The Young Lady Wants That Dog — Chapter 4

No, the truth was simpler than that. He'd merely realized, watching Lee Do-hee's recklessness and the expressions and tones of voice that flipped by the minute, that he was pressing all the wrong buttons. And this was the Chairman's youngest daughter? Woo Tae-kyung was not the type to wager his life on a fire drill started by a spoiled brat who didn't know the world.

"Still doesn't make sense to me, though. Why?"

The question — how could anyone on this earth possibly hate me? — nearly wrung a hollow laugh out of him, and he had to fight to swallow it down.

"Woo Tae-kyung, I've been thinking about it…."

The car finally rolled to a stop in front of the mansion. Without waiting to hear the rest, Tae-kyung stepped out of the driver's seat, circled around, and opened the passenger door. Do-hee lay sprawled with her arms crossed, the tip of her tongue darting out to lick the corner of her mouth.

Then she undid her seatbelt herself and held out one hand as if to say, pull me up.

That much he could oblige. But when Tae-kyung took her hand, she yanked at him with more force than he'd expected. Should he go where the pull led him, or hold his ground? After a brief deliberation, he braced himself easily, and Do-hee used that very resistance to lever herself upright. A long, slender leg slid out of the car. She kept her grip on his hand tight the whole way, refusing to let go until her whole body was free of the vehicle.

"I've been thinking about how to make you really fucking miserable."

Do-hee smiled, slow and silken. She spoke while rubbing her thumb openly across the back of his hand, still holding it.

"Just stay here. Jang Hee-jo's coming here anyway."

There was such certainty in her voice that Tae-kyung finally shook her hand off. Do-hee stared blankly at her own hand, dangling empty in midair where she'd flung it, then withdrew it as if it were nothing. A gust of wind chose that moment to blow her thick hair across her cheek. Sweeping it back, she fixed her gaze on him and held it.

"My daddy gives me anything I want."

"So."

That insolent air, available only to someone who owned all of it — Tae-kyung pulled a cigarette from his pocket and set it between his lips. Cupping one hand against the wind, he lit it. No point holding back when she'd already decided exactly how she was going to screw him over.

Drawing the smoke in long and deep, all the way down into his lungs, he tipped his chin at her.

"You're saying there's nothing in this world I can't have, Woo Tae-kyung. You know it's true. Our family money is rotting, it piles up so fast. If I want something, my brothers? Whatever it is, they'll hunt it down and bring it to me."

I don't bother picking and choosing my methods.

Do-hee whispered it. The wind happened to be blowing his way, and his exhaled smoke and his sigh together settled over her face. Do-hee inhaled that smoke in one long drag, like a man who'd quit cigarettes years ago and had been waiting for this exact moment.

She didn't turn her head away. She didn't even tremble with anger. She just breathed in, long and slow, swelling her chest to the very last — with the iron resolve to take in every last wisp he put out.

…What an absolute lunatic of a girl.

She huffed over it greedily, panting like someone starving for the scent, as if it were some expensive perfume. No — it wasn't weed, but you'd never know it watching her.

"Tae-kyung, where was I?"

"Saying you'd get me anything."

She asked with a flushed face, having held her breath far too long, and Tae-kyung answered her honestly.

"Right. So I'm going to ask for you."

Like a child begging for a toy, Do-hee pointed one slender finger at him.

What the hell do I do with this. He'd never once hit a woman, and he'd certainly never met this breed of one before. Even if he tried to scare her, he had no gauge for how much or how far to go. Facing those toy-hungry eyes of hers, he recalled that somewhere-broken expression she'd worn — the way she hadn't flinched even when he promised to carve the same wound into that cheek of hers.

Should I go further?

How much further?

"Do-hee, if you take me home, you won't get to leave that hotel. Not until you fire me. Or else…."

He'd already lost his taste for the cigarette after she'd so gleefully inhaled his secondhand smoke, so Tae-kyung dropped it to the ground and ground it out under his heel as he walked toward her. He wrapped one hand around the finger pointing at him — gripping it as if to snap it — and closed the distance. Then he gave her shin a light kick with his sneaker. Taken off guard, her leg buckled easily and she began to sink. But Tae-kyung simply raised the hand of hers he was still holding, high enough to keep her from collapsing all the way to the pavement.

