Desperate Measures: A Wicked Villains Novel Read online

  If you really wanted freedom, you should have used your safe word.

  I ignore the sensible voice whispering through me. Freedom without resources is no freedom at all. This is the only way.

  I reach the stairs as my bedroom door opens behind me. Even though I know better, I look over my shoulder as Jafar steps into the hall and adjusts the cuffs of his suit jacket. God, he’s magnificent. Evil and manipulative, and far too attractive for my peace of mind. Our gazes collide over the distance and the slow curve of his lips into a satisfied grin nearly sends me falling down the stairs.

  He starts toward me.

  I flee for my life.

  Chapter 2

  Jasmine

  I sprint faster than I’ve ever run before. Down staircase after staircase, flying around the corners with enough momentum that my long hair kisses the wall at every turn. I know before I hit the ground level that I won’t be fast enough. That I’ve made it this far is only because Jafar enjoys the chase. I know that, but I can’t stop myself from trying to win against the odds stacked against me.

  Freedom, true freedom, waits.

  Entrapment bites at my heels.

  I know he expects me to take the main route to the front door, a wide hallway that cuts nearly the length of my father’s house. It’s meant to showcase his wealth, the walls lined with priceless works of art and each open doorway giving glimpses of rooms filled with more of the same. This is where my father brings people when he wants to impress them, intimidate them, influence them.

  Or at least he used to.

  I can’t think about that now.

  I swing around the corner and race through the second door down the hall. If I can lose Jafar in the maze of rooms populating the floor plan, I might have an actual chance.

  The thought barely forms in my mind when a weight hits my back hard enough to take me to the floor. I shriek and throw my hands out, but Jafar is already rolling us, taking the brunt of the impact. The temptation to go limp, to give in, to not make this a fight, rises.

  Fuck that.

  I elbow him with everything I’ve got, and his quiet oomph is music to my ears. His grip goes slack for half a second, and that’s all I need to slither out of the cage he’s made his body. I almost make it. He catches me around my hips and flips me onto my back.

  And then he’s there, where I’ve dreaded and desired him, between my thighs, pinning my hips to the ground with his weight, his hands bracketing my wrists in a bruising grip. Overpowering me so easily, he’s not even breathing hard. I loathe him so much in that moment, I arch up and try to headbutt him. All that does is draw a low rumble of a laugh from his throat. “Brat.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Do you?”

  How can he lie here and talk to me as if we’re having any other conversation in any other circumstance? I can’t catch my breath, can’t think past the hard length of his cock pressed against me, past his heavy weight holding me down. “Let me go.”

  “No.” He transfers both my wrists to one of his hands and forces my arms over my head. I fight him. Of course I fight him. But the thrashing only loosens my robe, the silk sliding across my bare breasts and exposing me. Jafar glances down and his mouth goes hard. He uses his free hand to clasp my chin, stilling me. “Last chance, Jasmine.”

  I know what he wants to hear.

  If I had any self-preservation, I’d give him the word that would stop everything. For reasons I refuse to examine, I won’t. I have lost so much in the last few months. I can’t lose any more. I won’t.

  I wrench my chin out of his grip and bite his thumb. Hard. He doesn’t wince. To show even that much reaction would be too much for Jafar. He just leans away enough to flip me back onto my stomach before his weight pins me in place again. I fight, but I might as well rail against a hurricane. I’m helpless as he maneuvers my legs farther apart and grips my throat, arching me back until I’m looking down the hallway we lay in the middle of. His beard scrapes against my neck and then I feel his teeth against the sensitive skin there. “Scream if it makes you feel better. We both know why you won’t make me stop. You want this.”

  “I don’t want this.” I might want this.

  One of his hands snakes between my stomach and the floor, working ever southward. “Shall we see about that?”

  I thrash, but he’s got me too effectively pinned. Humiliation heats my face. I know what he’ll find even before his fingers slip beneath the band of my silk panties and lower yet. The truth of me. Hot and wet and aching to be filled by him.

