The Villain

by Shen, L. J.

  “She’s not your responsibility anymore.” Bracing my knuckles over my desk to stop myself from popping them, I leaned forward, feeling the threads of my cool unraveling.

  “I’m not buying your soul for the price of tarnishing mine.” She erected her spine. “Sorry, hubs, you’ll have to think of something else.”

  “I’ll hire a nurse for her.”

  Was I really negotiating with this woman? Again?

  “No,” she said flatly.

  “Two nurses,” I gritted out.

  She shook her head.

  “The woman is senile.” I bared my teeth. “She is not going to know the difference between you and a professional.”

  “But I will.” She unfastened her hair clip, her golden locks spilling like waterfalls on her shoulders. “And I’ll know I turned my back on someone helpless just because of my husband’s whim.”

  I wanted to…wanted to…what the fuck did I want to do to this woman?

  And why the fuck did I think the word fuck in my head just now?

  I did it again.

  God-fucking-dammit.

  She ambled toward me, putting her hand on mine from across the desk.

  “Cillian,” she whispered. “Listen to me. The two most important decisions in our lives are not ours to make. Our creation and our death. We don’t choose to be born, and we don’t choose when or how we die. But everything in-between? That’s our jurisdiction. We can fill in the blanks as we please. And I choose to fill mine by doing the right thing. By being a good friend—a good human—according to my standards.”

  Calmly, I retrieved the contract between us and shoved it into my office drawer. I locked it, disposing the key in my front pocket. I wasn’t going to get my way—not tonight, anyway—but negotiations were my playground, and the small print was where I thrived.

  She was going to stop seeing the old hag, if I had to work full-time at making it happen.

  I rounded the desk, leaning against it and crossing my ankles.

  “Come here.”

  She closed the space between us without hesitation, willing and responsive. Perfect. I’d never met someone so agreeable yet so stubborn.

  We were flush against each other, her flowery scent invading my nostrils.

  “Seen your Aunt Tilda recently?” My hand slid to her cheek, palming it. She took a ragged breath, her entire body trembling to my briefest touch.

  I wondered how receptive she was to her ex-husband.

  How hard she quivered when pressed against someone she’d actually chosen.

  Someone whose arms I sent her directly to.

  “Yeah, I did, in fact, the other day…” She stammered, letting me tug her into position. Her thighs straddled my right leg. I angled her so her clit pressed against my muscled quads. “Uhm, which, I guess, was Tuesday?”

  She wasn’t thinking straight.

  Unfortunately, neither was I.

  I dipped my head down at the same time she tilted hers up, her lips parting for me. I took her mouth in mine, pressing my knee between her thighs, feeling her muscles sealing against me. A moan fell from her mouth. She pushed her breasts to my chest, rubbing against me everywhere, craving friction. My tongue danced with hers, and I gathered her face in my hands, deepening the kiss, trailing my mouth down her chin, then her neck, stopping to draw a lazy circle around her racing pulse with the tip of my tongue when I reached the sensitive part of her throat.

  Her fingernails dug into my shoulders. She was close to climaxing from kissing alone. We were electric together, and I wondered when she was going to draw the line. To realize the things I wanted from her weren’t things she was willing to offer.

  “Oh my God, Kill,” she yelped.

  Rather than pointing out God didn’t exist, my mouth continued its journey south, to her collarbone, then to her tits, which I cupped, my tongue sliding like an arrow between them. She grabbed my head and pushed it to one nipple. I suppressed a chuckle, peeling off the side of her dress, slipping her pink, erect nipple into my mouth and sucking it. She sighed into my hair, her little talons grazing my shoulders as she dragged her hands down my back, claiming my ass cheeks like she was trying to squeeze water out of them.

  “Give me everything.” She lolled her head back and forth, her lips against my hair, mumbling, “Every inch of you. I want everything you give them and more.”

  Them.

  The women I’d paid.

