Tipping The Scales: Knox (Mate Craze)(9)

“Fine might be the wrong word, but he seemed to understand.” Shifting her eyes away from me under the guise of fixing her lip gloss, Rhi did a complete one-eighty, blocking my view of her expression. “Which, for the record, I don’t. I know you stay away from the dating scene, but come on. He was hot, interested, and did I mention hot?”

She did, in fact, mention hot. No less than five bazillion times since it happened. The first few dozen had me on edge. I didn’t want her seeing him as anything other some guy eating dinner. Completely. Utterly. Messed. Up. Who thinks so possessively about someone they just met? No. Freaking. One.

Rhi seemed to pick up on my inability to think rationally and she turned her tone when she said hot from “yummy yummy” to teasing and my tension fell. Yeah, I needed to focus on work and get out of here before I did something dumb like fall in love. Not that anything I was feeling was love. No, not love, but attraction like I never guessed existed anywhere but in the movies? Yeah, I had that in spades.

“I’m not interested.” My head fell back on my pillow. She didn’t need to glance at me to hear the BS in my words. I was interested. Darn. It. I had plans. This was not going to do.

“Wait, what is that smell?” Rhis spun around.

“What smell?” I sat up and inhaled. She probably left some of her yucky gas station snack fest out all night when it needed to be in the mini fridge.

“Is it smoke?”

I couldn’t smell a thing and climbed out of bed, meandering to where her flat iron, and the probable cause, was. She followed close behind, sniffing the air. Her flat iron was off and cool to the touch when I arrived and I had yet to smell a darn thing.

“Well I’ll be!” She cocked her head to the left, her eyes squinted as she held in her smirk. I had fallen for her antics… like always. “Your pants are on fire.”

“Brat.” I swatted at her, missing her shoulder as she ducked.

“Now get ready. We have a day of survival training booked.”

As if.

“Wrong.” I marched to the bathroom, my need to pee more important than what was going to become an argument. “You have a day booked. I have to get my research done.” I shut the door louder than it needed to be and started my morning ritual. Not that this stopped Rhi. She was relentless.

“Knox owns the survival training place,” she taunted through the door. I knew better than to assume a door would prevent her from… well, anything.

“And I still need to get my work done,” I called back as I flushed the toilet, set the shower, and turned on the sink to brush my teeth. Sure, it was wasting water, but it might give her the hint I wasn’t interested in talking right now.

“Get ready.” The command bellowed through the door as if she were the decider. “And we will talk about it when you have had a cup of coffee and are ready to actually be human.”

As I showered and changed, my mind kept wandering to him. Knox. What was it about this man? His appeal had me sneaking out a year ago, something so uncharacteristic of me, and still my draw to him then was only a fraction of what it was now. It made no sense. I mean, yeah, he was hot. All tattoos and muscles and eyes… those amber eyes were lethal. One glimpse of them and I became putty.

But it was so much more than that. The way his voice caressed me as he spoke, as if the words were only for me… Which they weren’t, because that would make me certifiable. The way he accepted my hiding in the bathroom like a chicken-head instead of being all pushy or worse, ridiculing me. The way he could care less what we thought of his extremely bountiful appetite. Most guys who work out like he must wanted to appear to be treating their body like a temple even if their cheat days were intense.

The part I didn’t understand was the way I reacted to him. I was a strong, confident woman. Sure, I dated barely at all, but that was an ends to a means. And yet with him all I wanted to do was be the carefree girl Rhi tried to pretend she was when at a party. Sit on his lap, bat my lashes, accidently brush my hand against him. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn’t in the bathroom hiding from anyone but myself. Ugh. I needed coffee and a To Do list. Stat.

“Let’s go!” Rhi’s voice bellowed through the door, and I immediately unlocked it. Her spider senses must have told her I was done and simply dawdling. Hiding. Whatever.

“I said no, but have fun.” I spoke quickly as I brushed past her, not wanting to give her an in to convince me to skip my work. She held the only key to derailing me from my mission, the opportunity to spend time with Knox. Not acceptable. Or so I kept trying to convince myself. “I’ll be at the town hall.” I cracked open the door, showing my resolve. Part of me, and by part I mean all but about the tiniest part of my rational brain, wanted to beg her not to go because he was mine. He wasn’t mine, though, and he never would be. That was just my hormones being on high altitudes or something.

“Fine, be that way, but you owe me fun.” I heard her plop back on the bed but refused to look as I took a step outside our door. Her puppy dog eyes had more power than I cared to admit. “This is my spring break.”

“And you knew I would be working before you even begged to come.”

“You and I both know this trip would suck without me. Besides, all work and no play make Kallie a dull virgin.”

At the V-word I scrambled back inside the partially closed door and pushed it closed. What was wrong with my friend? She thought everyone should speak freely about sex, periods, and even fantasies. Umm, no thanks. The last thing I wanted people knowing was when I had my last period, how much sex I didn’t have, or worse, the twisted things I thought about when Knox came to the forefront of my mind. I especially didn’t want the couple who owned this place to know.