  No.

  No, damn it, I shouldn’t want this.

  But a whimper still escapes my lips when he pushes a single finger into me. How many times have I imagined being touched like this? A thousand? A hundred thousand? More. It’s not the same when it’s my fingers driving me to new heights. I’m too soft, too tentative, too me.

  Jafar is none of those things. He touches me like he’s known my body before. Like maybe he’s imagined this, too.

  He doesn’t give me the chance to get over the shock of him doing this here. In the middle of the hallway where I can hear low male voices not too far away. Does he think to defile me in my father’s house? Right on the floor like a pair of animals?

  He withdraws his hand and holds his finger in front of my face, wet with my traitorous desire. “Tell me again how you don’t want this.”

  Time and time again, stretching back through my entire life, I have bent instead of standing my ground. Every. Single. Time. If I was smart, I’d do it this time, too. He tenses against my back, his body filled with the promise of violence and more. Would he be gentle with me if I conceded, if I admitted just how much I want this?

  I’ll never know. “I don’t want this.” Even as my mouth forms the words, my hips lift against his, the slightest undulation to betray me.

  Jafar curses. “Stubborn until the bitter end.” He shoves up my robe and shifts his grip to the back of my neck, pushing my face against the cool tile of the floor. A rip and then my panties are gone, tossed against the wall in my line of sight. Discarded and forgotten.

  I’ll be damned before I join them.

  I struggle, fighting to turn over. When he keeps me pinned, words fly free. “You do this, you better look me in the fucking eyes while you do it.”

  Jafar, the bastard, laughs. “Did you think you had a say? You don’t.” He uses his thighs to spread my legs obscenely and then he palms me again, spearing me with one finger and then two. “What a treacherous daughter you are, wet and panting on the floor of your father’s house, riding the fingers of the man who took everything from him.”

  He’s right, but I can’t quite gain control of my hips. His fingers feel so incredible inside me, but he doesn’t drive them deep like I crave. He’s cruel in his gentleness, in the slow touch while he holds me in this vulgar position so effortlessly.

  “I hate you,” I gasp. “I don’t want this.” Pleasure coils through me, tighter and tighter, centering on my clit and the slow circling of his thumb there. I press my fingers hard against the tile, desperate for more leverage to force him to finish this. So close.

  His hand drops away and then his voice is in my ear, low and rougher than I’ve ever heard it. “Repeat it enough, and it might even be true.” He lost his cultured facade somewhere along the way, and I’d give anything to be able to see the look on his face right now. The sound of his zipper dragging down seems to echo unnaturally loud against our harsh breathing. And then his cock is there, pressing at my entrance.

  I tense, waiting, hoping, that he’ll drive it deep.

  Nothing. Nothing but the threat of him.

  The promise of him.

  He’s giving me one last chance, I realize. One last chance to change my mind, to be anything other than what I am. Easier to pretend I fought this, to say over and over again that I didn’t want it. My body knows the truth. My mind does, too.

  I was never that good at lying to myself.

  I ca
n’t move my hips in my current position, my legs spread and ass lifted. I don’t have to. I have the best weapon in the world. “What are you waiting for, Jafar? Lost your nerve?” I swallow hard, but my voice still comes out just as ragged as his. “We both know I can’t make you stop. I won’t make you stop.”

  He goes still for one eternal moment. I have the hysterical thought that he’s going to make me beg, to put my betrayal into words the same way I’ve put it into action.

  And then he grips my hip and shoves deep. I scream. I can’t help it. I might be a virgin only in the most technical sense—that I’ve never had a man inside me—but any physical evidence of it is long gone thanks to the illicit sex toys I secreted into my room years ago.

