Page 375 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

A spark of something she’d never before seen come alive in his eyes. “You’re not following directions very well, and frankly I think you’re going to keep right on not following them until Daddy makes you.”

“N-no,” she said meekly. “I just think it’s silly and—”

“It is silly,” Morgan agreed. “But unless you do it, and do it the way Daddy tells you, this hand,” he held it up for emphasis, “and your bottom are going to become reacquainted in a very short, sharp, unpleasant way.”

“Daddy!” Audrey squealed, hating the way her voice warbled the cry. “Daddy, where are you?”

A corner of Morgan’s mouth turned smugly upwards. Letting go of her pants, he headed for the car.

“I feel like such a tool,” Audrey muttered, and stuck her tongue out at his retreating back. Cupping her hands around her mouth again, she continued to call for the missing doctor until Morgan summoned her to him.

“Take a look at this,” he said as she picked her way through the underbrush to his side. He bent down, crawling halfway onto the driver’s seat before reemerging a minute later with a shiny gold bracelet in his grasp.

“What is that?” she asked.

“A gift,” he said and held it out to her. “From your movie parent.”

For a split second, Audrey felt like a heel for every mean thought she’d entertained about the missing Doctor Walker. It took her a minute to remember that none of this was real.

Thank God.

“You’re supposed to put it on,” Morgan said, his arm still extended for her to accept the bracelet.

Audrey made a slight face. “I feel like I’m stealing someone else’s life.”

Half sighing and laughing, Morgan held up his palm again. “You know, I don’t think you’re quite getting the point.”

“Oh, all right!” She snatched the bracelet from his hand before he started calling himself her Daddy again. Her stomach performing giddy acrobatics inside her, she glared at him as she squeezed the band of gold jewelry over the meatiest part of her hand and onto her wrist. “There, happy?”

“Ecstatic. If I have to do remind you to do what I tell you one more time, I’m going to do my talking on your behind.”

For God’s sake, was she actually enjoying his threats? Embarrassed, Audrey moved aside so Morgan could shut the car door. She fell into step behind him where she could continue to make faces at his back without his knowing.

Instead of climbing back up the short hill to the road, Morgan took her further into the dark woods. Just before they reached the bottom of the incline, Audrey saw the trees around her brighten and felt as the vacuum began to pull at her.

“Ugh,” she said, just before it overtook her once more.

Suddenly the forest was gone and a vast and rocky desert stretched out before and behind them, with high rocky cliffs flanking either side of them as far as the eye could follow. The ground beneath her feet was hard and cracked, like an ancient, dried-up riverbed. The heat burned through the soles of her shoes as hot as the gray sun beating down upon her back.

She stopped in her tracks.

“What the hell? Where did the woods go?” Audrey turned around, but the dry river bed and rocks extended as far as she could see behind her, too. “Where’s the town? How can you have a dried-up desert and a lush evergreen forest within a few seconds of walking from one another?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I know. Fun, isn’t it?”

“My God,” she said. “This place comes with everything: sand, cactus, baking hot sun, scrub brush, dead cow’s skull…”

“Spider cave at the top of the cliff,” Morgan interjected, then thumbed behind them.

Audrey turned to look up, shading her eyes against the glare of the sun. “Holy cow, that’s way up there.” She sized up the rock wall, and then looked down at the jagged rocks that cascaded down the side to the bottom of the river bed. “This looks so familiar. Where have I seen this before?”

“Deep in the burning desert, where nothing can survive, lives the dreaded Gila monster,” Morgan said in a deep, melodramatic voice.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Audrey said. “This is the set for The Giant Gila Monster? I just watched this movie.”

He grinned.

Her eyes narrowed as she raised her face to the sun to study the cave again. “What’s the shiny thing, up there?”

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