"…until you're crawling out on your hands and knees like an animal. Still feel like it?"

He informed her kindly, as though to say, this is your future. Stuck suspended by his grip — unable to fall, unable to stand, her hips hanging awkwardly in a half-crouch — Do-hee stared down at the pavement while he looked at her, expressionless.

"If you want to play with me, play like that. Go right ahead."

At his leisure drawl, Do-hee burst out laughing. She dropped her ass straight to the ground. When Tae-kyung released the finger he no longer needed to hold, she clutched her belly and howled. And every time she shook with laughter, her cleavage jolted and rolled beneath his gaze.

He frowned and glared instead at the front gates that wouldn't open.

"Jang Hee-jo sold me off to sweeten himself up with your daddy — you really think he wouldn't sell you too? A dog just gets sold around. To whichever dog dealer pays better."

Still laughing on the ground, she stretched out those long legs of hers and kicked at the toe of his sneaker, not caring one bit that her own legs scraped the asphalt.

Tae-kyung vaguely began to understand what it must feel like to be the parent of a five-year-old wailing in the middle of the supermarket that she wouldn't go home unless they bought her that toy.

Do-hee clearly had no intention of getting up. Scanning the cluster of CCTV cameras posted in front of and beside the gate, Tae-kyung finally bent down. He was too big to sit flat on the ground the way she did, so he dropped to one knee and hunched his shoulders, bringing his eyes level with hers.

"I wonder why our young lady is so angry at me. We've only just met today, practically. Right?"

Just soothe her. That's all.

So he decided. He gentled his voice deliberately, laid it soft as he could — but he couldn't hide the low growl rumbling in his back molars.

"If I were angry, you'd already be dead. You don't know what I came out of detention center for, do you?"

A short, sharp pfft — the sound of escaping air — burst from Tae-kyung's lips.

He hadn't known she would stand in front of him and recite, like a threat, the fact that she'd gone to prison only because she'd killed one person and hadn't yet cleaned up the mess properly.

He couldn't exactly pat the head of a crazy girl and tell her to do a better job covering it up next time, but God, it was almost maddening. When this insignificant little thing glared up at him with such blazing swagger, he lost the will to fight altogether.

"Is that the greatest achievement of your young life?"

Do-hee's lips twisted. Still shaking with laughter hard enough to make her chest quiver, she sneered up at him through that crooked smile.

"I want to verify it. Watching you still trailing around after Jang Hee-jo like a dog — fuck, it suddenly made me want one of you for myself!"

The last part came out almost as a shriek, her canines bared as she yelled right in his face. Tae-kyung looked at her with plain contempt. If he was some kind of mutt, she wasn't even a chihuahua.

"I get the feeling we're going to wear each other out."

"Oh, I love being exhausted, Tae-kyung."

An ordinary person doing nothing at all. Maybe that was something he'd actually wanted, deep down. Dragged out of that languid hell of his, he couldn't help but half-welcome the way his senses sharpened, weariness and all — standing on edge for the first time in ages, wary of an ambush.

Welcome or not, though, there was no ignoring the blind, glistening hunger in Do-hee's eyes.

Do-hee lay on her own living room sofa without even changing her clothes, scrolling through her phone. Just as she'd predicted, Jang Hee-jo had entered the Chairman's mansion alone, never once meeting Do-hee's eyes, and disappeared straight into his study. Tae-kyung stood beside the sofa, wetting his throat with sparkling water.

Her hair spilled long over the edge of the sofa, nearly brushing the floor, and she shifted her head this way and that on its cushion as if it weren't comfortable, bare feet propped up on the armrest, toes wiggling. Then, every so often, instead of lowering her phone to check whether Tae-kyung was still standing there at her feet, she would tilt her head crookedly to peek, put it back, tilt it again — repeat, repeat.

Like a defendant standing before the judge, waiting for the verdict to fall, Tae-kyung whiled away the tedium waiting for the study door to open.

"Young lady, the eldest young master is here."