Tipping The Scales: Knox (Mate Craze)(6)

“Not really,” I admitted. Left to my own devices, I saw nature hardly at all. I was so focused on my goals that nothing got in the way. Part of the reason I knew her art was so good. It got me to stop and see. “Your picture showed me that. You have a gift. Ignore the galleries. You are the best.”

“I do have my moments.”

I didn’t need to turn my head to know she was blushing at the compliment and that the conversation was officially over.

“Castleton or bust,” I chanted a few times waiting for her to join in, which she failed to do.

“I vote not bust.”

I chose to ignore her serious tone. This was a week away for her and a week of work for me. Who knew? Maybe I could get my research done easy peasy and we could spend some time at the bar. Not that I was of age. Not that I would be looking for that guy. Heck, he probably wasn’t local, and if he was, some girl surely scooped his yummy arse up by now.

“Yeah, me too.”

Fifteen miles. The sign was like a beacon of awesome. This week was going to be a life changer. I felt it in my core.

“Since we have a ways to go, you might as well tell me about sex on a stick guy again.”

“Fifteen miles is not a ways.” I turned on the radio and hit seek until a familiar song filled the car. “You could tell me about asshat instead.” Holding in whatever crushed her so couldn’t be good for her. That didn’t mean she was going to openly share either, but a girl has to try.

“Or we could sing loudly, proudly, and poorly along with the radio.”

“Ding ding ding.” I cranked the radio up as a familiar refrain began. “We have a winner.” and with that the car became a very loud, very out of tune place for the last leg of our journey.





3





Knox





Since the craze had set in, the mornings were the worst, especially since most of the time I hadn’t actually fallen asleep during the darkness.

My cell phone rang somewhere on the other side of the room, wherever I had plugged it in for the night. The clan’s healer, Lindsey, told me to keep it away from the side of my bed. She thought I must’ve been waking several times during the night to check games or whatever people did on their phones.

Well, maybe I had checked Sims once or twice during the night, but that wasn’t what was keeping me up—not by a long shot.

Hurling myself out of bed, I groaned and zeroed in on the damned thing ringing like someone was paying it a salary.

“What? I mean, hello,” I gruffed into the phone.

“Knox, sir. You asked me last summer, about the girl who asked, you told me to…” Gretchen oversaw the diner for the clan. Everything in this town technically belonged to me as the Alpha, but the money was shared—all of us worked for it.

She wasn’t a big talker, but she was loyal as they came.

“Yes, Gretch, I asked you to let me know if you saw her again.”

I heard the sounds of her stomping rather than walking in a hurry to the other room. The swish of the revolving door between the counter and the kitchen barely cut off the sound of her breathing. She was obviously moving to a place where no one could hear her, or someone in particular couldn’t hear her. By the second, I got more and more anxious. If she was there—if the female that I’d seen last summer was back in town—well, I hoped she’d never leave again.

Then again, she was human.

“Sir, she’s here with that other girl, but this time she is with another young woman, not her mother. They just came in, sat at your booth, unknowingly, of course. Paul said they checked into their rooms at the B&B, and now that we have that software, he had to check their IDs. We’ve got her, sir.”

She called me sir all the time even though I insisted she didn’t.

“I’ll be there shortly.”

I dropped the phone onto the bed and grabbed hold of the bed post. This wasn’t just some girl. I knew it. And if anyone in the clan had really been paying attention, like Samson, they knew it too. She was human. She was not from here and certainly not one of our kind.

And she was mine.

She just didn’t know it yet.

Had she changed? Why did she return? Did she even remember me?

I walked the distance down the hill from my cabin to the diner, which laid right in the center of town. With big, forced exhales, I commanded myself, and my dragon, to calm the fuck down. The scales, which had now become part of my human exterior, burned underneath my navy button-down shirt. My collar was choking me even though it was a little loose nowadays.

With my head held high, like dragons always do, I got to the door of the diner without looking inside the glass walls to see her.

I wanted to scent her first.

My hand shook a little when I opened the diner door, and only seconds after the dinging of the bell announced my entrance, I was hit with the scent that my human nose had forgotten, but my dragon had not. He was writhing around in the smell of his mate. Something like jasmine, lavender, and tangerine floated in the air and clung to the inside of my lungs like it had been there all along as a part of my anatomy.

The heads of several clan members tipped down ever-so-slightly in my direction. It was a maneuver that recognized my status as their leader, but not enough to tip off any nosey humans.

“Corner table? Coffee, black like your soul?” Trina smiled, a darker echo of her older sister Gretchen.