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Night. Can’t wait for dinner.
PS-Don’t call me baby!!!
Chuckling, I hit connect on her name and waited for her to pick up. When it went straight to voicemail I blew out a disappointed sigh and waited for her message to end so I could speak. “If ‘baby’ is out, then what am I allowed to call you? Want me to go all Tennessee country boy on you and call you ‘darlin’? ‘Cause I can do that if you’d rather.” I’d only spent a few months a year in Tennessee when I was kid, but I could imitate a good country drawl if only to make my girl giggle.
Ending the call I turned my attention back to my coffee and the flat screen that was now tuned to ESPN.
With a huff, the chick who had been silently seething beside me got to her feet and walked in front of me on her way to the bathroom. I barely blinked as she paused for a second in front of me to block my view of the TV with her huge ass. Seriously, were those silicone implants? I tried not to laugh, but couldn’t hide it, earning me a frosty glare.
“Grayson left a few hours ago, hooker. Take the hint. Get the fuck out,” Jace called out seconds before the bathroom door slammed shut behind her.
“Doing dinner with Lucy?” Jace finally took his eyes of the sports talk show that was on and glanced at me.
Swallowing the last of my coffee, I set the mug on the coffee table and nodded. “Figured I would take her somewhere special. Any ideas where a guy can take a girl on their first date that offers some privacy, but not so much that I’m tempted to seduce her before the main course arrives?”
Jace snorted. “Fuck, dude. I haven’t been on a date since I left Bristol. All I know is how to order the perfect pizza from that place down the street and that tofu shit isn’t as bad as I first thought it would be as long as you add half a bottle of hot sauce to it.”
“Some help you are,” I grumbled and pulled my pants on as I stood. Tossing my shirt over my shoulders, I picked up my keys. “I’m outta here. See you tonight.”
“Yeah. You see Kin, tell her to answer her fucking phone.” His gaze was back on the TV, but I knew his mind was not on the predictions of who would be going to the Super Bowl in February.
“Or here’s an idea…” I stopped at the door with my hand on the knob. “You could go over to her dad’s place and see her. Just a thought.”
With Jace shooting me the finger, I was still laughing when I stepped into the elevator and hit the button for my floor. The laugh faded when I stood outside my apartment door, trying to determine if I really needed a shower and fresh clothes or not. Gritting my teeth, I opened the door and stepped into the quiet living room. Because there was no trashy chick sitting on my couch watching something on E! Network, I knew that Tessa wasn’t home.
Letting out a relieved breath, I went to my room and locked the door before taking a hot shower. Once I was clean, dry, and dressed, I grabbed what I needed and headed out. Lucy was home from school by now and I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible before work snatched up all my attention.
The drive to Malibu felt longer than it normally did, but I figured it was because I was anxious to see Lucy. She hadn’t responded to my earlier call and that wasn’t like her. Because of what had happened when she was nine, when I’d called her and called her that fateful Halloween night with no answer, only to find out the next morning that her biological father had taken her, she knew that not calling me back worried me.
Grimacing, I realized that she must have felt like this when I hadn’t contacted her over the past week and a half.
When I pulled into the driveway at the Thorntons’ house, I was ready to run inside and make sure she was okay. Forcing myself to walk calmly to the front door, I rang the doorbell and waited, my need to make sure my girl was okay and safe making my heart race and my gut twist.
Less than a minute passed before the door was opened and two identical beasts stood in the doorway frowning up at me. “Hey, Harris.” Lyric was the one to greet me. I could only tell it was him because the twins had a specific dress style that gave clues to which was which. Lyric was the calm twin, the more levelheaded of the two—which honestly didn’t mean shit when you realized how rotten Luca was. Lyric always wore something blue whereas his brother always had on something red.
“Hey, little dude. Where’s your sister? She’s not answering her phone.” I glanced behind him, hoping that she was just down the hall or something.
“Lucy isn’t allowed to have her phone. We’ve grounded her from it,” Luca informed me with a glare.
My eyes widened. “You grounded her from it?”
The older twin crossed his arms over his chest, nodding up at me without so much as flinching. “Yeah, we did. Mom and Dad didn’t think she needed to be punished but she can’t go scaring us like she did last night without getting something taken from her. So we snuck into her room and snatched her phone. She can have it back in a week.”
“Does she know that?”
I wasn’t surprised when both twins shook their heads. “Let her sweat it for a little more. She just thinks she lost it. She’s still looking for it in her room.”
Shaking my head, I pushed through the twins and into the house. If I left it up to them, they wouldn’t let me in the house at all. While they might love my baby sister, that didn’t transfer over to me. Not when they saw me as the guy who might one day take their big sister away from them. They could dislike me all they wanted because I could guarantee that I was definitely going to be the one to steal her away.
One day.
This wasn’t the day, though.
“Lucy?” I called from the bottom of the stairs. I wasn’t stupid. No way was I going to go up there and check on her unless her life was on the line. For one I would be too tempted to make out with her on her bed, and another, I wanted to keep my dick where it belonged—and not ripped off by Jesse Thornton before he fed it to his neighbor’s dog or threw it in the ocean.
From upstairs I heard a thud, as if she’d thrown something against a wall, and grimaced before shooting the twins a glare. “So you didn’t tell her you took her phone?” I needed them to confirm that for me. Knowing those two the way I did, you always needed to make confirmation.
