her a candy bar or some chips? Something to show she was more than a chore he had to finish?
He thought about her phone. Asshole brother. He didn’t want to be that. Whether or not he’d gone looking for more family wasn’t the point. She was a kid and totally alone in the world. The least he could do was suck it up and give her some attention. So what if he was bad at it—at least he had to try.
He knocked on her door. She flung it open instantly as if she’d been waiting for him.
“Is she here? Is she here? What is she like? Does she look like me? Is she nice? Will I like her?”
Malcolm smiled. “You’ve been saving up those questions, haven’t you?”
Keira danced from foot to foot. “Yes, now tell meeeee!”
He studied his younger sister. According to her pediatrician, she was about average height, slightly underweight and perfectly healthy. Her hair was light brown, her eyes blue and Carmen had said more than once he and Keira shared the same smile.
“She has your freckles,” he told Keira.
She laughed, then ran to the mirror and stared at herself. “Really? All of them? I can’t decide if I like my freckles or not.”
He almost pointed out her opinion on her freckles didn’t matter—it wasn’t as if they were going away—but stopped himself in time.
“They’re cute,” he told her. “On you and on Callie.”
Keira spun to face him and beamed. “Really? I can’t wait to meet her. And I want to see her room.”
“Give her a couple of hours to get settled,” he said, repeating what they’d discussed the previous night at dinner. “We don’t want to overwhelm her. You’ll meet her at dinner. As to her room, you saw it yesterday, when everything was delivered.”
Keira gave him a look that implied he was incredibly stupid but she would indulge him this one time. She crossed to the bed and scooped up the kitten sitting there. “Maybe she’s scared. Maybe she needs a friend.”
“Maybe she’s tired from her trip and would like a few minutes before she has to deal with the whole family.”
“There’s only three of us, plus Carmen. That’s not a lot.”
“It might be to her.”
From what he’d read in the report on Callie, since getting out of prison, she’d lived a quiet life. She’d stayed in a halfway house for nearly nine months before moving to Houston. She worked her two jobs, volunteered at a cat shelter once a week and lived in a rented room. She didn’t seem to have many friends or much of a social life. As for what had gotten her arrested in the first place, from how she’d lived the last five years, that had been a one-time thing.
Keira sighed heavily. “Fine. I’ll wait until dinner.”
“Good. You seem to be feeling better. You have a lot of energy.”
“I’m excited. This is so fun. We have a new sister. I could barely sleep last night. Aren’t you excited?”
“Very,” he lied. He didn’t care about the trust fund his grandfather would set up for Callie or the potential division of the business. He already had enough. It was more that all these years later, he was still dealing with his father’s shit. When was it finally going to end?
“I’ll see you in a couple of hours,” he told Keira. “Until then, leave Callie alone.”
Keira batted her eyes at him. “I wouldn’t think of doing anything else.”
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