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.”

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.