Knot Playing Fair: Book One (EBOOK, LGBT)

ONE

Mia Dimitriadis
*
BEING ANGRY IS always better than being hurt. That was my new personal motto, and it had been in force for the last two weeks. I sat at the polished oak bar, rubbing idly at the smooth band of tender skin where my wedding ring had sat for the past five years, two months, and eighteen days.

“This isn’t fair to me, Mia.” Nat’s words from our last argument had been playing on a continuous loop, living rent free in my head every hour of the day and night. “My needs aren’t being met, and they haven’t been met since business at the restaurant started to take off last year. I want to open up the marriage.”

My hands shook. I reached for my wine glass, throwing back a generous swallow. The bar stool next to me creaked, a broad, heavy figure settling on it.

“You looking for company, Flower?” It was a man. An alpha. He was the sixth one tonight to lead with a similarly bad pick-up line. “Pretty little thing like you shouldn’t be sitting here drinking all alone.”

He smelled like cigarette smoke and guava nectar. Hopefully the tobacco scent was because he smoked. If it was part of his natural pheromone cocktail, that seemed like a pretty cruel genetic joke.

“I’m good, thanks,” I told him.

“I’ll just bet you are.”

He waggled bushy eyebrows in case I hadn’t caught the double entendre. If he was younger than sixty, I’d eat my chef’s hat.

“That’ll have to remain a hypothetical, since I’m not interested,” I told him. “Good hunting, though.”

The alpha grunted and heaved himself from his stool, off to find more tractable prey. I returned to my merlot, debating the pitfalls of ordering another glass.

21 Oak was a singles bar that catered mostly to alphas and omegas. Aside from a decent wine collection, its main selling point was that it lay within walking distance of my restaurant, the Elderflower Inn.

I’d come here with a nebulous plan to flirt outrageously with a couple of attractive alphas, completely fail to go home with them, and then hurl an embellished version of the evening’s entertainment in Nat’s face the next time we fought.

I pondered whether being hit on six times in ninety minutes was enough to call it a night. I didn’t think I could bring myself to engage in any more conversations that began with, ‘I hope you know CPR—because, baby, you just took my breath away.’

God. What was I even doing here?

I should be curled on my sofa at home, wrapped in a blanket and watching mindless TV. Trying to recover enough energy to get up and go do my job tomorrow. I’d dragged myself here out of some twisted idea of tit-for-tat. Like, if Nat insisted on making connections outside of the marriage, then I would, too.

Was he even home tonight? Would I be going to bed alone? Would I be waking up alone?

Two weeks of this, and I still hadn’t told anybody else about it. I already knew what most people would say. Have some self-respect, girl. You need to leave his cheating ass.
It wasn’t that simple, though.

Nat and I weren’t just married. We were also business partners. Together, we’d launched the first Michelin-star restaurant not only in St. Louis, but in the entire state of Missouri. In addition, the Elderflower Inn was only the third Michelin-star restaurant in history with an omega head chef.
I’d worked my ass off to achieve that honor. I wasn’t about to throw it in the dumpster just because Nat had taken a meat cleaver to my heart.

A new presence slipped onto the stool next to me. I steeled myself to deliver yet another brush-off. But instead of heavy alpha pheromones, the sweet scent of honeysuckle and fresh-mown grass tickled my nose… like a childhood summer captured in a perfume bottle.

Startled, I turned to meet the olive-green eyes of the slender male omega who’d sidled into my space. Tousled black hair topped a pale, angular face. His cupid’s bow lips twitched into a smile so brief I might have missed it if I hadn’t been staring.

“Hey,” he said in a light tone. “I couldn’t help noticing that you don’t seem to be enjoying the meat market all that much. My friend and I have a table if you’d like to come sit with us instead.”

I blinked, following the jerk of his chin toward a table tucked in the back corner of the room. A pleasant-faced, broad-shouldered man sat facing us. He was dressed casually, with dusky skin and long dreadlocks gathered up in a messy half-bun. One hand casually cradled a glass of beer. He caught my gaze and inclined his head in a tiny nod of acknowledgement.

The jolt in my chest as his eyes pinned mine instantly identified him as an alpha.

“Um…” I said stupidly, trying to kick my wine-muddled brain far enough into gear to decide if there were any reason not to join them. I couldn’t come up with anything. “Sure?”

“Cool,” said the omega. “I’m Luca, by the way. That’s Zalen.”

“Mia,” I replied. “Thanks for rescuing me. I wasn’t really prepared for the level of creepy on display in this place.”

He snorted a small breath of laughter through his nose. “With a bar like this, it’s best to travel in a pack.” The moment the words left his mouth, though, he seemed to catch himself, a flush of pink rising to his cut-glass cheekbones. “Well… I mean… I suppose most omegas who already have a pack wouldn’t be here in the first place, right?”

