Tipping The Scales: Knox (Mate Craze Book 1)

by Lila Felix

“Maybe I wanna meet that sex on a stick guy you met last summer.”

  Leave it to Rhi to remember my tales of romantic woe after a night of listening to her latest crash and burn with yet another loser. And met wasn’t an accurate word. No, it was more like stalking. Silly me had thought letting her know that I liked a guy so much I snuck out to follow a guy, only to discover he was at a bar while I was six months too young to enter would lead to laughter and forgetting her current heartbreak. After all, only I could orchestrate a masterfully rebellious escape to wind up back in bed a mere twenty minutes later.

  When this trip came up, Rhi was sure he was why. Goodness, I didn’t even know his name; the last thing I would do was plan a trip around him. Although, to be honest, seeing him again had crossed my mind… a few thousand times. Imagine how much she’d hound me if she had half an inkling as to how much he still filled my fantasies.

  No, I was coming back to the place my mother had spread my grandmother's ashes, not for my family history, not for some wilderness fun, heck, not even for the hottie. No, I was there to investigate the death of my grandfather with the hopes of cranking out the best future defense attorney’s thesis ever and getting a full ride to law school.

  If I was going to work in the public sector as a lawyer, school loans weren’t an albatross I wanted. I wanted to be able to say yes to working in a small town, or even in an overcrowded city office, without money being the deciding factor. The more loans I took out, the greater the chance I’d have to sell out to the more lucrative side of attorney work.

  “Maybe I want to take him for a spin,” Rhi continued.

  “A spin?” Only Rhi would talk about men the way men talk about women. She’d claim equal rights and all, but I knew it was more for the shock value and I fed into her game every time. Because let’s face it, that’s what friends are for. “Really? He’s a person you know.”

  “And I’m a girl. With needs.” We pulled into the driveway, at last. The gas station was far from the “you can buy all things” kind we had near the school, but it looked like it would at the very least house some bad coffee and a semi-clean bathroom. “Besides, if you wanted him, you could’ve had him last summer. I officially call dibs.”

  “Whatever.” I found a spot near the door, parked the car, and took out my keys. “And Rhiamon?”

  “Yeah?” We were both unbuckling, grateful to be there. It wasn’t the time for me to bring asshat up, but it never was. She needed to know, and now seemed like the time to offer once again. Who knew, maybe it would be the time it actually stuck.

  “I know you’re only here to get away from he–who-shall-not-be-named, so if you ever need to talk—”

  “You’re my gal.” She cracked open the door. “Got it. See ya inside.” She popped out of the car and ran into the store before I even got out of the car. I crossed my fingers that meant she’d be done before I got inside.

  I wasn’t so lucky and started to do the little kid gotta-go dance outside the bathroom door. I had no shame and would’ve been in the men’s room in a heartbeat if the station housed more than one unisex room. Three knocks and a “please hurry” later, I found my relief and was ready to hit the road.

  “Ready?” I tapped Rhi on the shoulder at the coffee station.

  “Almost. Grabbing some snacks and coffee.” Her hands were full of chips, candy, canned coffee, and nuts.

  “You do know we are only an hour away?”

  “And you do know snacks will be helpful for more than just the trip?” She snatched a bag of snack mix from the shelf behind me. I kept waiting for the pile in her arms to topple over, but they stayed put. Impressive.

  She was probably right. I planned to stop at the local grocery store when we arrived to save money. I decided to grab a couple of things in case the drive had me too tired to do anything but sleep before my marathon of academic prowess. “I’m going to look around and see if anything catches my fancy.”

  And catch my fancy something did, but it wasn’t the coffee, the snacks, or even the very odd assortment of “souvenirs,” it was a small display of statues. No, that wasn’t the word. They were more like recycled sculptures in the form of animals, for the most part. Well, animals and a dragon, but mostly animals. Birds seemed to be the muse of choice and was the predominant theme of more than half of the items on display.

  I stood mesmerized. Someone had taken old kitchen utensils, tools, and from my best guess, used car parts and turned them into magnificent pieces. The ones on display were not much larger than a house cat or a small dog, but the flier beside them showed pieces much larger. And if the pictures were any indication, they were just as beautiful as the pieces in front of me. How someone could look at this random junk unassembled and see it as the birds, foxes, and dogs before me fascinated me to no end.

  I picked up the dragon and tried to identify all of the components. Scissors, some bolts, and a couple of spoons was as far as I got before Rhi caught up to me.

  “Ohh, that’s pretty stinking awesome.” She reached out, touching the nose which was made of some sort of glass, probably an old florist’s marble melted with a torch, given the other items used in construction. “Are you going to buy it?”

  Was I? I hadn’t even thought about it, but the idea of putting it down didn’t feel right. Somehow it felt like it was mine.

  “I doubt I can afford it.” That was a perpetual problem of mine, one Rhi failed to understand and one that led to more of our fights than anything else. She always wanted to do things that cost money. Lots of money. I wanted to do things that were fun and didn’t cause financial stress. The first year she roomed with me, she thought I was trying to thwart our friendship because I wanted my old roomie back. Truth be told, my old roomie was less than ideal so that hadn’t crossed my mind once. Eventually she figured out it was just me being frugal and she let it go.

  “Doubt?” Rhi flipped the tag in my direction. “It’s only thirty bucks. If you don’t get it, I’m getting it.”

  How the heck was it only thirty dollars? I went to enough gallery exhibits with Rhi in her quest to become a famous artist to know that the going rate of art this amazing was far outside my budget. Then again, this was a gas station and not a gallery, so maybe it was a mark-up?

