My teeth sank into my bottom lip. I hated that Drake was upset over this. Damn, I never should have left the house tonight. “O-okay,” I murmured and pulled my phone from my back pocket. I’d turned the ringer off earlier because everyone was blowing it up, so when I saw all the missed texts and calls from everyone in my family my heart clenched. Five of the missed calls were from Lana and Drake’s home number.
Before I could even slide my finger over their number, the door opened and in walked Dr. Levin with the slutty Nurse Frost. With three people already in the small room, the doctor and nurse made me feel almost claustrophobic in there, but I wasn’t about to ask anyone of them to leave… Except for the nurse who was still eyeballing my boyfriend. That bitch had to go.
The doctor’s eyes went from me to my parents, lingering appreciatively on my mom for a few seconds longer than my dad liked, given the way he growled at the guy. Dr. Levin quickly shifted his gaze away. “The x-rays look good. No fractures. Your hand is just badly sprained, Miss Thornton. Sometimes that can feel just as bad if not worse than an actual break. Nurse Frost is going to put a soft cast on to keep the hand immobile, but I suggest following up with your regular doctor next week.”
The nurse stepped forward with the soft cast and some paperwork, which she handed to Layla to sign. When everything was taken care of, the nurse walked us out to the waiting room where Kin and Jace were still waiting with Aunt Emmie and Nik. Marcus went to get my SUV, but Jesse told him to just drive it on home. I guess I was riding with them.
“Everything okay?” Aunt Emmie asked as she wrapped her arms around me but her question was directed at my mom and dad.
“Nothing broken,” Jesse assured her. “Follow up with her regular doctor.” Nik handed him cup of coffee and he drained the small cup in one swallow. “Fuck, that’s weak.”
“Sorry, bro. Not everyone believes in making coffee so strong you could eat it with a spoon.” Nik took his turn hugging me before grasping Aunt Emmie’s hand. “Let’s go home.”
I looked up at Harris who was standing with Jace. They had both ridden with me and Kin in the Range Rover, but since my dad had sent Marcus on home I didn’t know how they were going to get home or back to the club. A glance at my phone’s screen showed me that it wasn’t all that late. They could still go back to First Bass if they wanted.
Catching my gaze on him, Harris gave me a small smile. “I’m going to catch a cab back to the club with Jace. I need to make sure they didn’t have any problems.”
Disappointment made my heart clench. I’d hoped he would come home with me or would have at least wanted to ride with us and we could have dropped him and Jace off. I wanted a goodbye kiss. Something. Anything. But he was keeping his distance.
Forcing a smile for everyone else who was watching, I nodded. “Okay.”
Aquamarine eyes darkened and he took a step toward me before pausing and glancing toward Jesse, who was too busy talking to Nik to notice. I grimaced. I was the one who didn’t want to tell my dad about us just yet. If I was feeling disappointed right now, it was my own fault.
I thought about just blurting it out right then and there, letting everyone that was standing in our group know that I was with Harris now—that he was my boyfriend—but my parents had had enough excitement and reasons to want to kill people tonight.
“I’ll call you,” Harris promised and hugged me against him. I felt his lips touching the top of my head. Because it was something he always did, no one questioned it. “I’ll pick you up from school tomorrow and we’ll have dinner. To make up for not getting to yesterday.”
He started to step back but my hands wrapped around him, holding on for a few extra seconds. He pressed another kiss to the top of my head and carefully untangled my arms. “Goodnight, Lu.”
Kin wrapped her arm around my waist and leaned her head against my shoulder as Harris and Jace said goodnight to everyone else and headed for the door. I laid my head against hers. “You okay?” I asked. She’d been left in the waiting room with Jace for over an hour.
A shuddery sigh left my friend. “Nope,” she told me honestly, “but I will be.”
Harris
Something tickling my cheek had me jerk awake with a suddenness that left my stomach protesting.
Opening my eyes, I frowned up at the culprit smiling down at me innocently. “Hey there, tall, dark, and yummy.”
I sat up fast, quickly taking in my surroundings. After a few seconds of frowning at the room I was in, I began to relax. I was at Jace’s apartment because I hadn’t wanted to go back to my own. Tessa was still there and I didn’t trust her not to try and start trouble. I had a feeling that Tessa suspected that Jenna might break up with her when she got home and, even though I didn’t know Tessa all that well, I wouldn’t put it past her to make life for me as hellish as possible until she got the boot.
Rubbing sleep from my eyes with the heel of my hands, I shook the last of the fog from my head before turning my attention back to the chick who had been tickling my face with her long hair. She was easy enough to look at, and from the look of her, easy, period.
Who the fuck was she?
Jace and I hadn’t gotten to his place until after four that morning, and I’d passed out on the couch before he’d even called it a night. Jet lag and stressing over Lucy had drained me to the point that I hadn’t even cared where I fell asleep.
I did know, however, that neither of us had brought a girl back with us. Which only left one other explanation. Grayson Knight, guitarist and all-around badass motherfucker, was Jace’s roommate as well as his band-brother. And the chick standing over me, eyeing me and obviously enjoying the fact that all I was wearing was my boxers, was definitely Grayson’s type.