  The women I was going to continue paying because Persephone wasn’t born, prepped, and meant to fulfill my dark fantasies. That was out of the question.

  She was too good.

  Too innocent.

  Too precious.

  And besides, I had to be the dumbest man on planet Earth to deliberately tangle my life with hers any more than it already was.

  I moved to her other nipple, lapping, pulling, and biting. Teasing her with my mouth, I brought her to the brink of an orgasm, to a point she was humping my leg shamelessly. I knew she was close. The tremors in her thighs told me so.

  I chose that moment to rip my mouth from hers and step away.

  She nearly fell on the desk. I clutched her waist and tugged her back to me, tilting her chin up. “Do I still kiss like a hungry Rottweiler?”

  I was pleased to find my voice was the same dry, bored rumble.

  She cleared her throat, boneless against me.

  “You’re improving. This one was better.”

  “Better, but not perfect?” I arched an eyebrow, amused.

  She shook her head, grinning mischievously while working my zipper. “Sadly, we still have to practice. Often.”

  I couldn’t help it.

  I laughed into our kiss.

  It was the first time I’d laughed in years.

  Maybe decades.

  And it felt…new. Good.

  “Now show me why you put a continent between you and your mistresses. What could you do to them that is so kinky?”

  She didn’t give me time to answer. With my zipper undone, she tugged at my hand and dragged me to the hallway, glancing around, waiting for me to lead the way to my bedroom. I did even though I knew she knew.

  Knew she took a tour of my house when I wasn’t home. I saw her in the cameras when Petar showed it to her.

  I shut the door behind us, locking it for good measure, and she stepped in front of me. Wiggling out of her dress, she let it pool on the floor around her like a frosted lake.

  She snatched my hand, wrapping it around the front of her snowy neck.

  “Is this your jam?” Her chest rose and fell to the rhythm of her frantic heartbeats, her eyes zinging with exhilaration. “You did it the day…that time…”

  I kicked her out screaming.

  “Or…” She trailed off, sliding my hand down her body, all the way to the curve of her ass until I reached the crack. “Maybe this? I don’t mind doing things to you, either. I don’t mind anything, Cillian. As long as it’s with me.”

  My resolve was dissolving faster than edible thongs in a seedy bachelor’s party in Vegas.

  The devil on my shoulder told me it wasn’t my job to warn her off sleeping with me.

  The angel on my shoulder was…well, currently duct-taped and gagged in the devil’s trunk.

  “I don’t fuck fair,” I warned.

  My hand was still in her palm. She moved my fingers into the folds between her legs, spreading her thighs for me. I dipped my index finger inside her. She took my finger and sucked it clean.

  I died. The end.

  Fine. I did not die. But I was getting close to it, and all the reasons I shouldn’t sleep with her—my control, my condition, how she was entirely too good for me—were starting to sound like more of the same BS.

  “Show me your true colors,” she croaked, her voice breaking with emotions.

  “They’re ugly,” I said flatly.

  She shook her head. “Not to me. You’ll never be ugly to me.”

  That was all it took to melt my determinatio
n into a puddle of nothing. Grabbing her hair from behind, I brought her lips to mine in a punishing kiss.

  “Do I need a safe word?” She sucked in a breath.

  “Your mouth will be too occupied for talking. Tap any surface twice, and I’ll stop.”

  I thrust her against the window overlooking my garden, butt naked, tits and pussy smashed against the glass, shoving my dress pants down my hips and freeing my cock. She whimpered, wiggling her ass in my direction, arching, begging, pleading. She was so wet her juices made her thighs stick together. I kicked her legs open and kneaded her ass so rough, I left pink marks all over it. I watched down on my wife’s angelic face from behind as reality sank its claws into her.

  She was pressed against a window overlooking my yard—but also someone else’s private garden. She was naked as the day she was born, about to get fucked so hard women in neighboring zip codes were about to get secondhand orgasms. Persephone gulped but didn’t stop me when I leaned down, picked up her drenched panties, rolled them into a ball, and stuffed them into her mouth.

