Tipping The Scales: Knox (Mate Craze)(22)

Still in shock, she choked on her words. “Thought it was an earring or a piercing or one of those dermal piercings-something. Yeah, I can see it.”

Both of my hands were kneading her waist through her shirt. It was uncontrollable, the sheer need to get through the fabric to touch her skin just once.

“No one can see those. No one.”

Her eyes narrowed, but never left the gaze with mine. “I see them. I see you.”

She didn’t know the full impact of those words.

“You told me to leave,” she said with a tear brimming at the corner of her eye. With some force, she blinked it back, determined to turn her back on it altogether.

“I did. I still want you to leave, but not empty-handed, not like this.”

She tried for an instant to wriggle free. It was haphazard at best.

“I’m not sure you can get rid of me now, female.” I leaned down, feeling her breasts brush against my chest and I got so close I could whisper in her ear.

I didn’t hold her tight. She had every opportunity to free herself from me with one tug. “I can do what I want, when I want,” she breathed.

“That’s what I like about you. You won’t be tamed. Instead, maybe you can tame me.”

She backed away then, just enough that her eyes were connected with mine again, but not so much to free herself from my hands fisting the sides of her shirt. Her chin, with the tiniest dent in the middle quivered for a second while the redness in her cheeks returned. She was pissed, and I wasn’t going to stand for it—for very long.

I did the only thing I thought could possibly shut her up. Before one syllable could exit her mouth, I bent down, just the slightest and with as much restrain as I could, pressed my mouth against hers in a release of pent up want and passion. Her lips were rigid against mine for a few seconds before, with a sigh, she relented to what we both wanted, and she moved with me. Her hands grabbed onto my back and pulled me closer as though even the small space between us was too much before trailing them up to the back of my neck, desperate for me to deepen what I’d started.

With a growl that was half human and half dragon, I slid my tongue into her mouth and just as I got lost in the taste of her, the sounds from her, the way she melded into my body, it was over. With one shove of her hands on my chest, she tore me out of the bliss and back to Earth.

“What are you doing?” That was the first question that came to my mind.

“I’m doing what you said, remember? Go. Now.” She mocked me with a tone that wasn’t too far from the truth and began a slow and smoldering walk to the truck. I should’ve caught her and asked her not to go.

Instead I stood in shock at the pure and unadulterated knowledge of what I thought I’d known all along.

Kallie was my mate.

She saw my scales and kissed me like she and I were both about to die in a fiery apocalypse.

Now I had to tell her that she was the mate to a man, and a beast.

As soon as my truck was out of sight and I could no longer hear her heartbeat between my temples, I pulled off my shirt, closed the door that she’d left open in complete anger, and hauled ass out the back door toward the mountains. The trees that so well hid my house passed through my vision. I allowed my dragon to take center stage in my consciousness so I speak to my brother. There was only one person in the world that I could talk to about the shit storm that Kallie had brought into my life.

Best shit storm I ever got into.

Samson, meet me at the mountain. Now.

It took him a minute to answer me which was odd. Usually, even if he was still in human form, he answered immediately. That’s why he was the beta—he was to be available to the clan at all times.

Yep. Give me ten.

Ten? Ten! I was an asshole. He had a mate and a child on the way. If he needed ten minutes to meet me then it must be for a good reason.

I stuck my clothes into a hole in the last tree before the cliff. I’d dug out that hole with my father because after my first spontaneous change, I’d come home naked and ravenous.

After a while, I had learned to have some control over my change, until last summer, when Kallie had visited. The pieces didn’t come together in my mind until a few days ago. It was her—it was all her—the way it was supposed to be when a dragon found his female—his eternal dragon mate.

And there laid the problem. The woman I was sure was my mate, down to the throbbing of my scales, was a human.

Fuck me sideways and call me Sally.

I stood at the edge of the cliff a little too long for my dragon’s liking. He pushed through, taking advantage of the scales that wouldn’t quite go away and expounded on their presence. Skin turned to scale, hardening while taking on a glimmer of teal and red, the colors of an Alpha dragon. My toes and fingers lengthened and became talons meant for tearing apart flesh and my jaw enlarged and became capable of crushing bone in one blow. In all my dragon’s beauty there was danger that lay just beneath the surface.

After a short flight in and between the puffy clouds that hugged the tops of the mountains, I landed next to my brother who had managed to get there before me despite his ten minute supposed delay.

“I’m just letting you know that I’m not doing that.”

I pulled on a pair of shorts and rolled my eyes. “What?”

“All that screwing you sideways, Sally.”

I’d forgotten that the channel to my brother was still open when I shot out that thought.