Craving Lucy by Terri Anne Browning Page B

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