t spurn my son because she wanted to be cruel or because she didn’t like him. She found her mate. There’s no room for betrayal in such an action.”
I thought it through, seeing her logic. “Perhaps not. But it’s still understandable for him to be upset, no? After all, the dragon is onlypartof him. The other part has feelings, emotions, things that can be hurt.”
“Oh, of course. And he was hurt. Moped around the house for ages without a purpose. It’s good to see him this happy again, even if I never expected it to be because of a human.” Yolandi reached over to pat my arm reassuringly. “I mean no offense from that. Until the ceasefire was announced, therewereno human women here, and I still cannot understand how one can be mated to a human when they have no dragon to recognize the bonding.”
“Yeah, me neither,” I said, her words sinking home.
Levi had said I was his mate. Stated it with conviction. Yet, if a mating bond required two halves of a dragon soul, as Yolandi had explained, then how was it possible for him to choose me, a human, to be the other half of him?
Or was it all based on emotions and feelings? A desire to couple up simply because I had his child? Was that it?
Then, of course, there was Lydia. Whatever “choice” she might have made, her actions toward Levi could only be construed as driving the point home.
Assuming her choicehadbeen made.
I didn’t like that train of thought. After all, if Leviwasover her, then why did he continue to allow her to act the way she did? Surely, he wasn’t blind to it. Could it be there was a lingering seed of desire for her? After all, she was a dragon, and I wasn’t. How was I supposed to compete with that?
And more to the point, did I even want totry? Just how much did I care about whatever was going on between us?
It appeared I had some thinking to do …
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sarah
“Did you have fun today meeting the rest of your family?”
“Yep!”
I bit back a smile, listening through the doorway as Levi tried to put Jakub to bed when all our son wanted was to bounce off the walls and recount his day with the dragons.
It warmed my significantly more cynical self to see Jakub wasn’t permanently scared of the dragons. He’d already probably forgotten about the war. True, my parents and I had tried hard to shelter him from it, but to completely ignore it was impossible. The dragons had taken much of the northern seaboard of our country, including some of our biggest cities.
And in return, the dragons had become the bogeymen of legend. It had only taken eight months for horrible tales to circulate, and the threat of “being taken by the dragons” replaced anything else, from trolls to gremlins and evil monsters.
Now, Jakub was unlearning that. And perhaps, little by little, so was I. The dragons were a society as well. Not all of them were evil or war rabid. Many, in fact, detested the war and wanted peace so they could be left alone.
