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Finally, the last to enter was Kobe.
Now, where I thought that Wake was intimidating… Kobe, though he looked unapproachable, had these dead eyes that felt like they saw right down to the very soul of me.
Suddenly, Bain’s spacious kitchen became very unspacious.
If that was even a word.
They all crowded around the food that was left over from breakfast and started to pick it apart.
“Sheriff,” Wake said as he held his hand out to the other man. “I see you found our wayward friend.”
“Friend? No. Wayward? If you call drowning in a bottle of liquor at the bar in town, yes. I put the BOLO—be on the lookout—for him around one this morning. Some girl called it in after seeing the BOLO go out for him. Though, she wouldn’t give me her name. Not sure if the person who did it was the girlfriend.” He jerked his chin at Braxton. “Or not. But seems suspicious that she knew exactly where he was,” Sheriff Sunny explained.
“I was getting drunk because I had to leave another pregnant girlfriend behind because she turned fuckin’ psycho.” Braxton reached for a leftover pancake, but Kobe got there first. Rolled it up like a sausage and then stuffed half of it in his mouth while glaring at Braxton.
I nearly laughed at the way Braxton all but snatched his hand back as if he was waiting for something to come up and bite him.
“How about you start from the beginning,” Etienne suggested in his beautiful Cajun drawl. “I feel like you are talking us around in circles.”
“Why are you even here?” Braxton asked, glaring at each one of the men. “This is a family thing.”
“This is a family thing,” Cassius said stiffly. “You’re just not part of the family. More like, you’re a nuisance and we’re trying to figure out how to situate our boy so that he can live the rest of his life with his girl, happy and not have to deal with your bullshit anymore.”
That was the most words I’d heard him say in a row since I’d met him.
He sounded… sinister.
I liked the way he made Braxton cave in on himself.
“I’m his brother.”
“You’re the man that helped send him to prison,” Wake said. “You think we forgot that?”
Braxton shifted nervously from foot to foot.
Yet, he didn’t say a word to refute it.
“What did you ever see in him?”
Bain’s whispered words had me snorting. “That was the point.”
He squeezed my hip then looked down at his plate as he said, “You ate every bit of my pancake centers. I thought you were going to let those go to waste.”
“I couldn’t allow you to do a psycho thing like leave those delectable pieces,” I explained. “They’re my favorite. That would’ve been blasphemy.”
He whispered into my ear, “Why do you think that I left it? I know it’s the simple things like that that make you happy. And seeing you smile makes my fuckin’ heart beat.”
I felt myself choke up.
“Well, it goes like this,” Braxton said, distracting me. “I saw a huge chunk of money missing from our bank account.”
“Wait,” Hilary said. “You shared a bank account?”
“It seemed like the responsible thing to do,” Braxton said. “She was having my baby. It was the least I could do.”
I rolled my eyes.
Even when we were married, Braxton and I had separate bank accounts. He’d not even floated the idea that we would share our finances.
The fact that he was sharing one with her? It was a laugh-out-loud moment.
“Go on,” Wake ordered.
Braxton shot him an annoyed look, but nonetheless continued. “Anyway, there I was, trying to figure out where fifteen thousand dollars went when she accused me of still being in love with her.”
He jerked his chin at me.
My brow rose in surprise.
Braxton had never loved me. He only loved himself.
“And?” I asked. “You told her that you didn’t even like me, right?”
“I told her that it was none of her business.” He shrugged. “And then she bitched and complained and I left. I can’t handle anyone being psycho. I didn’t realize what she bought with that missing fifteen K until the new sheriff here asked me why I would want to hire an assassin to kill my ex-wife.”
Cassius pulled up a chair at the table, followed by Wake.
Kobe leaned his hip against the counter directly across from Bain and me, but it was Davis who walked right up to Braxton and said, “You’re a fuckin’ joke. You know that? You need to learn how to treat ladies so they don’t want to do psycho things like kill people. You could’ve just as easily set her straight. Sure, she was likely crazy, but she didn’t need to aim her psycho sights on Diana.”
Out of all of the guys that I’d met previously, Davis—also known as KD—was the most jovial. He reminded me of a golden retriever. All playful, sweet and clumsy. Yet, you couldn’t ever forget that he was still a dog. One that would turn around and bite you if you weren’t careful and got on his bad side.