Cheaply dyed blond hair, nice tits, voluptuous ass, and more importantly—easy. Grayson was one hell of a guitarist, but his hard work and talent sometimes didn’t go any further than the edge of a stage. He wanted the easy lay because it meant that it would be easy to get rid of her the next morning. The rocker didn’t do commitment, and he sure as hell didn’t do next-morning drama. I liked the guy, respected his skills, but in all honesty the dude was a total douchebag the majority of the time.
“What’s your name?” the blonde asked, dropping down onto the couch beside me.
“It’s ‘mind your own damn business’,” Jace grumbled as he walked into the living room with two mugs of coffee. Handing one over to me, my friend took his usual chair angled toward the flat screen on the wall. “Hooker, go get your fucking clothes on and leave me and my friend alone. We aren’t interested in sloppy seconds, especially when they come from Gray.”
The chick gasped, obviously offended, but Jace didn’t spare her so much as a look. I didn’t want to get into this shit. It was way too early to be dealing with hoes walking around my friend’s apartment. Taking a deep swallow of the hot coffee Jace had given me, I leaned my head back against the couch and closed my eyes.
As soon as the mug was empty I was going to have to go up two floors to my own apartment and get ready for work. I’d promised Lucy dinner, but I still had to go into the club tonight. With Tainted Knights performing, I couldn’t be spared. Things always went crazy with those five fuckers in house.
Thinking of Lucy, I couldn’t suppress the smile that lifted my lips. Taking another swallow of the strongly brewed coffee, I opened my eyes and leaned forward to snatch my phone off the beat-up coffee table in front of me. It was hard to believe that Jace and Grayson had bought all the furniture in this apartment when it was brand new. With all the parties they’d thrown over the last eight months or so, their new things looked like pure crap now.
Swiping my finger across the screen on my iPhone, I saw that it was three in the afternoon and I only had one text from Lucy. Pulling it up I was a little disappointed to see that it was just the reply to my ‘goodnight baby’ after I’d texted her on my way home with Jace in the early morning hours.
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.
Luca shut the front door with a bang and he and his twin turned to face me. Arms crossed over their chests, chins jutting out, they looked exactly like their dad. If they had been a few feet taller I might have been as intimidated as they wanted me to be. But when I stood over them by at least a foot, intimidation was not on my list of emotions I was feeling for them at that moment.
“Of course we didn’t,” Luca informed me with a growl. “She’d tell Mom and then we’d have to give it back. What lesson would she have learned then?”
“Do you think there is a reason that no matter how much trouble you two little monsters get into, that no matter how upset your mom and dad get at you, that they never take your phone from you?” I demanded.
I knew for a fact that Jesse and Layla would never take any of their children’s phones away. Like my parents had done with Trinity’s phone, every one of the Thornton kids had a phone with a special chip installed. It didn’t matter if the phone was on or not, if something happened to one of them, the authorities could track them through their phone. It was something that the security firm that had been working OtherWorld and Demon’s Wings tours for years had developed themselves. The same chip was sewn into Trinity’s backpack, her shoes, even her jacket. Just like they were in Luca’s and Lyric’s.
These two little beasts, however, didn’t understand the why’s of all of it, though. They had been babies when Lucy had been taken by her biological father, and not much older when Emmie Armstrong’s daughter was nearly kidnapped by some lunatic. Luca and Lyric didn’t understand why their dad was so overprotective. They just knew that he was a basket case every time their sister left the house.
Lyric surprised me when he spoke. “I never thought of it, but he’s right, Luca. Mom and Dad haven’t ever taken our phones away.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Luca grumb
led. “She worried us. Mom and Dad were practically shaking when they left last night. Uncle Drake was upset and Aunt Lana was crying. Lucy needs to be grounded from something for doing that to us.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face and glanced around. Where the hell was Jesse? Muttering a curse under my breath, I crouched down in front of the twins. “Look, guys, I realize that Lucy having to go to the hospital was scary for you both. I know it was scary for me. She was in pain and there was nothing I could do. But it wasn’t like she wanted to be there. Some guy said some things that upset her and she stood up for herself. You can’t blame her for doing that, can you?”
“What did he say?” they both demanded at the same time. Their eyes, so much like their father’s, changed from one shade of brown to another so fast that a person would have sworn it was just a trick of the lighting if they didn’t know that it was a genetic thing.
“Doesn’t matter. She took care of him and hurt her hand in the process. She didn’t mean to upset you or anyone else. So why does she have to be punished?” I was trying to use my reasonable tone, the one I used when I was trying to get Trinity to see my way of thinking, but I was pissed at those two little demons. Lucy’s phone was important, damn it. She should never be without it. Never. Just thinking about her leaving her house without that lifeline broke me out in a cold sweat.
Lyric, ever the reasonable twin, turned to his brother. “He’s right, Luca. We have to give her back the phone.”
After a small hesitation, Luca finally nodded. “Yeah, okay.” Those dramatic brown eyes turned back to me. “So why don’t they take our phones?”
“Because if you are somewhere they aren’t and you need them, they are only a phone call away.” I straightened. “Now, go and give her the phone back.”
“You gonna tell on us?” Luca asked, his chin still jutted out like the tough guy he was.
“Not if you give her the phone back in the next two minutes.” I checked my watch and then glanced back down at him. “Go. I’m timing you.”