  Flower Girl gagged on her sensible cotton underwear, her eyes watering. I stayed still, waiting to see her fist rising in the air, tapping it out. Sensing I was testing the water, she splayed her fingers over the window, giving me a nod.

  Bring it on.

  I plowed into her in one go.

  She cried out, her panties muffling her moan. My neighbor came trotting out to his patio holding a beer, wearing a wifebeater and smart dress pants as I knew he would. Every night at ten sharp, Armie Guzman, a Wells Fargo banker, came out to water his rosebushes.

  Persephone’s eyes widened as I began to move inside her. He was standing directly in front of us with a full view of her being hammered against a window.

  She whimpered when I drove into her again, smacking her ass, leaving an imprint.

  “Tap twice.” My teeth sank into her neck, reminding her she had a way out. The way she responded to my thrusts with her back arching told me she wasn’t the innocent little thing I’d made her out to be in my head.

  I wanted her to tell me it was too much. Too soon. Too perverted. To prove to me we didn’t fit in all the ways I suspected we did. If she were cold and unresponsive, walking away from her once she was pregnant would be easy.

  Fine. Not easy. Doable.

  She shook her head, meeting me halfway, grabbing my hand from behind and putting it on her ass again.

  I spanked her again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And again.

  She turned her head to stare at me, eyes half-lidded, drunk on what we were doing. To make matters worse, each time I drove inside her, I left a small part of myself I wasn’t prepared to let go of.

  A shard of self-control.

  I grabbed her jaw and redirected her face to the neighbor’s backyard.

  “Play with your tits for him,” I ordered. “Make it worth his while.”

  I was trying to push her as far as she could go, in hopes she’d tap out, turn around, agree to the IVF, and leave me the fuck alone.

  She did as she was told, playing with herself for him, pinching, tugging, caressing the shape of her heavy breasts. The middle-aged man looked up from his rosebushes and halted, his face tilted up to my window.

  Persephone Penrose was good.

  Proper.

  Sweet.

  …and fucking depraved, just like me.

  That made her a very powerful drug.

  “That’s it,” I growled into her ear, pumping harder as gooseflesh prickled on every inch of her skin. “Open your thighs and smear your juices on my window to show your new neighbor what your husband does to you, my sweet, beautiful slut.”

  Surely, she was going to throw in the towel.

  She couldn’t…

  Wouldn’t…

  She did.

  Obeying, she parted her thighs and played as I slammed into her from behind.

  The man was still glaring, his face carefully expressionless as my wife rubbed her pussy against the window while I was fucking her from behind, the friction on her clit wreaking havoc through her body. Her inner muscles clenched around me, so I knew she was close. I bent her over, L-shaped, in a position that allowed for deeper penetration. Then I grabbed both her ass cheeks and pounded her mercilessly. Her palms raked the window, leaving sweaty handprints.

  We were both soaking wet. I glanced down at her jiggly, bruised ass, hating how much I loved the view.

  The power she had over me disgusted me. She would never know how much I craved her. How much I preferred her above all others.

  How it felt like her glorious yellow hair wound and looped around my wrists and feet, like a creature out of a Greek mythology, chaining us together.

  She spat her underwear out. “Holy shit, I’m coming.”

  Her legs shook, and she fell on her hands and knees to the carpeted floor, spent and thoroughly screwed.

  I wrapped an arm around her lower stomach, massaging her clit to milk another climax out of her. Still driving into her, I chased my own release, doggy-style.

  A minute later, my balls tightened, and I felt the euphoric release of a carnal fuck emptying inside my wife just as she found her second climax.

  The moment I was done, I pulled out, wiping my still-hard dick on her ass cheek. I stood, a little woozy from the orgasm, quickly dressing and regaining my control.

  “God. I can’t believe he saw us.” Persephone collapsed, burying her face in the carpet, her red and pink ass staring back at me. “I’m never leaving this house.”

  “Yes, you are, and soon,” I quipped.

