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Layla was tempted. After reading that threatening note, she didn’t want to be alone tonight. But Isabel was the very definition of a social butterfly with a swarm of adoring fans always in her wake. Layla wasn’t sure she could handle quite so much company. “I’m really tired lately.”
“Don’t be loco. Come with us to amateur hour. I’ll teach you to dance up on stage.” Isabel, who was studying to be a sex therapist, managed to say this as if it weren’t scandalous at all.
“No, thank you. I prefer not to be paid for my skills in dollar bills.”
“Ha! I think you got other plans. Is Dr. Jaffe taking you out tonight?”
“Boundaries, Isabel. Boundaries,” Layla warned, picking up her pen. She always did crosswords in pen.
“Chica, you’d have more fun if you didn’t have all those boundaries.”
Layla didn’t dare reprimand Isabel for her sass. After all, Isabel not only helped Layla keep track of her day-to-day life, but stood as a living reminder of all the lies she’d spun to cover the things she didn’t know. Isabel was the first person Layla had fooled into thinking that she wasn’t an amnesiac, and because of Isabel, it was easier to fool the rest. On the other hand, sometimes it seemed as if Isabel wasn’t fooled at all. “You’re sure not dressed for a hot date tonight, Dr. Bahset … “
Layla wouldn’t have the first idea how to dress for a hot date. She owned a closet full of dark skirts and high-necked blouses. Isabel, by contrast, was always dressed as if she had a hot date. Today Isabel was wearing a curve-hugging suit and leopard print heels that weren’t entirely office-appropriate but made her look like some kind of sex goddess.
Isabel handed Layla a lovely box from a fashionable Las Vegas boutique. “Here. A present for you. Open it, then I’m gonna sing.”
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Layla started to say.
But Isabel held up her hand. “Trust me, I did. You need somebody to put a little sexy in your step!”
Neatly folded beneath sparkling tissue paper was a siren-red dress. Layla pulled it out, laying it over her knees. “It’s lovely, thank you.” And it was. Given Isabel’s own taste in clothing, it was a remarkably restrained choice: a knee-length, sleeveless sheath with delicate shirring at the neckline. Layla didn’t own anything like it.
Isabel grinned. “Wear that on your date with Dr. Jaffe and he’ll want to give you birthday spankings.”
“Isabel!”
Isabel laughed and in spite of everything, Layla couldn’t help but laugh with her. Her incorrigible assistant had that effect on everyone, so as far as Layla was concerned, Isabel could say, do and wear whatever she wanted.
“Happy birthday to you …” Isabel sang, her voice a Spanish purr. But when Layla leaned over to blow out the candle on her bran muffin, Isabel stopped her. “Wait. What are you gonna wish for?”
That was a good question. Layla already had plenty of money, though she had no idea where it came from. She had a successful practice, but not successful enough to justify her fat bank account. So, what should she wish for? Did she dare wish for her memories back?
“You’re thinking too hard,” Isabel scolded. Then she leaned forward, pursed her ruby-red lips, and blew out the candle. “There, I made a wish for you!”
Layla put the dress back in the box and tried to make her desk as neat as it was before Hurricane Isabel arrived. “I’m afraid to even ask what you wished for me.”
“Just because I can’t find a man who can keep up with me doesn’t mean you have to settle,” Isabel said, sashaying toward the waiting room. “All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t be surprised if a new man comes walking into your life. And unlike Dr. Jaffe, this one will actually be your type!”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t have a type,” Layla assured her. But did she?
She couldn’t remember anything from her past. No husbands, lovers, boyfriends. She was only dating Dr. Nate Jaffe because healthy adult women had relationships. The aging psychiatrist was interested in her and it’d seemed easier to go to bed with him than to say no. She was fond of him, but not more than that. She couldn’t let it be more because whatever lurked in Layla’s past, she knew it was dangerous, and she didn’t want anyone else to have to pay the price.
Ray was home. Well, he was stateside anyway. For the past two years, he’d imagined himself climbing up the steps of his mother’s front porch—the one she swept clean and adorned with pink petunias. He’d imagined his nephews throwing open the front door and running into his arms to welcome him. Instead, he’d had to sneak back into the country under an assumed identity, greeted only by the bells and whistles of the slot machines in McCarran International Airport.
Las Vegas was where he’d find Dr. Layla Bahset, so here he was.
The first thing Ray did was rent a cheap motel room that accepted payment in cash. Now he stood before the grimy bathroom mirror, which was steamy from his shower. Staring at his reflection, he tried to recognize himself. As a soldier, he’d always been fit, but the musculature of his hulking shoulders was something entirely new. He’d wasted away in a dungeon for two years; he should’ve been gaunt and frail. Instead, his biceps bulged and his muscles strained over the broadness of his chest.
