Dark Sins and Desert Sands

Tugging his jeans up, he fastened them again. Deciding it might be easier to control himself if she were at eye level, he said, “Stand up.”

She rose, and he realized she was trembling. She stood there in front of him, hugging herself. He’d taken the calm and composed lady shrink and rattled her to the bone. It didn’t make him feel good about himself. The fact that she didn’t remember what she’d done didn’t make her innocent, but there wasn’t any satisfaction to be had from terrorizing someone who couldn’t appreciate the karmic justice of it. “So, Doc, when I said I wanted you to make things up to me, what did you think I meant?”

“You know what I thought.” Her words were like ice.

“Yeah, well, I’m interested in your mind. The information I need to get my life back is locked in that pretty head of yours and you need to tell me what you know. That’s the only way you can make things up to me.”

“I just told you that I have amnesia. But if what you’re saying is true, there has to be a record of what happened in your case somewhere. Maybe you should file a request under the Freedom of Information Act.”

“A FOIA request? That’s your brilliant solution? Sweetheart, I didn’t even get a lawyer, much less a trial. No, the only way to prove my innocence is to find my accuser and you know who that was.”

“I don’t know who gave evidence against you. I don’t remember.”

“Maybe you don’t want to remember,” he snapped.

She shrank away as if she thought he might strike her, or ravish her, or worse. Though it scalded his tongue to comfort her, he found himself saying, “Look, you don’t have to be afraid that I’m going to … take advantage of you.”

Her green eyes looked haunted and lost. “Maybe I’m afraid I want you to.”

What kind of game was she playing with him now? It was like a matador snapping a red cape in front of a wounded bull. Heat seared through his body and tinted his vision with scarlet need. It’d been one thing to meet the alluring lioness in her mindscape, the one who tempted him with her blatant sensuality. But to see the confusion of the buttoned-up woman in front of him was an entirely new kind of torment. One that dizzied him.

“You’re bleeding again,” Layla said softly as Ray swayed on his feet.

He’d obviously used his powers too many times in the past few days. It was all catching up with him. There was never a time when he hadn’t experienced pain and blood in the aftermath, but Layla was harder to control than anyone he’d encountered before. Keeping her here with him was taxing him beyond endurance.

“You should let me go, Ray,” she said softly.

“I didn’t just snatch you off the street for my own reasons, okay? You’re being followed.”

He could see that she didn’t believe him. “Those men that you yanked me away from, they looked like federal agents. Which makes me think they aren’t after me. They’re after you.”

Ray shook his head, hand coming to rest on the back of his neck. His control over her was fraying. “No, Doc. I’m telling you, they were watching you.”

“Well, I’m not afraid of government officials.”

“Goddammit, Layla! People with badges aren’t always the good guys. Do you think that with skin like yours, with a last name like yours, that professional courtesy is going to save you if they’ve decided you’re a threat to national security? Did the fact that I fought for my country matter a damn when I was being tortured?”

Suddenly, he was breathing faster. The world seemed to narrow into some dark tunnel, and if she gave any answer to his question, he didn’t hear it.

Layla watched him collapse. He toppled like some felled animal at sacrifice. He fell hard, his head bouncing when it struck the floor, his mouth going lax. Instinctively, Layla rushed to his side, stooping to feel for a pulse. She found one, but he didn’t respond when she said his name.

What was wrong with him? She remembered that he’d suffered a nosebleed the first time she saw him in her office. He was bleeding from the nose again now. Maybe he was suffering from high blood pressure or some far more serious ailment.

She should call an ambulance. No. He’d kidnapped her. She should call the police. But if she did, it was all going to come out. All of it. They’d find out that she’d been hiding her amnesia for two years, and no one would believe her when she told them about the mental powers that Rayhan Stavrakis had exerted over her. They’d think that she’d gone crazy.

Maybe she had.

This was her chance to escape, but she couldn’t just leave him here bleeding on the floor. She pushed on his shoulder, trying to roll him over. He was brawny, heavy, hard to move. She managed to angle his mouth toward the ground so that he wouldn’t choke on his own tongue but she didn’t know what else to do. She had a doctorate in psychology; she wasn’t a medical doctor.

But Nate Jaffe was.

Layla fumbled for her cell phone in her purse and dialed. After five rings it went to voice mail. Why wouldn’t he pick up? Okay, he was obviously still smarting from their breakup. She’d just have to go get him. Nate’s apartment wasn’t far from here and her captor didn’t look like he was going to regain consciousness anytime soon, so Layla bolted for the door. If there really were other men out there following her, then she’d just have to risk it.

Chapter 5

A barren woman with skin cracked and dry, still enchants men though none know why.

Though Seth was a desert god, he hated the Mojave. Not just because it was a New World desert, far and remote from his own Egyptian home. He also hated the Mojave because as a war god, he believed that a desert should devour. A desert should destroy.

A desert shouldn’t give birth to a neon monstrosity like Las Vegas.

The city was like no proper desert metropolis of old. It had no citadel; it sent no chariots into the sands to conquer. It didn’t join with the sand and sun and powerful ring of mountains. Instead the Vegas architecture was a blend of archaic myth with modern excess—an adult fantasy-scape at the very edge of reality, where magic blurred with the mundane. With its garish lights and glitter, the city beckoned visitors and residents to worship the myriad relics of man’s gloried past. It became a fertile oasis for washed-up immortals. And why not? Where else but Vegas could deities walk comfortably amongst the mortals without fear of discovery? Here a primitive goddess of dancing could easily take on the guise of a showgirl. Where else but Vegas could a trickster god hide in plain sight, running a casino? Where else could a god of revelry gorge himself in an actual bacchanalia, but at Caesar’s Palace?