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?”