Dark Sins and Desert Sands

by Stephanie Draven

  Layla inhaled sharply. “What?”

  “I saw a lioness.”

  “A lioness?” It sounded wrong in every way. She wasn’t anything like a lioness. Layla was wary and restrained, not wild and free. She was a creature of order and logic, not instinct. It’s true that when she’d defended herself in the stairwell she’d felt like a fierce predator, but she hadn’t known that part of herself. She also didn’t know the part of herself that wanted this man. She was a stranger to the part of herself that quivered and ached for him.

  “Then make me remember, if you think you can,” she said. “Do it.”

  He pressed her down onto the mattress with a kiss that left her breathless. Her bra and panties, and the skirt bunched at her waist offered little barrier between his body and her own. Even so, she let him remove her clothes, and then his own. She squeezed her eyes shut, but her thighs parted for him anyway, and her back arched as he positioned himself. She wanted to say that it was all his doing, that he was controlling her, but it had gone well beyond that now. She wanted to give in to this before grief and fear and wisdom and sadness chased it all away.

  She was mesmerized by the scars on his body and by her own need to touch him, soothe him, as if her fingers could erase the burn marks and the slashes of pale flesh across his muscular back. His erection pressed between her legs and it suddenly seemed impossible that he would fit inside her. Ray was a big man in every sense of the word, and she gasped as he tried to slide forward into her. The pressure built and it wasn’t altogether pleasurable. Resting his weight on his elbows, he readjusted, probing her wetness. He was stretching her and she squeezed her eyes shut against the discomfort.

  “Am I hurting you?” he whispered.

  “No,” she lied. But then, biting her lip, she whispered, “A little, but don’t stop.”

  Layla wouldn’t have wanted him to stop even if she were in agony. She wanted to give him her body, as if it could heal what had been done to him. As if it could somehow make up for what had been done to her. Ray slowly sank down until he was within her.

  Then he groaned. She loved the sounds he made, the way he looked at her in amazement. He was the burning center of her now and she struggled to adjust to his thickness. She didn’t have her memories, but she knew that she’d never been stretched so far. Her insides throbbed as if her heart had somehow fallen between her legs. If he’d started thrusting, if he’d moved at all, she would’ve screamed. But he didn’t move. He stilled, gritting his teeth as if he were the one in pain, and maybe he was.

  His shoulders shook from the effort and that’s when she realized he was waiting for some signal from her. She gave it to him by lifting her hips. Another groan, and he was withdrawing, leaving a stinging emptiness behind that she found more unbearable than anything. “No, please,” she whimpered, rocking up against him. “More.”

  “Careful what you wish for,” he said through gritted teeth, but he wasn’t too much of a gentleman to accommodate her. He hoisted one of her knees over his hip, then started the slow and steady pistoning motion. She reeled as if he’d breached some barrier, and she supposed he had, because sex had never felt like this before. Heat spread through her belly and the tension in her thighs eased. This wasn’t the kind of sensation that a woman like her should’ve wanted. But she did want it, and it changed her.

  He was so big that he left no room inside her for doubts or self-consciousness, no room for second thoughts or self-control. There was only room inside her for this.

  He rocked her, heedless of the rickety headboard that banged against the wall with each thrust. It was so good now, so thrilling, that her skin tingled. Before he’d seemed like too much, but now she wasn’t sure she could get enough as her body coiled and coiled with so much pleasure she thought it might kill her.

  “Come,” he whispered, nudging some fleshy spot near her womb that made her cry out. She wrapped her legs tighter around his waist, desperate for it. Sweat-damp dark hair fell over his face as their eyes locked and he took control of her mind so gently it was like a kiss upon her forehead. He pushed her over that edge, right into orgasm.

  She bucked beneath him as he took possession of her muscles, and made them all release at once into a climax that left her raw and screaming. If it’d only been the one time, perhaps she’d have been able to retain some semblance of decorum. But he did it to her again, and again, until her cries sounded like sobs and she lost all sense of time and place. Her nails raked his back. Her teeth sank into his shoulder as if she really were the lioness he saw inside her.