The sudden awkwardness didn’t quite match the vision of porcelain, put-together perfection seated next to me.

“Are, uh… are you and Zalen together?” I asked, not wanting to blunder into anything without first knowing the lie of the land.

“No,” Luca said quickly. The color staining his cheeks deepened, and he cleared his throat. “I mean, not exactly. We work together, and… it’s kind of complicated.”

“Gotcha,” I said, despite having no clue what that was supposed to mean in this context.

Luca slid off the stool and ushered me toward his complicated alpha, his hand hovering a few inches behind my lower back. I clutched my mostly finished glass of 2015 Leonetti and spared a nasty thought for my absent husband.
Suck it, Nat.

Zalen rose as we approached, offering me a faint, reserved smile. It crinkled the skin at the corners of his dark brown eyes, but he had the air of someone distracted by other worries.

I could relate.

“Hello,” I said, taking the initiative. “I’m Mia. Thanks for offering a refuge.”

I transferred the wine glass to my left hand and reached across the table with my right—an automatic gesture after too many meetings with investors and members of the press. Zalen accepted the handshake with a murmured greeting. His palm was cool and dry despite the stifling heat of the bar; his grip pleasantly firm without being overbearing.

“Have a seat,” he said, hooking Luca’s chair out for him before retaking his own.

Not together, my ass, I thought, mildly amused by the display of chivalry.

I settled into my own seat, placing my glass in front of me. As I did, Zalen’s incisive gaze flicked down to my hand… where, I abruptly realized, the paler band of skin at the base of my ring finger would be easily visible.

As stupid as it was, I jerked my hand down to rest on my lap, where it would be hidden by the table. Then I silently berated myself for the guilty reaction. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, damn it.

Thankfully, Zalen was too polite to say anything. Or possibly, he simply didn’t care that I normally wore a wedding ring.

“So, Luca says you two work together?” I began, in an oh-so-cool and natural segue into conversation.

Smooth, Mia. Real smooth.

“That’s right,” Zalen said, playing along. “My pack runs the Hope Project in East St. Louis. Luca’s our grant writer, among various other talents.”

The idea of anyone voluntarily running anything in East St. Louis was a bit hard to wrap my head around. St. Louis, Missouri had a pretty bad reputation for crime. East St. Louis, Illinois had a horrible reputation for crime.

“I haven’t heard of it,” I said. “Don’t really get across the river much. What do you do?”

“It’s a center for at-risk youth,” Luca said, drawing my attention back to him.

For the first time, I noticed that his heavy-lidded green eyes were accented with guyliner as well as thick, dark eyelashes. I’d always had a bit of a thing for pretty, male omegas—at least from an aesthetic standpoint. Luca certainly wasn’t doing anything to cure that tendency.

“There’s some heavy gang activity in the area,” Zalen said. “It’s where we’re needed. We do our best to offer the kids an alternative. Free classes, tutoring on life skills, that kind of thing.”

“And martial arts,” Luca put in.

“And martial arts,” Zalen agreed.

“What about you?” Luca asked. “No offense, but you’ve kind of got that ‘I just finished a brutal shift at work’ look.”

I let out a short laugh. If I’d been in any doubt that these two weren’t pick-up artists, that would have sealed it. ‘Wow, you sure look tired’ wasn’t exactly prime seduction material.

“Restaurant chef,” I said, not mentioning the name of the establishment. The nice thing about being a local celebrity chef was that people didn’t generally recognize your face on the street… or in bars, for that matter. But there’d been enough press coverage of the Elderflower over the past year that specifying where I was a chef sometimes made things awkward.

People seemed to have all sorts of passionate opinions about a female omega running a prestigious restaurant kitchen, for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom.

“Yep. That’d do it,” Luca said. “Do you enjoy it?”

I used to. These days, I could still honestly say that I enjoyed the sense of accomplishment at achieving that first Michelin star—but the actual day-to-day grind was slowly wearing me down. More so over the past two weeks since Nat dropped his bombshell on me.

I settled on, “It can be stressful. But probably not as stressful as dealing with gang members.”

Zalen shrugged. “They’re mostly good kids.”

I drew breath to reply, but a prickle at the back of my neck alerted me to approaching trouble an instant before Zalen frowned at something behind me, his brow furrowing.

“Mia!” The barked name wasn’t quite a shout, but it carried clearly over the ambient noise of the room.

A sick swirl of dread mixed with hot resentment twisted my stomach as Nat stomped over to the table.

“Nat,” I said through gritted teeth.

My beta husband looked incredulously from me, to Zalen, to Luca, and then back to me.

“What the hell?” Nat demanded… and this time, it was definitely a shout.

Around us, heads turned curiously as nearby patrons were drawn toward the promise of drama. With a scowl still wrinkling the skin between his eyebrows, Zalen rose slowly from his chair, squaring up to Nat across the table.

End of Sample