But not everything about him had changed. He still had the marks of his captivity. The burns, the cuts, the lashes. Some parts of his body were a gnarled web of scar tissue that made him shudder to look at. Ever since he’d escaped, he’d been going on pure adrenaline. Now that was subsiding in favor of exhaustion, and his limbs felt heavy and sluggish. He thought about sleeping, but then he’d be at the mercy of his nightmares. If he wasn’t dreaming about being locked in a box, then he was dreaming about his brother’s suicide or he was dreaming about Afghanistan. The hail of bullets. Screaming at his buddy to stop shooting. All the blood …
Best to stay awake. At least for a little longer.
He had a palpable need to hear his family’s voices and make sure they were okay. He’d never thought he’d miss his mother’s nagging or his father’s sardonic comments, but he did. He only hoped they’d be happy to hear from him even though he was a fugitive. No. He couldn’t even call them. The last thing he wanted was to incriminate or shame his family, which meant there was only one person in the world that Ray could contact.
Jack Bouchier answered on the third ring. “Howdy!”
“It’s me,” Ray said.
There was a shocked pause on the other end of the line until his old war buddy finally said, “Naw … it can’t be. Ray?”
It was almost too much to hear his name spoken by someone who knew him when he was a soldier, when he was still a man and not some kind of monster. Emotion welled up in Ray’s throat until he wasn’t sure he’d be able to speak over it. He had to squeeze his eyes shut. “Yeah. It’s me.”
Jack’s slow and lazy Southern drawl suddenly snapped to stiff attention. “Where the hell are you, brother?”
They had been brothers. Brothers-in-arms and more than that, too. There was no one Ray trusted more. But even though Jack was a good ol’ boy from Virginia with ancestors he could trace back to the Jamestown settlers, that didn’t mean Homeland Security wouldn’t pick up the call. “Not on the phone,” Ray said.
Jack breathed heavy into the phone. “They wouldn’t tell us what happened to you. You just didn’t show up for muster one mornin’ and when we asked, they told us to mind our own business.”
Ray’s knees wobbled, so he sat on the edge of his motel room bed. “Just tell me about my family. Are they okay?”
“They’re fine, Ray. I ain’t gonna tell you they’re right as rain, but they’re fine as they could be under the circumstances. When I came back stateside, I helped ‘em hire a lawyer for you, but you done disappeared. They’re scared outta their wits for you.”
Ray bet they were. His parents were immigrants. They’d fled from Syria and even though they’d always taught Ray that America was different—that America was a place of laws and tolerance—he wasn’t sure they ever truly felt safe. “Tell my family that I’m innocent and I’m alive. I’ll owe you one.”
“You don’t owe me shit,” Jack said. “Not after what you done for me.”
Ray didn’t like to think about what he’d done for Jack, so he didn’t say anything.
“I owe you big, Ray, and you know it, so what else do you need?”
“I need you to believe that whatever anybody says about me, I never worked with the enemy. You’ve gotta tell my family that and don’t do it on the phone.”
“You got it. Then I’ll come get you. Just give me an address and I’ll jump in the pickup.”
“Can’t.” Ray rubbed his neck, the image of beautiful but cold green eyes dancing mockingly in his mind. “There’s someone I need to take care of first.”
It wasn’t difficult for Ray to find Layla Bahset’s office. She hadn’t gone to any trouble to hide her identity. She was listed right there in the Las Vegas phone book like she was just an ordinary woman and not evil incarnate. This had probably been a mistake—to come directly to his interrogator’s office in the middle of the day. They’d have him on the security cameras and someone might be able to identify him. But unless he planned to stalk Layla Bahset down the street, like he’d done with the guard in Aleppo, this was the easiest way to handle things.
“Hola,” the woman at the desk purred, eyeing him with unabashed interest while her fingers arranged a vase of flowers. “My name is Isabel. And aren’t you just trouble in a tight black T-shirt … “
She was a glamazon with cinnamon-brown eyes, Latin curves in all the right places, and a smile that could cause a war or two. Ray felt himself flush under her magnetic charm. She was sexy as hell and it’d been a long time, but Ray couldn’t let himself be distracted by flirtation. He’d come here for Layla Bahset. He’d come here for justice. He’d come here to clear his name. Nothing less would satisfy.
“So, will the doc see me, or not?” Ray asked.
“Lucky for you, Dr. Bahset’s a workaholic. I’m sure she’ll squeeze you in, Papi.”
Were they already to the nickname stage? “Thanks, Cha-cha,” Ray returned, swiping a piece of candy from her desk. He popped it in his mouth hoping the sugar would steady him, but the intense sweetness put him even further on edge.