  When he finally found his own release, he gave a shuddering moan, flooding her. She felt the warmth of him settle, like rain on a fertile plain. She gasped again as if something quickened inside her, her newfound discovery of pleasure like the gasp of a newborn infant.

  Then they collapsed together, in a tangle of panting, sweaty flesh.

  “I’m sorry,” Layla said, twining her fingers in the hair on his chest, marveling at its texture. “For scratching…”

  “Don’t apologize,” Ray said, still breathing hard. “There’s a lot of stuff you should be sorry about, but not this. Maybe I need to get you declawed but—” Then he saw her expression and went serious. “To see a woman like you do that was damned sexy.”

  “Seth didn’t like it.” Layla hadn’t meant to say it, and she bit her lip once the words were out. She knew that the mere mention of another lover could send a man into a rage, and Ray seemed like a man with more anger than he knew what to do with.

  She expected him to lash out, but he just rolled over onto his side so that he could look at her. He brushed the hair out of her eyes. “You’re already remembering more.”

  Layla nodded. “Not the specifics, but impressions. Nothing useful to you.”

  “Okay.” His frustration was plain. “So tell me what else you remember about your asshole ex-husband, then.”

  “He used to call me names.” Whore, slut, tramp. She could hear them still. Given that she was in bed with a man she barely knew, it was hard not to think those words about herself now and let them stain her cheeks with shame.

  Ray’s expression soured. “I’ll never get why women marry guys like that in the first place.”

  “I loved him.” It clearly wasn’t the answer Ray had been expecting. Certainly it wasn’t the answer Layla had been expecting either. She’d thought herself incapable of any emotion as strong as love. Now a sharp pain stabbed her chest at the realization that she’d felt love before. That maybe she could feel it again and that it might hurt her just as badly. “He broke my heart.”

  “What’d he do? Cheat on you?”

  Layla let out a little laugh. As if being betrayed in such a banal way could have possibly caused this much damage. She didn’t know how Seth had broken her heart; she only knew that he’d shattered it like glass on a cement floor. Now with so many jagged edges, she was afraid she’d slice open anyone who tried to pick up the pieces. Maybe that’s what had happened to Nate Jaffe, and why she couldn’t cry over his death. Maybe that’s what would happen to Ray if he came to care for her.

  “He didn’t want me,” Layla said.

  “Bullshit.” He looked completely bewildered, as if he couldn’t comprehend that any man might not want her. His fingers closed protectively around her arm and her body felt as marked by his lovemaking as his was marked by torture. Maybe it was this moment that she started to fall in love with him.

  “There were things I wanted that Seth couldn’t give me,” Layla tried to explain.

  “Like an orgasm?” Ray asked, and she wasn’t sure if he was joking.

  “I don’t know. I only know that everything I did, I did to please him. He owns Scorpion Group and he has multibillion-dollar contracts with the government. If I wanted to be a part of his life, I had to be a part of that. So I learned how to use every weapon I could get my hands on. I learned to move in his world. I helped catch bad guys. I helped ensure the war effort went well. Seth liked that.
He appreciated my competence, but the more I made myself into what he said I wanted, the more bored he seemed to be. Like the thrill of the chase was gone, and then he only seemed to want me if someone else did. But if someone did want me…he’d become so jealous. Murderously jealous, Ray.”

  “I told you before, I’m not scared of him. But let me ask you something. Did you go with other guys just to piss him off? To get his attention?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that why you’re in bed with me now?”

  She all but hissed with indignation, but didn’t he have every right to question her motives? Ray had no reason to trust her, and even less reason to trust whatever it was between them. “I wanted you, and you have no idea how foreign a thing that is to me. To want something and take it for myself, without his permission…”

  Ray’s eyebrow arched at the way she phrased that. “He sounds like the kind of abusive asshole who would have eventually killed you.”

  “He can do worse than that, Ray,” she said. “He did do worse than that. When I was with Seth, I thought I knew who I was. I told myself that I was doing good things to help the war effort and make the world a better place, but obviously I was wrong.”

