Tipping The Scales: Knox (Mate Craze Book 1) Read online

  I took a glance back at the table to see my mate wide-eyed at something in front of me—or maybe at me.

  God, I hoped it was at me.

  “Dude, that’s a hell of a lot of food,” the raven-haired friend called out to me after turning around in her booth.

  “It is. Y’all want to join me?” I asked, not thinking they would.

  “Absolutely!” the friend called out, hopping out of her booth, grabbing her plate, and almost skipping over to my table. I pulled everything I could toward me to make room—not for her, but for my mate.

  “I’m Knox,” I said, pushing my hand across the table with my eyes on the brown-haired beauty now joining us. “Knox Renouf.”

  “I’m Rhi and this is Kallie.”

  Kallie-Kallie-Kallie.

  “Kallie, this is Knox. Knox,” she fumbled over the introduction.

  I smiled at Kallie rolling her eyes. “Two Knox or just one Knox?”

  Pretending to be calm, I lined up my pancakes and poured the syrup in the middle, watching it waterfall over the edges.

  “Just one. One of me is enough for anyone. Go on, eat. I won’t bite.” Kallie had left half of her plate full of food.

  “Damn, you’re not my type then. I like the biters.” Rhi dug into my omelet, not caring.

  “What are you girls in town for? Business or pleasure?”

  Kallie opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it. “Some business and some pleasure,” she finally said. I closed my eyes, feeling myself carried away by her voice.

  “We signed up for a survival course. Kallie loves all that outdoor shit. The only thing I like to do outdoors is, well… not hiking.”

  A whisper of a smile pulled at Kallie’s mouth. She had a sense of humor. While I was busy looking at her mouth, her lips fell back into place making me look at her eyes to see what had changed. Her brown eyes, golden flecks scattered in like Midas’ stars, stared back at me. I gasped in my mind. My scales, the ones that were too stubborn to go away with the dragon, buzzed, vibrating against my human skin just below the surface. The burning that had only been an ember before was now a bonfire, heating me from the inside out, confirming what I already knew was true about the female across this rickety table from me.

  When I finally gained some air back in my lungs, I spoke again, “Well, I teach the survival course.”

  “What did I tell you, Kallie? It just gets better and better every time he opens his mouth.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but whatever it was it made Kallie’s cheeks bloom with color. Blush was her color.

  “Are y’all in college?”

  Kallie flicked her fork down onto her plate. “You ask a lot of questions. What are you, the sheriff?”

  I looked to Trina and Gretchen who were barely holding in laughter. Probably because no one talked to me like that— ever.

  “Something like that. This is a small town, if you haven’t noticed. We notice when new people come here. But you two know that. You were here last summer. Or, at least, one of you was.”

  “I wasn’t,” Rhi said. “But Kallie was here all alone. You didn’t see her?”

  The lie was bitter on my tongue, like I’d inhaled it and it soured on my taste buds. Rhi turned and gave me a look of bewilderment.

  “I see a lot of people.” A grin like the Grinch’s grew on my face as I inched the plate of loaded hash browns my way. It was the only thing Rhi hasn’t stuck her fork into, unwelcomed.

  “That’s a shit-eating grin if I ever saw one. He’s got your number, Kallie—dialed it and you answered. Sex-on-a-stick has you cornered. Isn’t that what you call him—or have called him for almost a year now?”

  Not only was Kallie’s face red, but now the tips of her ears were almost glowing. I moved my plates to one side of the table for the show. From the eyes that Kallie was cutting in Rhi’s direction, it was going to be good.

  “Oh, I call him that? Right, because of the two of us, I’m the one who would call him that. Right.”

  Rhi scooted forward. “You said right twice, genius.”

  “Stop changing the subject. I’m not the one who called him that. I don’t even know his freakin’ real name or else I’d call him that… Wait, his name is Knox. Stop saying sex!” Her voice trailed off, laced with embarrassment.

  Rhi covered her mouth with her hand while I twisted my mouth in every way but a smile. I didn’t want her to think I was laughing at her—though I was.

  After a few minutes of looking at anything but me, Kallie finally met my gaze again. “Knox, I was wondering if you could help me with something?”

  I leaned forward—it couldn’t be helped—and let my dragon pour a little of his fire into my voice. “Absolutely.”

  One side of Kallie’s mouth rose while she leaned forward, matching my stance, and looked at my mouth. My scales were buzzing and the dragon inside me wanted to scoop her up and fly her to the nearest private mountain top.

  The girl was playing with fire—literally.

  Her eyes, deep and deadly, bored into mine as she ran her bottom lip across her top teeth.

  One day, that would be my job.

  “Knox. It’s a really important question.”

  “Anything.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she popped back against the booth, one of her eyebrows popped up, knowing what she had done to me, and stuck out her tongue.

  4

  Kallie

  The bathroom. I hid in the bathroom the night before like a freak, and honestly, I felt like a freak. I know Rhi thought she was the one causing all of my discomfort with her taunting, but she had very little to do with it. Sure, she was annoying as heck, but that had always been a part of her charm. Best friends push buttons, it’s like a rule.

  What really had me a caflustered, beet-red mess was Knox. Goodness, even his name had my heart a-flutter and my face a-burnin’. My memory had not served him justice. He was more than gorgeous, for his looks were only a fraction of what drew me to him. It was his energy. He filled the room until it felt as if he was embracing me in his arms, even though we weren’t even touching. It was all I could do not to climb in his lap and beg him to touch me.