  I wasn’t done parading her like a winning horse.

  “I’m mortified.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Why?” She moaned into my carpet. I supposed it was a bad time to comment it cost more than her sister’s entire studio apartment and ask her not to stain it.

  “The window is tinted from the outside,” I said dryly, buckling myself up, hoping to hell she was going to fall pregnant tonight. Not only would it help me get rid of my nagging fixation with her, but it would kill any potential ex-husband drama. Something I sincerely didn’t want to deal with. I didn’t envy the bastard if he came back for what was now mine. I was never in a sharing mood.

  She whipped her head, her eyes flaring.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I don’t have a sense of humor, remember?” I buttoned my shirt, which was halfway undone, though I didn’t recall taking it off.

  “What was he looking at, then?” She sat up, turning around to face me, still buck naked.

  “The flowerbeds on my balcony. My landscaper grows superior roses. Drives him mad.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Watching you squirm turned me on.” I leaned down to pat her messy blond hair like she was a pet before walking over to my recliner and opening my cigar box next to it.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Gladly. You are excused. Have been for the six minutes since we finished.” I waved her off.

  Her tits were fantastic, especially when she stood suddenly, in a jerky movement. Full and pear-shaped, with pink nipples like two small diamond studs. My wife grabbed her dress from the floor, sliding back into it with a shake of her head.

  “Petar’ll call the driver for you.” I tucked the cigar to the side of my mouth, texting my estate manager while she jammed her feet into the nasty pair of Manolo Blahniks that gave her blisters.

  “Screw you, Kill.”

  “Sounds like a plan. How about tomorrow? I have an opening at lunch. If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to wait until I’m back from work at around nine thirty.”

  She turned around without a word, stomping to the door. She stopped at the threshold, her hand touching the wall as she peered at me from behind her slender shoulder.

  “I’m the same as you, you know.”

  “Highly doubt it.” I didn’t look up from my phone, already answe
ring an email from my legal department. Not my finest show of gentlemanly character, but I knew if I looked at her, I’d ask her to stay.

  “I like to see you squirm, too.”

  A smirk touched my lips.

  “That’s adorable. Aim high, Flower Girl.”

  “That’s why, when I danced with Andrew Arrowsmith tonight, I agreed to his proposal,” she explained calmly.

  My eyes flew up from the phone in an instant.

  “What proposal?”

  “Oh, lookie here.” She smiled sweetly. “Now I have your attention.”

  “What proposal?” I repeated, my tone lower.

  “To tutor his children.”

  I saw what Arrowsmith was doing there.

  Putting my wife close to my secret. To my shame. To the loaded gun in the room. Making her realize what I was, what it meant, how inferior I was to her blatant perfection.

  I darted from my seat, about to give her a piece of my mind.

  She lifted a hand.

  “Save it, hubs. You have your conditions, and I have mine. One of them was I wanted to keep working.”

  “As a pre-K teacher, not my archenemy’s au pair. This goes against the non-compete contract, which, by the way, you signed.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do with my career.”

  Her voice was peaceful, like the sailing clouds she loved so much.

  Red-hot anger slithered in my veins. My pulse quickened.

  Not good.

  “I just did.” I flashed my teeth, smoke seeping from my mouth. “And I’m saying it again, for the brain cells in the back: you’re not working for Andrew Arrowsmith. See? Easy.”

  She clasped her hands together, all sugar and honey. “In that case, you’re not drilling in the Arctic.”

  And just like that, I was no longer in danger of asking her to stick around.

  “Sorry, sweetheart, your job is riding my cock, not giving me business advice.”

  She nodded. “Then yours is knocking me up, not telling me who I can visit during my weekends and who to work with.”

  “This is a violation of our contract,” I warned.

  She pretended to think about it, then hitched a shoulder up.

  “Leave me then.”

  “You know divorce is not an option,” I gritted out.

  She winced. “It does take the sting out of the contract, doesn’t it?”