  He glanced away. It was still there in the room between them. They’d each seen the monster in one another. “Layla, I used to imagine what it would be like if you believed me. If you believed in my innocence. I used to imagine that you’d beg for my forgiveness.”

  “When you imagined it, did you forgive me?” she wondered. The answer seemed terribly important.

  “Yeah.” The one single word sounded like it had been torn from his throat. “But not before I had you naked and on your knees.”

  “Having sex with me was what you needed to forgive me?” she asked.

  Ray looked queasy. “Layla, don’t even say that. Can you stop being a shrink for just a minute and stop analyzing?”

  Layla braved his anger anyway. “You started it. Besides, I just want to know why you fantasized about me naked.”

  He winced. “Because I just wanted to have power over you for a change. Because it felt good to think about sex. Because it was a distraction from prison. Because if I was thinking about pleasure, then I wasn’t thinking about pain. It helped me forget the fear. It made me feel just a little bit free.”

  “Then I’m glad you did,” Layla said, pressing a kiss to his palm.

  “Are you?” Ray asked. She could see that he was wondering if it had been part of her game. Maybe he was wondering if what they’d just done together was still some new kind of manipulation. If she was just trying to earn his trust, so that she could send him back to a dark dungeon. He squeezed his eyes shut a few times, as if he were literally in pain, and then she saw that he was.

  “Ray?”

  He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. You’re bleeding.”

  A few droplets of blood had leaked from his ear onto the pillow and his jaw clenched. “When I use my power to control people, it always hurts after. More so with you.”

  She felt guilty for encouraging him to use his powers during sex. Her heart hammered in her chest at the thought that something that had felt so right between them could have hurt him. “Can I get something for you?”

  “I just need to rest a little,” Ray whispered. “Just stay with me.”

  The war god struggled to keep his expression appropriately somber as the police allowed him into the parking garage to look over the crime scene. Layla was gone. Vanished. Her car abandoned. That should’ve been enough to fix Seth’s mouth into a scowl, but the dangling body of one of his men was a sight that unexpectedly delighted him. The limp body hung loosely from the stairway railing; the police thought it was a clear case of suicide, but Seth knew better. This was Layla’s handiwork, and he wanted to pause and admire her skill.

  Seth had always believed that blood was the best irrigation for the soil, but there was something to be said for the clean and sterile kill of a sphinx, too. Every man had secret sins and a guilty heart. Some men had shame too great to live with, and that made them vulnerable to a riddler like Layla. Obviously, the men who worked for Seth—men who agreed to kill for profit—were easy prey.

  Even if Seth could feel pity for a mortal, he wouldn’t have felt it for this man. It was difficult for him to even pretend to be grief-stricken.

  Isabel had no such difficulties. She was already sniffling into a tissue. He didn’t have to guess how the strumpet had managed to charm her way past the police tape. There wasn’t a mortal man alive who could walk by her without a second look, and a police detective was already at her elbow, comforting her. “You shouldn’t have to see this, Miss Flores. Why don’t you let me take you back inside and we can go over your statement again about the last time you saw Dr. Bahset.”

  “¡Qué horror!” Isabel cried, eyeing the dead man and shaking her head.

  The worst part was that Seth sensed that the Aztec’s emotions were genuine. How could the goddess possibly be upset about the death of one of Seth’s men? Had she known his hapless employee? Worse, had she touched him? Had they been lovers? The possibility was surprisingly unsettling. It was a good thing the man was dead, because Seth may well have killed him just for the brief flicker of…what was it? Jealousy?

  No. Isabel was a filthy whore. Why should he want what so many other men had obviously already enjoyed? Worse, she was a goddess. No minion that he could control and keep under his thumb. If she displeased him, he couldn’t simply punish her. Isabel would be his equal. Well, not exactly his equal. He was older than her, and stronger by far. The fact remained that she wouldn’t submit to his commands and Layla’s rebellion was already more trouble than Seth wanted to contend with.