  It doesn’t seem to matter. He’s big, bigger than anything I’ve played with to date, and he’s not giving me time to adjust. Jafar pulls out and shoves back in, hard enough to move me several inches up the hallway despite his hold on my neck. The tile bites my knees and my hands slap the floor, sounds slipping from my lips that are more animal than woman. It hurts. Everything hurts. But I can’t stop arching back against him as much as I’m able, the pain twining with pleasure that I have no way to describe.

  The earlier denied orgasm rolls over me, and my breathless cries morph into a single word. His name. A benediction and a curse. Over and over and over again. “Jafar, Jafar, Jafar.”

  He keeps thrusting, his low sounds just as animal-like as mine. At last moment, he pulls out of me and something hot and thick lands across my ass and upper thighs.

  My body morphs into something less solid than muscle and bone. I drop to the ground. I can do nothing but lay there and relearn how to breathe with my lower half exposed, his come cooling on my bare skin.

  He just …

  That bastard just …

  “Say it, Jasmine.”

  I blink rapidly, mind gone hazy and indistinct with the shocking combination of pleasure and pain he’d delivered, the dose of humiliation and possession that he cultivated like fine wine. I lick my lips, and it takes me two tries to form the words. “Say what?”

  “Say ‘Thank you, Jafar.’”

  Over my dead body. “The hell I will.”

  “Disobedient to the very end.” His chuckle has my body clenching despite my rage. “We’ll work on it.” He moves off me, and a few moments later he catches me under my arms and pulls me to my feet and turns me to face him. My knees buckle, the traitors. I’m forced to grab his shoulders to stay upright.

  It’s right around then that we get our first good look at each other.

  There’s no evidence of what we just did on his face. It might be there in the extra growl in his voice, but he appears as composed and distant as ever. It makes me want to strike him. My world just came crashing down around me, and even without access to a mirror, I know that I look a mess.

  Jafar skims off my robe, ignoring my weak attempt to cover my breasts. He uses the wadded-up fabric to clean the evidence of himself from my ass and thighs, and somehow that’s the most humiliating part of this whole experience. “I can do it.”

  “No.” Just that. Nothing more. He tosses the ruined fabric to join my panties on the floor and only then does he look at my face. At the bruise darkening my skin, courtesy of my father’s hand. Storm clouds gather in his dark eyes. He touches my chin, tilting my face to the side. “Did he do this?”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific.” When he just waits, I relent. I’m too tired for this ridiculous argument. Too confused and exhilarated and depressed, all at once. “My father doesn’t like it when I talk back.”

  “You always talk back. He’s never hit you before.”

  “Hasn’t he?”

  His mouth goes tight and I have the presence of mind to wonder if my father is still among the living. He may not stay that way for long with the fury emanating from Jafar.

  Funny that he wasn’t angry until this point.

  He unbuttons his shirt in neat, precise movements and shrugs out of it. I skitter back a step. “My room is upstairs. I’ll get my own clothes.”

  “You know better.”

  Damn it, but I do.

  This is as much about a power play as it is about anything as mundane as lust. Jafar might want me, but it’s not simply because he’s a man who wants a woman. I am a symbol, an indicator that his victory over my father is complete on every level. Power, money, home, daughter.

  Likely in that order.

  Jafar pulls his shirt on me and buttons it up as if he dresses me in his clothing regularly. I’m tall enough that it barely covers my ass, but apparently that isn’t the point.

  The conqueror must parade his stolen goods in front of his men.

  “Why not just throw a collar on my neck and lead me around naked to really seal my degradation?”

  His lips curve. “Maybe another time.” He brushes my hair back and then his finger is there, tracing the shape of the bruises coloring my cheekbone. Marking it. Memorizing it.

  Yes, if my father is alive, he’ll come to regret that strike. I have no doubts about that.

  “You’re in my world now, Jasmine.”

  Was that supposed to comfort me? He’s a snake in the garden, tempting me into delicious sin and then abandoning me in every way that counted once the deed is done. Jafar doesn’t seem to need a response. He simply tosses me over his shoulder like some old-world war prize. I want to scream and curse and flail, but it’s only his upper arm across the bottom of my ass that holds his shirt in place. If I fight him, I won’t get free, and everyone will see every part of me.

