Dark Sins and Desert Sands Read Online Free PDF Page B

those eyes enough times to remember them—he’d pleaded with her to believe him when he said that they had the wrong guy. It was a thin thread of shared memory with which they were joined, but now, hopefully, he could follow it back to her.
    Once, he’d been at her mercy, but tonight Layla’s fate would be in his hands.
     
    She’d taken sleeping pills to calm her nerves, so when Layla was half awakened by the rush of air by her ear, she told herself it was nothing. Just an all-too-vivid dream. Then she heard the sound again. A pant, bestial and strange. A breath not her own. A shadow fell across her, as if the darkness was a physical weight pressing down on her.
    She wasn’t alone.
    Even though she’d locked the bolts on her door, even though she’d checked every window latch as part of her nightly routine, and set her alarms, someone was here with her. The certainty of it froze her heart in her chest and shot a liquid chill through her veins.
    Layla opened her eyes slowly, an eternity passing as she lifted her lids by creeping degrees. It was dark, butthe casino lights of the Vegas skyline flashed garish in the night and briefly lit his silhouette in slashes of green and magenta. The stranger stared at her, his breathing heavier now that he knew she was awake. She couldn’t see the whole of him, only sense the strain of bone and sinew beneath his powerful muscles. Layla stifled a groan of terror, all but paralyzed.
    He was an enormous man. Or was he something else? His chest was a mass of muscle. There was froth upon his…snout? It was as if she could see lust trembling upon his sleek haunches and it made her acutely aware of her body beneath the Egyptian cotton sheets. The way he stared at her made her feel vulnerable, obscene. Yet there must have been a time when it pleased her to have men admire her body, because a primal and utterly foreign rush of pleasure ran through her blood right alongside the fear. And she felt suddenly quite unlike herself, filled with some carnal delight that a man would seek her out in her own lair, that any man would dare.
    Questions to try, answer or die, what am I?
    As the little rhyme echoed in her mind, Layla slammed back into herself. The pleasure was gone and she pulled the sheet over her body. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice a low, terrified whisper. “I don’t know you.”
    His answer was a snort of taurine rage that echoed through the bedroom. “You’re still so pretty when you lie….”
    Layla hissed, pushing herself up so that her back was against the silken headboard of the bed. “I want answers,” he said, coming closer. “I want my life back. I want justice for what you did to me.”
    What had she done to him? Was he real, or some figment of her imagination, one of her lost memories come hauntingly to life? In desperation, she whispered the only words she could think to utter. “Are you the man from the desert?”
    The words fell from her lips before she could stop them, and in response, she thought she saw furious flared nostrils. She thought she heard the thunder of hooves on her floor as he shouted, “You know who I am!”
    “I don’t,” Layla said, shaking her head so violently that it dizzied her. “I can’t remember.”
    “Then I’ll remember for you,” he said, his weight settling on the bed as he crawled overtop of her. “Let me in. Let me inside you.”
    Was he a rapist? She’d be overtaken by his bulk, helpless against his size and strength. Layla shrank back, the sheet bunching up to expose one long bronzed leg all the way to the thigh. She saw the glint of sharp horns, as if he were intent upon goring her. Intent upon slashing through the sheets. Intent upon impaling her. She threw her hands in front of her as a defense, then heard herself scream.
     
    This time, Ray expected the barren landscape of her mind. But there were subtle changes. The pyramid was more prominent, and he saw an entrance made of rotted old wood and iron.