I backedup the truck for the third time and pulled forward before finally being satisfied with my park job. The hospital rose in front of me like a glowing beacon. An ambulance unloaded a patient on a gurney at the emergency department entrance. Its light painted the parking lot in red and white.
I puffed out a breath, hoping it would settle the anxiety that was burbling in my stomach like a bad chowder.
I could have gone home.
I should have. But when I’d finished my shift, I drove towards the man who had tossed me his keys and told me to drive myself home. He’d made me promise before he’d followed the deputies out the door into the night.
Yet here I was at two a.m., disobeying direct orders and sticking my nose where it didn’t belong.
I should definitely go home. Yep. For sure, I decided, getting out of the truck and walking right on in through the front door.
Given the hour, there was no one sitting at the information desk. I followed the signs to the elevators and the Surgical Intensive Care Unit on the third floor.
It was eerily quiet on the floor. All signs of life were limited to the nurses’ station.
I started toward it when I spotted Knox through the glass in the waiting room, the wide shoulders and impatient stance immediately recognizable. He paced the dimly lit room like a captive tiger.
He must have sensed me in the doorway because he turned swiftly as if to face an enemy.
His jaw clenched, and it was only then that I saw the turmoil. Anger. Frustration. Fear.
“I brought you coffee,” I said, lamely holding up the travel mug I’d prepared for him in Honky Tonk’s kitchen.
“Thought I told you to go home,” he growled.
“And I didn’t listen. Let’s just move past the part where either one of us pretends to be surprised.”
“I don’t want you here.”
I flinched. Not at his words but at the pain behind them.
I put the coffee down on an end table stacked with magazines that pretended they could distract visitors from the endless loop of fear. “Knox,” I began, taking a step toward him.
“Stop,” he said.
I didn’t listen and slowly closed the distance between us. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“Just get the fuck out of here, Naomi. Just go. You can’t be here,” his voice was ragged, frustrated.
“I’ll go,” I promised. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m fine.” The words came out bitterly.
I raised my hand to lay on his arm.
He flinched away from me. “Don’t,” he said harshly.
I said nothing but stood my ground. I felt like I could breathe in his anger like it was oxygen.
“Don’t,” he said again.
“I won’t.”
“If you touch me right now…” He shook his head. “I’m not in control, Naomi.”
“Just tell me what you need.”
His laugh was dry and bitter. “What I need is to find the motherfucking bastard who did this to my brother. What I need is to rewind the clock so I didn’t waste the last however many years over some stupid fucking fight. What I need is for my brother to wake the fuck up.”
His breath hitched, and I had no control over my own body. Because one second I was standing in front of him and the next I was wrapping my arms around his waist, holding on and trying to absorb his pain.
His body was tight and vibrating as if he was seconds away from coming apart.
“Stop,” he said on a broken whisper. “Please.”
But I didn’t. I held on tighter, pressing my face to his chest.
He swore under his breath, and then his arms were around me, crushing me to him. He buried his face in my hair and clung to me.
He was so warm, so solid, so alive. I held on to him for dear life and willed him to release some of what he’d kept bottled up.
“Why don’t you ever fucking listen?” he grumbled, lips moving against my hair.
“Because sometimes people don’t know how to ask for what they really need. You needed a hug.”
“No. I didn’t,” he rasped. He was quiet for a long moment, and I listened to his heartbeat. “I needed you.”
My own breath tripped in my throat. I tried to pull back to look up at him, but he held me where I was.
“Just shut up, Daisy,” he advised.
“Okay.”
His hand stroked down my back and then up again. Over and over until I melted into him. I wasn’t sure which one of us was giving the comfort and which was receiving it now.
“He’s out of surgery,” Knox said finally, pulling back incrementally. His thumb traced my lower lip. “They won’t let me see him till he wakes up.”
“Will he want to see you?” I asked.
“I don’t give a fuck what he wants. He’s seeing me.”
“What was the fight about?”