  “Mine.” I clutched it close as she attempted to retrieve it from me after my non-response to her comment. She didn’t want it, or so I assumed. Didn’t matter because I needed it. The thought of putting it down, no matter the cost, was too unsavory.

  “Possessive much?”

  “I meant I’m buying it, weirdo.” Not that her assessment was less than accurate. I was oddly possessive of the dragon in my hands. “Of course it’s not mine... yet.” I made a mental calculation of where the spare dollars would come from. Soup for lunch while on break it was. So worth it.

  I didn’t really have thirty bucks to spare, but something snapped in me when she threatened to buy it. Which was insane. It was official, a year of all school, all the time was getting to me. Only one project and half a semester to go and I could, and would, take some well-earned and much needed time off.

  We checked out without any more discussion of the matter. I think my weird freak out was disconcerting to my roommate of two plus years. I was always the level headed one, and she wasn’t, so to see me in all my non-normal self-glory this trip probably had her second guessing her decision to come. It wasn’t like she could even escape to shop. There was no mall anywhere close by. My guess was she was going to be taking pictures, reading on her e-reader, or one-clicking online the entire trip.

  As I settled into the car for the last hour of our journey, I felt remarkably not guilty for buying the frivolous piece of art. It felt right to have it, almost as if it was meant to be mine.

  “You know, that dragon you got is really beautifully designed. All of those sculptures were. They should really be in a gallery and not a gas station.”

  “Alongside your pieces?” Actually, hers really should be. She had a way of
seeing things no one else did. Her camera wasn’t just clicked at random. It had a focus that showed the world differently, and once she took that piece and collaged it into her multimedia masterpieces… impressive. Now if she could convince a gallery to take a chance on her.

  “Quite possibly.” Rhi sounded far away. She got that way when her dreams seemed unattainable. She’d been rejected twice in the month before we left, and I guessed that seeing artwork as unique as hers, even if in very different ways, at a gas station was a slap in the face of her aspirations.

  “They made some money, so maybe the gas station was the perfect place. I’m sure people saw the flier and purchased much bigger pieces,” I offered, hoping she’d see it as a business model and not as the best the artist could do.

  “Advertising?” The long pause that followed told me all I needed to know. My premise had her thinking in a more positive way. A quick rebuttal followed any of my ideas that Rhi considered craptastic. “Hmmm. I didn’t think of it that way. Do you think my pieces would sell in a gas station?”

  “I think your work would sell anywhere.” They truly were magnificent, they just needed to be seen by people and not in her closet, waiting for a showing.

  “Says not one of the galleries I attempted to show at.”

  “They’re blind and snooty.” She had showed them to Art Alley, and in a city like ours that meant pretentious row, and that was one thing Rhi never came across as… pretentious. “You capture nature as it is and then show all its promise. People will love that. I love that.” I wasn’t one for blowing smoke up people’s asses. I loved her work and looked forward to saying “I knew her when…” after she got famous. The only thing standing in Rhi’s way was her self-confidence, which always seemed to come around full circle to her parents.

  “The galleries say it is nothing they can’t find elsewhere.”

  “I call bullshit.” A sign for our destination came into view. Only thirty miles, which on the slow road we were taking could mean forty-five minutes, but still very close. We would reach there by nightfall, which had been my goal.

  “Because you are the best roommate ever.” She squeezed my shoulder, her emotions too close to the surface.

  “Or because I wanted to cuss.”

  “Well, there is that.” She chuckled at her sad little joke. For some reason, Rhi found it odd I cussed so infrequently, although to be fair, much more now than when we met.

  “Seriously though, your eye catches things the average person misses as they wander through the woods or sit in their own backyard. That makes them far from ordinary. Sure, anyone can look around and find a lady bug. That’s not what you do. You manage to capture, on film, a moment in time where the ladybug and the flower work in perfect harmony, and then you build around it so that others can see it as clearly as you do.”

  “You saw that?” Her voice filled with wonder at one observation. I shook my head, pissed at all the professors, gallery owners, and family members who failed to support her all these years. She wasn’t high maintenance on this. With boys, clothes, and a boatload of other things, yes, but not on her art. She just needed words of affirmation from time to time and not all from me, her loner roomie.

  “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.

  “Yep,” I answered, barely. I was surprised that anything had come out of my mouth. The corner booth was on the other side of the place, so I counted the black and white tiles as I tried not to fall on my ass in front of my future mate.

  “Been here about twenty minutes, give or take. Gretchen filled me in on the situation,” Trina mumbled as the black sludge poured into a cup she’d set in front of me.

  “Thanks, Trina.” I focused as hard as I could on my reflection in the hot liquid. “One of everything, please.”

  “Already cookin’, Knox. Say, um, is she? You don’t think that might be your… she’s not…”

  My upheld hand shut up anything else she was going to say. “Don’t be silly, Trina. She was digging around here last summer, trying to uncover things that are best laid buried. That’s all. I just want to keep an eye on her—make sure she doesn’t dig too deep.”

  “Gotcha, boss. Be right back.”

  Over the tip of my raised mug, I dared to look in the direction of—fuck, I didn’t even know her name.

  Trina was already on that for me. She was at their table, making small talk. I waited, demanding that I maintain some semblance of normalcy while they talked, while Trina found out the information that I should’ve been finding out, first hand, from my mate.

  “Everything you ordered, sir.” Gretchen placed plates of food one by one in front of me.

  “Gretchen, there’s no need to call me ‘sir’. Knox is just fine—and thanks.”