Dark Sins and Desert Sands Read Online Free PDF Page A

swallowed his legs, yanking down. Startled, Ray fumbled his way back, trying to follow the thread of consciousness back into waking reality. She was still fighting him. He sank deeper and deeper into the sand. But Ray had come too far—been through too much—to give up now. Did she think she could stop him? She could just forget it!
     
    Forget it!
    Those were the words echoing in Layla’s mind when she was wrenched out of some kind of hypnotic state. It was Isabel’s insistent knock from the other side of the door that jarred her back into the present. “Dr. Bahset?” Isabel called, her voice shrill. “ Que pasa? Everything all right?”
    Layla startled to realize that she was sitting across from a very attractive man and in the tension of the moment, she felt her cheeks burn. What had just happened? The stranger took great gulps of air, as if he’d been drowning. Blood dripped from his nose and she noticed that an end table had been overturned. Had he tripped over it?
    The pounding on her office door became louder. “Dr. Bahset, I have a key, you know!”
    The bleeding stranger stood, staggering a little as hedid so. “This isn’t the end of it,” he told her, accusation in his eyes. “I’ll be back for you.”
    So it must be him . The man who had broken into her office and left her a threatening note. The man she’d feared for two years now. So why didn’t she run from him? Instead, all she wanted to do was help him.
    “You’re bleeding,” she whispered, pulling a tissue from the box on her desk.
    He took it, their fingers touching softly, just as Isabel threw open the door. Then the three of them stood there awkwardly until the stranger brushed past Isabel and walked away without a word.
    “Hay Dios!” Isabel said, eyeing the overturned end table. “What happened?”
    “I—I have no idea,” Layla croaked. Her throat felt raw and sore, but she had no idea why.
    This had never happened before. It was true that she didn’t remember her past, but she remembered everything since the day she first arrived in Vegas. There’d been no gaps. No blackouts. At least not until now.
    Isabel came to her side. “Did he do something to you? I’ll call the policia …”
    Layla straightened the collar of her blouse, her fingers hovering over the top button. “No police.” If she let Isabel call the authorities, the life she’d struggled to build for herself here would all come tumbling down. All the lies she’d told to cover up her memory loss would be exposed. Her patients would be hurt. What’s more, she was certain to her very bones that her stalker was no ordinary man and that the police couldn’t help her.
    Maybe no one could.
     
    It had taken at least five hours for the roaring pain in Ray’s head to settle into a dull ache. Since his escape, he’d never come up against a mind that could physically resist him. But Layla Bahset had. Not only had she fought him, she’d nearly buried him right along with her memories. He’d trapped others in a state of madness, but he’d never come close to being trapped himself. If the assistant hadn’t knocked at just the right moment, Ray wasn’t sure he’d have made it back out with his own mind intact.
    He was afraid to try it again without someone to shake him out of it, but the teenaged prostitute’s expression hovered somewhere between curiosity and disgust, her lips making a perfectly cherry-round circle of surprise. “You some kind of freak?”
    “Look, kiddo, it’s easy money,” Ray said, setting the alarm clock by the bed. He wondered if motel-rooms-by-the-hour came with a wake-up call service. Probably not.
    “Easy money,” she mimicked, shaking out her blond hair and pointing at him with the stained end of her Popsicle stick. “Easy money is how girls like me end up missing.”
    He didn’t have time for this. “Just sit down, Missy. That’s your name, right?”
    “It’s Artemisia, but yeah, you can call me Missy. Most everybody