“I will have certain rules you must follow; at all times. I won’t ask for much, but when I do, I expect your absolute obedience.”

“I haven’t even made up my mind yet,” she says.

“You’re sitting in my truck.” I point out over the low rumble of the engine.

My point is mild, my tone even more so, but it is clear how hard it hits home. Casey slumps back in her passenger seat, brings her knees up to her chest, and rests her head against the window with a bump. She doesn’t even seem to register the pain.

There’s a crack of space at the top of the glass, and the wind whips and pulls at her red hair whenever I round a corner. Hell, every time she looks at me with those greens, it does things to me I can’t explain.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I can explain some things.

I can explain that just the thought of her makes my cock twitch.

I can explain that this is the dumbest shit I’ve ever done. She might not be Vince Amari’s girl, but she is his property.

Keep your eyes on the road, Dec.

“Why are you doing this?” She whispers over the sound of the whistling wind and her hair dancing. “Why can’t you just leave me be?”

“I’m saving you, Puss,” I reply.

“Some guardian angel you are!”

“I never said I was,” I bite back sharply. She’s got fight, this girl. I like a girl with fight. So long as she knows that while she’s mine, she’s mine.

“Then what is this? What are you doing with me?”

I close one eye, thinking. The other remains firmly fixed on the dark road ahead. I could make up some lie, but I don’t know what it would be. If I’m saving her, it’s only a brief respite – a second’s escape as I toss her from the frying pan straight back into the fire.

“It’s simple,” I reply, lying through my teeth; it’s anything but simple. “I want things that I can’t have. So you, Casey, are a dangerous thing to have around.”

“Person,” she mutters, low but firm. “I’m a person, not a thing.”

“Tu-may-to, ta-ma-to,” I grin. “It all comes out the same in the end. Here’s the fact: taking you could get me killed. Now that’s interesting to me. You, Casey, are interesting.”

She rakes my face with disgust. “What happens when I’m not: when I’m no longer ‘interesting’,” she rolls the word across her tongue, and layers it with enough sarcasm that I’m left in no doubt as to her opinion on the subject.

“Do you give up and throw me onto the scrapheap? How many girls have you done this to, Declan. How many survived?”

“None.”

Casey’s face drains of blood, and she looks at me like I’m a killer. She’s not wrong, but I correct myself before she has an aneurysm; or she tries to grab the wheel … she’s got balls, this one. I wouldn’t put anything past her.

“I’ve not ever done this before, I mean. You’re the first.” At this rate, maybe the last, as well.

Hell, if you asked me straight to my face, I still wouldn’t be able to explain why the hell I was doing this. This is the kind of stupid shit that dad drilled out of us when we were kids. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything this dumb. Starting a feud over some girl is movie drama; it’s not real life.

Least, it’s not supposed to be.

“Why me?”

Why her. It’s a good question; I don’t know if I can answer it. The second I saw her in Vince’s warehouse, I knew I had to have her. That’s not an answer, I know. I don’t know how to explain it.

It’s like my whole life I’d been wearing shades; then this beautiful redhead strolls in and plucks them from my eyes. Suddenly I see her in color. The rest of the warehouse might still look the same to me: gray; depressing; lifeless…

But somehow, Casey gave it color. She was like a beam of spring sunshine, shining in that place, revealing all the cracks, misery, and evil that lurked in the darkness.

I could say all that, but I don’t. I fall back on something trite and insufficient ; a quick, easy, little line, the kind I’ve used my whole life, to distract from serious questions.

“It’s quite simple: because, I saw you, and because I can.”

“Tell me then,” she spits, revealing a hint of the fire I know lives inside her. “Tell me these rules of yours.”

“You are mine. Whenever I want you, wherever I want you, however I want you, you will submit to me. If you do as I say, I will make you feel things you have never felt before. I’ll take you places you don’t even know exist; show you the heights your body is truly capable of reaching. But if you don’t…”

I pause, picturing Casey’s naked body in my mind’s eye. I’ve only seen it hidden by darkness, and concealed by a skirt.