  “It isn’t suicide,” Seth told the police. “Rayhan Stavrakis did this. He’s an escaped enemy combatant and he has a score to settle with Dr. Bahset and now he’s kidnapped her.”

  “But first he took the time to hang this guy?” the detective asked. “Kind of a lot of trouble to go to when a bullet would work just as easily.”

  Seth hated to be questioned by petty mortals. “It’s his modus operandi.”

  “So you think Stavrakis hanged her boyfriend, too? What was his name? Dr. Jaffe?”

  Seth winced at the word boyfriend. It was such a juvenile word, and it implied intimacies that Layla shouldn’t have engaged in with anyone, much less the pathetic psychiatrist. Then again, Layla was proving to be as unpredictable and elusive as the minotaur. Oh, how Seth looked forward to capturing them both.

  “I think you’d be smart to put all your resources into finding him. He has information vital to our national security so we need him alive.”

  In truth, the minotaur had never given up useful information in the dungeon. He may have even been innocent of the crimes he was accused of. Not that it had mattered at all to Seth. The important thing about Rayhan Stavrakis was that he’d been a perfect specimen. It hadn’t been difficult to turn him into just the kind of pet Seth had always wanted for his very own. Seth doubted the Las Vegas police force would be able to catch him, but a manhunt would increase the pressure.

  Back out on the street, Isabel was waiting for him. “Is Layla in danger from the minotaur?”

  It irritated Seth that he wanted to reassure her. “No mortal man can hurt Layla.”

  “Rayhan isn’t just a mortal man, he’s also a monster. What if he really has taken her? What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m going to find them both and add them to my collection of creatures. I’ll use them to make war, to grow more powerful, to put the world back the way it was supposed to be. Maybe you should help me. Perhaps if men understood the power of the old gods again, you’d have a worshipper or two.”

  “Do you really think I don’t have worshippers?” Isabel asked, her pretty eyes hot with offense.

  “Besides slobbering fools who want to take you to bed?” He
glanced angrily at a man on the street who ogled her.

  “Sex can be worship,” Isabel countered, fearless of his wrath. “Lovemaking is. When a man worships a woman’s body, he’s worshipping me, too.”

  Ah, he could see it now. Whereas he fed off war and mayhem, she fed off sex, and with all the rutting in this sinful city, he could see why she’d make it her new home.

  “I think,” Isabel said, her eyes half-lidded and voice sultry, “that you would even worship me a little bit, if I came to your bed.”

  It wasn’t possible that he should want her. She was the embodiment of everything he despised in a woman. Where he was the sterile sand, she was lush and fertile. Where he inspired hatred, she inspired lust. Maybe even love. He controlled storms and crocodiles and venomous scorpions that burrowed under sand and rock, whereas she commanded flowers and hummingbirds and butterflies that fluttered delicately through the air. Yet, the thought of conquering her stirred something in his blood that he hadn’t felt for centuries. “If you came to my bed, perhaps you’d do the worshipping, Xochiquetzal.”

  She smiled at the use of her true name. “It’s a pity you’ll never find out.”

  “I could have you if I wanted you,” Seth assured her.

  “No,” she replied. “No man puts his hands on me unless he’s earned the right.”

  Earned the right? He didn’t need her permission to enjoy whatever pleasures her body offered. He could take them. “I’m more powerful than you,” Seth warned. “I can bend you to my will.”

  She should’ve stepped back from the thunder in his eyes, but instead, Isabel whispered, “Are you sure about that?”

  In an effort to soothe his ego and satisfy his pride, Seth had come to Vegas to fetch his wayward minion. Now Layla had made a fool of him again, and the young Aztec goddess had been on hand to witness it. It had emboldened her to taunt him like this, and it made him furious. She was too young a goddess to truly understand the world, but he would teach her. She’d either submit to him now or he’d take her right here on the street like the whore that she was. He’d tear the clothes from her body with the scouring winds of a sandstorm. He’d scorch her lips with his desert heat and make her wilt in supplication!