He sighed. When he reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, I swooned internally. “I don’t really feel like talkin’ about it, Daze.”
“You have something better to do?”
“Yeah. Yelling at you to go the hell home and get some sleep. Waylay’s first day of school is tomorrow. She doesn’t need a zombie aunt pouring dish soap on her cereal.”
“First of all, we’re having eggs, fruit, and yogurt for breakfast,” I began, then realized he was trying to distract me. “Was it about a woman?”
He looked at the ceiling.
“If you start counting to ten, I will kick you in the shin,” I warned.
He sighed. “No. It wasn’t about a woman.”
“Besides love, what’s worth losing a brother over?”
“Fucking romantics,” he said.
“Maybe if you get it out, instead of bottling it up, you’ll feel better.”
He studied me for another one of those long, pensive beats, and I was sure he was about to tell me to get my ass home.
“Fine.”
I blinked in surprise. “Um. Okay. Wow. So this is happening. Maybe we should sit?” I suggested, eying up the empty vinyl chairs.
“Why does talking have to be a whole damn thing with women?” he grumbled as I led us to a pair of chairs.
“Because anything worth doing is worth doing right.” I sat and patted the chair next to me.
He sat, stretching his long legs in front of him and staring blankly at the window. “I won the lottery,” he said.
“I know that. Liza told me.”
“Took home eleven million, and I thought it was the answer to everything. I bought the bar. A building or two. Invested in Jeremiah’s plan for some fancy-ass salon. Paid off Liza J’s mortgage. She’d been struggling since Pop died.” He looked down at his hands as his palms rubbed against the thighs of his jeans. “It felt so fucking good to be able to solve problems.”
I waited.
“Growing up, we didn’t have much. And after we lost Mom, we didn’t have anything. Liza J and Pop took us in and gave us a home, a family. But money was tight, and in this town, you’ve got some kids driving fucking BMWs to school on their sixteenth birthdays or spending their weekends competing on forty thousand dollar horses.
“Then there was me and Nash and Lucy. None of us grew up with anything, so maybe we took a few things that weren’t ours. Maybe we weren’t always on the straight and narrow, but we learned to be self-sufficient. Learned that sometimes you gotta take what you want instead of waiting for someone to give it to you.”
I handed him his coffee, and he took a sip.
“Then Nash gets a bug up his ass and decides to become Dudley Fucking Do-Right.”
Which must have felt like a rejection to Knox, I realized.
“I gave him money,” Knox said. “Or tried to at least. The stubborn son of a bitch said he didn’t want it. Who says no to that?”
“Apparently your brother.”
“Yeah. Apparently.” Restless, he shoved his fingers through his hair again. “We went back and forth about it for almost two years. Me trying to shove it down his throat, him rejecting it. We threw a few punches over it. Finally Liza J made him take it. And you know what my stupid little brother did with it?”
I set my teeth in my lower lip because I knew.
“That son of a bitch donated it to the Knockemout PD to build a new goddamn police station. The Knox Morgan Fucking Municipal Building.”
I waited for a few beats, hoping there was more to the story. But when he didn’t continue, I slumped in my seat.
“Are you saying you and your brother have barely spoken in years because he put your name on a building?”
“I’m saying he refused money that could have set him up for the rest of his life and gave it to the cops instead. The cops who had hard-ons for three teenagers just raising a little hell. Fuck. Lucian spent a week in jail on some bullshit charges when we were seventeen. We had to learn to take care of things ourselves instead of running to a crooked chief and his dumbfuck cronies. And Nash just up and hands over two fucking million bucks to them.”
The picture was coming into focus. I cleared my throat. “Uh, are the same cops still with the department?”
Knox hitched his shoulders in a shrug. “No.”
“Does Nash allow the officers under him to take advantage of their position?” I pressed.
He poked his tongue into the inside of his cheek. “No.”
“Is it fair to say that Nash cleaned up the department and replaced bad cops with good cops?”