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?”
“Don’t know how good Grave is, considering he still likes to drag race on the weekends,” Knox said stubbornly.
I put my hand on his arm and squeezed. “Knox.”
“What?” he asked the carpet.
“Look at me.”
When he did, I saw the frustration etched on his gorgeous face. I cupped his cheeks in my hands. His beard was coarse against my palms.