Page 62 of Mating Her Dragon

She felt, instead, strangely, suspiciously calm.

"What is wrong?" Kara asked.

"Nothing."

"Precisely," Kara said. "You find that alarming, and I am wondering why."

Sydney lay there a moment longer, turning that over, and had to admit Kara wasn't wrong. She'd spent her entire life waiting for enormous, destiny-shaped things to happen to her– Prophecy, Kara, missions, Garrett himself, in the beginning, before either of them had chosen anything about it consciously.

Tomorrow was different.

Tomorrow wasn't coming for her.

She was walking toward it.

Garrett had apparently been awake since the dawn of time, doing logistics. Sydney found him standing at the edge of the bluff, studying the ground as if it might still betray him.

She looked around, genuinely startled by what she didn't see.

There was no visible military fortress. No Council tents pitched discreetly beside the Mating Ceremony spot. No weapons emplacement disguised, with questionable subtlety, as a floral arrangement.

"Where's the army?" she asked.

"Out of sight."

"Garrett."

"You said the Mating Ceremony was not a military operation." He didn't so much as blink. "You did not say I couldn't secure a perimeter three hundred yards away."

Of course he'd found the loophole. Of course he had.

She couldn't actually be mad about it, though, because he'd done exactly what they'd agreed to. He’d protected the space around their Mating without turning the Mating itself into bait.

People started arriving through the afternoon. Sydney was grateful, watching the small cluster of trucks pull up along the access road, that the guest list had stayed exactly as small as they'd wanted.

Carrick and Ginnie arrived first. Carrick to perform the rite itself. Ginnie for reasons that had started as soul-and-threshold expertise and become, somewhere along the way, genuine friendship. Bonnie Sue and Maggie Mae Sampson after them, because Two Wolves had been the first safe harbor of this entire road trip, and neither Sydney nor Garrett had wanted to Mate without at least a piece of that here with them. A pair of Commanders Sydney barely knew by name, present only because Dragon tradition required a Commander's Blessing from somewhere, and even Garrett hadn't wanted to argue that particular point.

She could have had Rayne and Maddox there, or even Kayne, but then she would have to tell her parents, and there was no way in Hell she was involving them and her new baby sister in any of this. She also thought about Garrett’s brother, Grey, but he and his Mate, Star, were off on a mission and couldn’t be reached.

She and Garrett had already talked about it. When the coast was clear, and Leviathan was put in a box somewhere, they would go home and have a proper family reunion with the whole Clan.

No parade of fifty people who'd normally expect an invitation to a historic Special One Mating. Just the people they'd actually chosen.

Bonnie and Maggie arrived with enough food, by Sydney's rough count, for at least forty-seven people.

"There aren’t even a dozen of us," Sydney said, staring at the sheer volume coming out of the truck bed. “Unless your hubby is comin’, Maggie Mae.”

“No, Heath can’t make it,” the She-Wolf chuckled. “He’s helpin’ Colton, his twin…” She nodded. “You remember him, right?”

“I sure do.”

“Well, Colton is an Agent-in-Training with the Dragon Intelligence Agency, and he needed a Tracker, a good tracker. Now, my Heath is the best Tracker around, so he is off helpin’, and I’m here.”

"Okay, so why again did you bring so much food?"

"Dragons count as four people apiece," Bonnie said, like this was self-evident.

Garrett examined the quantity carefully. "That seems reasonable."