  Just more humiliation.

  “You’ll pay for this.”

  “Unlikely.” He starts down the hallway with an easy stride, as if my weight on his shoulder is completely inconsequential. As if I’m nothing more than another token of his superiority.

  I’m thankful that my long hair hides my face as we leave the hallway and enter the main foyer. It’s a ridiculously overdrawn room with two curving staircases leading up to the second floor and more than enough space for fifty people to stand comfortably.

  It sounds as if it’s filled to capacity.

  A murmur goes through the people gathered. It’s speculative and filled with no small amount of gleeful malice. They think Jafar raped me, that he took by force something they followed with covetous eyes since the time I hit puberty and developed breasts.

  They could never comprehend the level of my betrayal, that I wanted him to defile me the way he did, that I welcomed his touch even as I mouthed all the protests I could muster. Every word but the one that would make a difference.

  Jafar knows.

  He owns me, and I have no one to blame but myself.

  “Well done.” His voice booms out, silencing everyone. “Tonight is for celebrating.” He lets them cheer, lets the ugliness of their glee wash over me. “Tomorrow, we get to work.”

  “Where you taking the girl, boss?” A voice from the crowd. I know that voice. It’s Richard, a man who served on my personal protective detail despite my begging my father to remove him. Another fight I lost. He laughed, the sound buoyed by others around him. “Share the spoils of war!”

  Share me.

  I tense. I can’t help it.

  Surely he wouldn’t …

  Jafar goes still. I sense the danger before the rest of the room. But then, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time studying him over the years. He always goes still before he cuts someone off at the knees. “Richard, would you come into my home and steal from me?”

  Stammering. Richard realizes his mistake. I could tell him it’s too late, but instead I squeeze my eyes shut, wanting this whole spectacle to be over.

  “This woman is mine, by right and by might. Touch her, and I will crush you.”

  “She’s just a pair of tits, boss.” This from farther away, deeper in the crowd as if that will save them.

  “Touch her, and I will crush you,” he repeats.

  Jafar turns
and pushes through the doors. I can’t maintain the tension in my body any longer, and I slump down against him. “I hate you.” Maybe if I say it enough times, it will even morph into the truth.

  Anything is possible.

  He moves down the steps, and even in my fury and fear, I notice that he takes pains to keep his stride even and not jar me more than necessary. I can’t bring myself to feel grateful. Not after the events of the last hour. Not after his men were so painfully clear of what they would have done to me—what they wanted to do to me.

  I shudder. “I’m going to be sick.”

  Instantly, he has my feet on the ground and guides me to a bench situated near the driveway. “Head down between your knees.” His big palm on my upper back doesn’t give me a choice in the placement. It helps. I hate that it helps. “They wanted to—”

  “No one will touch you.”

  “You did.”

  It’s only when his hand stops rubbing on my back that I realize it was in motion to begin with. I expect him to argue that I wanted everything he did to me and more. To point out that we have one foolproof brake when it comes to our rules of engagement and I didn’t enact it.

  I should know better by now.

  “I did more than touch you. I held you down and shoved my cock into that tight little cunt of yours, and even while you cursed me, you came harder than you’ve ever come before. ” His breath ghosts against the shell of my ear. “I’m going to do it again. And again. And again. You made your choice, Jasmine. Now you have to live with it.”

  Chapter 3

  Jafar

  Five years of maintaining perfect control and I’ve thrown it away in a single night. Anyone else would call the events of the last few hours a complete and utter victory. I look at the woman curled up on the seat next to me, her long legs tucked under the shirt that I put on her. Jasmine will wear my bruises in the morning, marks on her hips from my fingers and marks on her knees from the marble floor. That doesn’t concern me. She made her choice with eyes wide open, and I’m a bastard because I look forward to every single power struggle in the future spinning out between us.