Page 14 of Mating Her Dragon

"Correct."

"You're conducting a military occupation of a gravel pad."

"The camper is level. That is not optional."

"It's a camper, Garrett. If it tips over, it'll tip over slowly. We'll have time to escape."

He didn't dignify that with a response, which she counted as a win.

Meanwhile, Sydney contributed by opening a bottle of wine and pulling a bag of chips from her giant snack bag. She set them on the steps, then set up two camp chairs facing the sunset.

"What are you doing?" Garrett asked, straightening from his final inspection.

"My job."

"Which is?"

"Morale." She held up the wine. "Somebody has to keep spirits up while the Dragon Guardsman conquers a parking spot."

He looked at her for a long moment, something unguarded moving behind his eyes. Then he sat down in the chair beside her without another word of protest.

The desert went gold, then orange, then a deep, bruised purple. It was the kind of sunset that made a person feel very small in a way that didn't feel bad at all. Garrett sat with his forearms braced on his knees, staring out at the horizon like he was trying to memorize it.

"Regretting it yet?" Sydney asked.

"No." Immediate. No hesitation, no consideration required.

She smiled into her wine glass.

"How far is it?" he asked after a while. "The Pacific."

"Far." She tipped her head back, looking up at the first stars starting to show. "But we're not in a hurry."

He looked at her, and she felt him turn the sentence over. She could literally see him weighing it against a lifetime spent measuring every mile in terms of how fast it needed to be covered.

"We're not running to it," she said. "We're just going there."

It felt important to say out loud. Their whole existence, both of theirs, had been built out of urgency– run toward the danger, run from the danger, save this person, stop that thing, beat Fate to the punch before Fate got there first. For once, neither of them had anywhere to be except wherever they ended up.

Garrett didn't say anything. But his hand found hers in the space between the two camp chairs, and that was answer enough.

She got up a while later, and headed inside for more coffee because it was well past the hour when coffee made any logical sense. However, Sydney had never once let that stop her. Singing under her breath, she stopped dead three steps from the Airstream's door.

There was Magic nearby. That wasn't new– she'd always been able to sense Magic, had grown up soaked in it, could feel a Ward the way most people felt a change in air pressure. But this was different.

She could see it.

Not an aura. Not the soft, familiar glow that screamed Shifter or Fae or something old. This was the actual architecture of a Spell, laid bare in front of her like a blueprint. There were threads and knots and layers, woven into the old fence line at the edge of the campground, running through the posts and the scattered stones like veins.

Protection. Concealment. Warning.

She knew what each thread did without anyone teaching her, the way she knew her own name.

“Well,” she thought. “That's new.”

"What is?" Kara asked.

"You don't see that?" Sydney asked slowly, staring at the impossible, beautiful tangle of the old Ward.