I feel a familiar stirring in my pants, and the breath catching in my throat. I feel the muscles in my thigh tense as my foot hovers over the gas pedal, and my fingers flinch as I imagine plunging them deep inside her pink lips. I feel…

Casey interrupts that train of thought, and she’s just in time. The truck was beginning to sway across the white-painted asphalt. I jerk the wheel and pull her level.

“However, if I don’t?”

She’s turned back to face me. She’s trying to act cool, but I see how her cheeks are flushed red with interest, and the way she’s playing with her fingers. She can try all she likes to hide it from me, but her body is giving away every secret her mind is trying to hide. It’s not just her cheeks or her fingers; it’s her pose, the way her chest is pushed out.

She’s eager. She wants it. She wants me.

I clear my throat. It’s not a choice – I have to. This seductive minx to my right has put a frog in it. “Well,” I reply, my voice hoarse, “I guess I’d have to punish you.”

“Punish … me?” She replies, stumbling over the words. “How?”

She licks her lips, and I watch in the mirror, enthralled, as her eyes caress mine. “Tell me: exactly.”

I tear my eyes from the road. Casey’s not acting like a girl who only minutes before was locked in her own private hell, without an escape in sight. I don’t know if she’s trying to play me, but if she is…

… It’s kind of working.

I’m off balance. “What do you mean?” I ask.

I’ve had every type of girl: believe me. If you can think of it, I’ve ticked her off my list: blondes; brunettes; short; tall; petite; curvy. It’s not that I’m not picky; because I am. I just happen to see myself as a connoisseur, and just like a wine aficionado might try a dozen vintages before finding the one for him, so am I with women.

There’s beauty in all of them, somewhere. Women are like paintings – you don’t have to like the final product, but you can still admire the skill, and the hard work that goes into each and every one.

In my experience, though, some try too hard.

I’ve taken girls to my dungeon before who called me daddy and squealed like a stuck pig. It felt desperate; and desperation is so not sexy.

By all rights, Casey should be desperate. She was a month away from the grave when I found her. She should have been down on her knees with my cock in her mouth the second after I offered her a way out, or else burying me under a landslide of thankful kisses. She isn’t doing any of that. First she played sulky, and now, this – whatever this is.

Sultry?

But then, if she had…

If she had, I wouldn’t have cared. It’s her resistance to my charms that excites me, not meek submission. Oh, I want that too, but later; after I’ve taken her; molded her.

Once I’ve tamed her. I’ll get her consent, of course, but it’s exactly that which I find so delicious. That someone believes in you so completely, so implicitly, that they’re willing to sacrifice everything for you…

That feeling’s better than any fuck I’ve had.

“I want you to tell me what you’ll do to me,” Casey whispers, toying with a strand of her rich red hair, “if I disappoint you. I want to know how you’ll punish me. What will it be?” Her eyes drop to my crotch, and I know she can see the thickness of my cock pressing out against the denim. “Will it be your belt; your palm?”

She bites her lip, and catches my eye in the rearview mirror.

“Will it be your hand around my throat?”

I gulp.

Casey’s not acting like any girl I’ve ever met. She’s taking control – or at least trying, when by rights she should just be thankful to be alive. I think back to the parking lot, and the way she fought me off like a fiend …

It’s … different. I’m not sure if I like it. Some part of me does – it finds her more interesting than the gray women I’ve dated in the past. Women who simply lay back and took whatever I threw at them, just happy to be there. Women I discarded in days, bored out of my mind.

Casey’s not like those other women. She’s a challenge; an enigma.

I swallow, and Casey’s greens stay fixed on me. A wanton smile tickles at the corners of her lips, and I know she knows the effect she’s having on me. I can’t help it.

“Would you like that?” I ask.

