Page 13 of Mating Her Dragon

Getting out of the truck, he walked around and opened her door. After much cajoling and pleading, she finally got him to stand beside the jackalope. Of course, Garrett was less than thrilled and stood there with the exact posture of a man being forced to pose next to unexploded ordnance. His arms were crossed, and his jaw set. He was clearly counting down the seconds until it was over.

"Smile," Sydney said, phone raised.

"I am smiling."

"You look like you're identifying a body."

"This is a body. It has antlers, Sydney. Rabbits do not have antlers."

"It's a jackalope. It's fake. It's fiberglass. It cannot hurt you."

"That has not been established."

She snapped the photo anyway, mid-argument, and it was, without question, going to be the best picture she owned of him for the rest of her natural life.

And then, something miraculous happened. She honestly had no clue what did it. It could have been the ridiculous rabbit or their silly argument or simply the ludicrous fact of the two of them standing in a gravel parking lot in the middle of nowhere with nowhere they had to be.

But none of that mattered because… Garrett laughed.

Not the polite huff he sometimes gave her jokes. Not the dry, almost-smile she'd learned to read as amusement over all of their near-death experiences.

It was a real laugh. It had exploded out of him, loud enough to echo off the gas station. It was the kind of laugh that seemed to surprise him every bit as much as it surprised her.

Sydney froze, phone still raised, and just… looked at him.

There he was. Not the Guardsman. Not the centuries of duty stacked up behind his eyes like sandbags. Just Garrett, laughing at a fiberglass rabbit in the Texas sun, looking about a decade younger and infinitely more hers.

"I want more of that," she thought, simple and clear as a bell.

"You appear," Kara observed, entirely too pleased with herself, "exceedingly satisfied with your Mate."

"Kara, don't."

"I said nothing."

"Yes, you did, and you were about to say more."

"No, I merely observed a fact. You are exceedingly pleased with him. This is not new information, but something I wanted to say that I had noticed."

"I'm always pleased with Garrett."

"That is not what I meant, my girl, and you know it."

"Shut up, Kara."

Kara, mercifully, let it drop. But Sydney kept the thought anyway. She tucked it away somewhere warm, right alongside the first time she saw his face, the first time he smiled, their first kiss, and when he and Grey hugged. They were precious memories, of which she knew there would be more, that she would always keep close to her heart.

They crossed into New Mexico a little before sunset. They found an RV park tucked against the edge of the desert– a gravel loop, a handful of scattered sites, a fence line, and past that, nothing but red dirt and creosote bush running out to meet a sky so wide it looked personally offended by the concept of a horizon.

Before they even got out of the RV, Garrett announced that he had a checklist.

Of course, he had a checklist, and it made her want to laugh, but she didn’t. Instead, she tried to help.

Sadly, that mostly meant standing nearby, holding things Garrett didn't ask her to hold, and watching him level the camper with the focused precision of a man mixing two chemicals that just might blow up the known world. Wheel chocks. Water hookup. Power hookup. Sewer, which he handled with a grim, professional efficiency that suggested he'd decided it was simply another category of hostile terrain to be neutralized. He checked the awning twice, then did a full safety inspection of the hitch, the frame, and the connections.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was a second full safety inspection because Sydney had interrupted the first one to ask if they had string cheese.

"We are camping," Sydney informed him, watching him circle the Airstream for the fourth time. "Not fortifying a border."