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CHAPTER 4

There’s a rhythmic, repetitive scraping sound itching at the edges of my consciousness. I blink my eyes open. The trunk lid is open, and Sir is leaning on the edge of the car.

I must have fallen asleep, despite my fear and the twisted arousal that fear does to me.

The scraping sound is his knife dragging along a dull gray wand he holds in his other hand. He’s…sharpening it. The knife, I mean. Right in front of me. Like a hunter about to gut a deer or something.

And the fear and arousal rush back through me, tingling my fingers and toes, prickling my skin, hardening my dick.

“Morning, sunshine,” he says cheerfully when he notices that I’m awake. “Or, evening, I should say.”

I turn over onto my back. There are lots of stars winking overhead and a sliver of moon just visible under the trunk lid yawning open above me. “This isn’t Westport.”

The stars are way too bright for us to be in the Connecticut town where Logan and I spend part of our time living. And it surely can’t be anywhere in New York City, since I’ve never seen more than a handful of the brightest stars in our upper West Side neighborhood. Or any other Manhattan or Brooklyn neighborhoods I’ve been in.

“Nope,” he says. “Not Westport. Not that you need to know where we are. All you need to know is that the nearest neighbor is about a mile and a half that way.” He jerks his chin off to his right and all I can see are trees surrounding us. “So, you can run if you want, but you’re likely to get lost. And even if you manage to find the neighbor’s house, exactly what are you going to tell them to explain your predicament?”

Um, that’s an excellent question. “I was kidnapped on the side of the road, forced into the trunk of this guy’s car, and managed to run away before he did bad things to me?”

He chuckles and it’s a low, dark sound that makes me shiver in the cooling night air. “You were hitchhiking, you got into my car willingly, and you’re wearing shorts that barely cover your ass and a T-shirt that says ‘I do what the good girls don’t.’ You think they’re going to believe you?”

“It’s a song,” I protest.

“Sure it is,” he says. “Get out of the trunk.”

I turn over and push myself onto my knees, despite the awkwardness of my wrists still being bound. Then I balance my ass on the edge of the trunk and hang onto the trunk lid while I swing my legs over and out.

I stamp my feet a few times to get the blood flowing to my legs again. He slams the trunk lid closed and the sound echoes in the darkness around us. Then he grabs my arm and hustles me across the gravel driveway, over a patch of well-tended lawn, and up the few steps to the door of a small cabin nestled between two sprawling maple trees.

He shifts the knife behind his fingertips of the hand that’s still holding my arm and I hold as still as I can while he digs into his pants pocket for a set of keys. His hand grinds the knife’s handle into my upper arm and I’m looking down at the point of the blade staring up at me.

Is the knife just for show? To scare me into compliance?

Or is he planning to use it on me? My heart starts tripping in my chest and I’m legit scared now. Once I cross the threshold into this cabin, I lose all control over what he’s going to do to me.

He gets the door unlocked, pushes it open, and a light winks on, illuminating the entrance to the cabin. Then he lets go of me and steps back so that I’m between him and the threshold.

“You have ten seconds to decide whether you’re going to walk into this cabin on your own.”

The or is implied.

Or he’ll stick the knife in the small of my back and I’ll walk in at knifepoint.

Or he’ll shove me inside, with or without the help of the knife.

Or I can try to get past him and run. I don’t know if he’ll chase me. He said he didn’t want to run in this heat and I don’t blame him. The temperature has dropped several degrees with the sun and we’re in some sort of forest where it was probably cooler during the day than it was on the side of the road. But the air is still thick and muggy and there’s sweat running down my sides and along the column of my spine.

The sweat could also be from fear, though.

“Five,” he says. Crap, ten seconds is really not very long to decide whether to give in or be forced.

Or I could end this whole thing right now. One magic word and all the fear stops.

But so does everything else.

“Four.”

My mind is racing, cycling through my options. I can’t go through with this.

“Three.”

I want to know what happens next. Okay, my mind is having trouble admitting to what I want, but my dick sure as hell knows. It’s up for anything. All the things.

“Two, Silas.”

There’s a rustle of cloth behind me, like he’s uncrossed his arms or brought the hand holding the knife forward and brushed his sleeve against his shirt. Will it be the knife he uses to push me forward or his hands?

My skin prickles, anticipating the sharp tip of the blade. Instead, there’s a puff of air at my ear and his low voice says, “One. Last chance to voluntarily step inside, boy.”

“No.” The word escapes on an exhale—I can’t do it; my legs are locked and I can’t get them to move—and at first, I think he doesn’t hear me, but then I hear a snort and feel another puff of air at my ear.

Then a flick of his tongue at my earlobe and I shiver at the arousal that floods through me. My earlobes are super-sensitive and he’s not playing fair.

But then he whispers in a low voice that somehow conveys both threat and glee. “I have to admit, I was sort of hoping you’d say no.”