I need to put her back on her heels again, to knock her off balance. This whole conversation’s heading the wrong way. I don’t know what it is with this girl. She seems stubborn, and headstrong – like she’s always got to have her own way.

I don’t know what’s happened in her life to make her like this, and honestly I don’t much care. All I know is that I’ve got to fuck her out of my system, have enough fun with her that my body remembers I’m a Byrne, not some love-struck teenager.

We aren’t meant to be tied down. Not even to a girl with so much chemistry the whole damn truck’s at risk of sparking.

She licks her lips. Slowly, dawdling, never breaking eye contact. I want to blink, but I daren’t look away.

“Like is a nebulous word,” she says, her voice breathy and hoarse. “It’s also not quite the right one: need, maybe. Yes, that’s better.”

I bash the back of my head against the seat rest. “Jesus fucking Christ, Casey,” I groan. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

A flash of hurt flickers across her face, but it’s gone in a second: replaced by that sultry mask. I make a note to figure out what it means, but I don’t pry: not now.

“It’s been said.”

The headlights lick at the black asphalt. We’re alone in the world, an hour from dawn, with only engine noise for company. It makes my mind up for me. I look up at the rear view mirror, and she matches my glance.

We’re staring at each other, separated by a piece of polished glass, and it seems like a fair enough metaphor for everything that’s happened between us so far. Two different people, fucked up in God knows how many ways, brought together for some unknown reason.

I reach over with my right hand, and she never breaks eye contact. I thread my hand into her soft, silky red hair, and caress the back of her neck. I feel the way her breathing changes – catching in her throat.

“What are you doing,” she gasps.

“I need an answer, Casey. Now.”

She grimaces. “I can’t, I won’t…”

“You can, and you will,” I shrug. “Or else you can find another way out of this mess; but we both know that you can’t do that – or you already would have.”

She flashes me a hateful glare, so powerful I worry it might break the mirror. “You’re an asshole, you know that?”

I think back to her words from a minute before. I grin. “It’s been said…”

“Fuck you…”

“I need an answer.”

“Fuck you, Declan. I’m yours, but screw you to hell. Three months, and then I’m gone.”

I breathe out – every scrap of breath in my lungs escaping in one powerful heaving movement. I feel … something I never expected to: relief.

I tighten my grip on the back of her head and begin to pull her towards me. She resists, and it only makes me work harder – to shape her, to tame her, to make her mine.

“What are you doing?” She protests.

“It’s time to get to work,” I say, staring directly into her glittering green eyes through the mirror. “Nothing’s free.”

The scowl she shoots my way would kill a lesser man, but it just turns me on even more. I don’t know; there’s something kind of exciting in knowing that I’m making her do this, that there’s probably a hundred places she’d rather be.

She shakes my hand free of her head, unclips her seatbelt, and leans over my body. I watch it all happen in the mirror. There’s an excitement in watching it unfold like this – like watching myself in a dirty movie.

But I can’t help notice that – in her own little way – Casey’s taken control once more. I’m not making her do this, not physically, not anymore.

The sound of my belt unbuckling startles me, and reminds me to keep my eyes on the road. But it isn’t long before they are slipping. The second I feel her hands on my cock for the second time tonight, I close them entirely.

“Jesus, Casey,” I groan.

The car vibrates, and I pull it back from the white line marking the edge of the road.

She slips my cock in her mouth. I take one hand off the wheel and thread it through her hair, pushing her down. It takes everything I have to keep my eyes open, and they are slipping shut to enjoy the pleasure more often than I care to admit.

Headlights flash in the distance, then the blaring sound of the horn, and my reflexes kick in. I’ve strayed into the opposing lane, and I tug at the wheel, pulling us hard right and into safety. I catch a glimpse of the other driver as he speeds by, flashing me the finger.

Casey sits up, wiping her bottom lip. She doesn’t look bothered by the fact that we nearly died. When she speaks, it’s with complete calm.

“What a way to go…”