  Touch me. If being close to him had me all in a fluster, touching him was going to be the death of me, of that I was sure. The brush of his hand had my body feeling things I couldn’t process. It was heat, actual temperature heat, and heart thumping, butterflies in your stomach, which probably was true for most crushes. But it was more. Like he was a magnet and I was metal. Not touching him took all my strength.

  Not that I was planning to jump him or whatever wise-arse thing Rhi would come up with, but I needed to touch him. Hold his hand, lean against him, even playing footsie would suffice. How was this man doing this to me without even trying? Maybe he was like those not-hot guys on television that everyone was still drawn to. Some je ne sais quoi or whatever the French saying was.

  In any case, I was a red hot mess. A mess of a mess. A needy ball of messy McMessness.

  Rhi tried to talk me out of my hiding perch in the stall, but I wasn’t having it, too afraid of what was happening, which in hindsight was crazy, but at the time felt necessary. After all, he had to have drugged me to get that kind of reaction, right? No not right, crazy, and I knew it. He was not the type to be underhanded like that. His eyes danced with trouble, but something in them told me he would never hurt me intentionally. Leave me with a broken heart? For certain sure. He probably left a trail of them everywhere he went.

  Heck, I was sitting here the next morning unable to forget him, or my inability to be normal in front of him anyway.

  “Are you getting up yet?” Rhi broke through my less than positive trip down memory lane.

  Busted. I was pretending to be asleep as Rhi completed her far-too-long morning routine, enjoying the lack of conversation as I tried to piece together what was happening to me. This trip needed to be all about work.
Important work, at that. If it panned out, I could save close to a hundred thousand in student debt, and that was a necessity if I were to achieve my goals.

  “I’m up,” I grunted, throwing a pillow in the direction of her voice, terribly missing her before finding a home on the floor.

  “You were hiding from me.” The pillow returned to me as a projectile I hadn’t seen coming and, unlike with my throw, her’s was spot on. Good old Rhi.

  “Was not.” I was such a liar face. “Fine, I was, but not from you as much as last night.” That was as close to the truth as I could get, even with my closest friend. Anything else would have meant being honest with myself, which was something I wasn’t even close to ready for.

  “I told you, he was fine with it.”

  “Right. He was fine with a chick hiding from him in the bathroom until he left.” I didn’t let my eyes leave her as I spoke the words, hoping she would give something away. As if anyone could be fine with someone fleeing their presence to hide in the bathroom until they left. That was not okay with anyone, no matter what Rhi tried to say. He was most likely trying to avoid showing his stomped on self-esteem or relieved he hadn’t been too invested before discovering my layers of crazy. The town was small and chances were I would run into him again, especially with Rhi taking that stupid survivalist class, the one she tried to get me to be a part of. A twisted little part of me wanted to make that happen, consequences be darned. I desperately wanted to see he really was fine with it.

  “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.

  “Because you know anything about my dating life,” I countered, poorly. A debate team star I wouldn’t be. Not on this subject anyway.

  “Sadly, I know all and you are boring as can be.”

  Stupid truth bomb.

  “What you call boring, I call motivated and responsible.” Responsible. Not a word that would win anything with Rhi, but true nonetheless. “Listen. I need to go. Call you later?”

  She nodded in defeat, and I hightailed it out of there faster than I thought possible. The entire conversation had me on edge, and mixed with my worry over this morning, I was a hot mess of a mess. I needed to see files that were public access, but more than that, I needed unfettered access to all files related to the case in town hall, where the courthouse/post office/clerk’s office/police stati
on all lived. Small towns, they were efficient in some ways to be sure.

  My butt started to vibrate. I knew I should have turned it off to prevent Rhi from pestering me, but I promised my mom I would keep the line of communication open, so responsible daughter gave Rhi the edge on this one. Only when I looked down, it wasn’t her.

  This is Knox

  Holy crap on a cracker. Knox. On my phone. After last night. I stopped dead in my tracks.

  How did he… never mind.

  Of course she gave him my number when she made the reservation, and of course she was late. For a brief moment there I thought he was calling for me, something I liked far more than I should’ve.

  Rhi will be there soon. Woke up late.

  I typed in the excuse and began to walk again. The sooner I got to work, the sooner my brain could focus on something, anything else.

  And you?

  I have work to do

  My fingers trembled as they typed, my pace but a crawl. My heart wanted to say I would be right there, but I couldn’t go down that path. I had things to do to create the future I needed. He was a distraction. A yummy distraction, but a distraction.

  For?

  Work.

  I felt guilty being so curt. I stunk at messaging.

  Fine I’ll let it drop. Have a good day.

  Brilliant. I’d pissed him off. It was probably for the best. Yeah. For the best. I lied to myself so many times today I really would have burning pants.

  You too.

  And Kallie?

  Yes?

  I’m sorry I freaked you out yesterday. I’d like another chance with you.

  Just like that, he melted away part of my resolve. Good thing he wasn’t here. I might have taken him up on his wilderness whatever. No. I was a strong woman… Still lying.

  Me too, but I truly need to get work done.

  “Kallie?” His voice was so close. I spun around and almost wacked into him. Darn man was like a cat.

  “How did you find me?” Thank you for finding me. I want you here even though you shouldn’t be here. You look better than yesterday. “Ah yes, the fabulous Rhi.” He nodded with a smirk. “So the real question is: why are you here?”