Dr. Bahset’s office door was half-open, and he took a moment to watch her. Was it just Ray’s imagination, or had he been in prison so long that every woman looked like a goddess today? Layla Bahset was as flawless as he remembered her, and Ray found that comforting. If a wisp of her black hair had escaped the confines of her severely upswept coiffure, it might’ve given him pause. If her lips had been slightly chapped instead of delicately glossed, he might’ve hesitated. But she was perfect. Beneath the demure white blouse and dark skirt, there wasn’t a single crack in the facade through which her humanity might have shone through.
Yet here she was, in the flesh.
It all happened in slow motion—fractional increments of time. He stepped into her office and locked the door, hearing the satisfying sound of the bolt sliding into place. Layla Bahset looked up, her emerald eyes disarmingly and deceptively warm. He remembered those eyes, as green as the Nile and as timeless as the pyramids. Eyes so penetrating and pitiless that his throat had constricted with every question she’d asked. Now he made himself just as hard and pitiless. His boots rapidly closed the distance between them and her smile faded. His coat caught the edge of a low end table and overturned it just as she rose to her feet to call for help.
Then he had her.
Kicking her chair out of the way, he slammed her against the bookshelf and felt her go boneless with fear. Rage blinded him as he wrapped his hands around her throat and he struggled not to let the beast in him take over. He reminded himself that he wasn’t here to choke her; he just needed to keep her from screaming. He let her exhale and felt the heat of her breath on his face. Her palms flattened against his chest to fend him off but the rest of her was surprisingly warm and yielding. He could actually feel the heat of her through his shirt. She smelled like something sweet and fragile, like a desert blossom. Like something he could trample and destroy.
Damn. It had been a mistake to touch her. More than two years had passed since he’d touched anything so soft, and the intimacy of skin against skin might be his undoing. Her eyes were closed, lips trembling. He could almost taste the salt of her fear-induced perspiration. It should’ve given him a feeling of satisfaction or mastery, but it only made him hungry for her. Urges he no longer knew he had clawed their way to the surface. With his blood running hot and his knee between hers, he nearly forgot what he’d come here for.
“Look at me, damn it,” he growled close to her ear until her pulse quickened beneath his fingertips and her eyelashes fluttered open. “I bet you thought you’d never see me again, did you? Take a good look and hope it’s not your last.”
Her eyes frantically searched his face as if for something she might recognize, and it infuriated him. Her face was burned into his memory. Her questions were branded into his flesh. That she could have forgotten him was unthinkable. He let his eyes blaze a path to the edge of her mind, but he was so angry he could barely focus on controlling her. The top button of her white blouse had come undone, baring her collarbone, and he wanted to press his mouth into the hollow of it. After everything she’d done to him, she was finally at his mercy. He could have her. He could show her his strength and power now that he wasn’t in chains. The desire to take her was so strong that it actually shook him out of his stupor.
He wasn’t that kind of monster, after all.
He let his grip relax, fingers splayed over her shoulder as she took a desperate breath. “You’re not going to scream, okay?” She nodded and in spite of his admittedly tenuous hold over her mind, she didn’t scream. She didn’t claw at him either. Instead, she did the most astonishing thing. Her delicate hand slipped over the taut sinews of his forearm in a caress. “Let me help you,” she whispered.
He couldn’t remember the last time another human being had touched him in gentleness, and the intensity of it was unbearable. Unbearable. He was an escaped creature of the black dungeon. Perhaps he wasn’t meant for the sounds, scents, or gentle sensations of the world anymore. Perhaps he knew only pain now. Her touch left him unbalanced. Unsteady. He had to pull away. “Sit down at your desk,” he commanded, but he wasn’t sure if it was his power that compelled her or just the fear.
“I want to help you,” she repeated, settling into her chair.
“You didn’t help me when I was in Syria,” he snarled. “You just asked me all those questions, and they’d swirl in my head like you were some kind of sorceress. Like you’d bewitched me. And when I wouldn’t answer, you’d send me back to have my hands and feet beaten until they bled. Of course, that was before you tried to make me think you actually cared about me … “
She shook her head as if she didn’t know what he was talking about and it made him even angrier. “Oh, give it a second and you’ll remember me. You see, everything has a price, sweetheart, and your bill has just come due.”
Chapter 2
What can you hold without using your hands?
Layla couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The stranger had told her not to scream, and she hadn’t. He told her to sit down, and she’d done as he bid, like a marionette. He seemed to have some power over her. Something that she couldn’t explain. Even now, it was as if he could silence her and keep her from calling out for help.
That wasn’t possible, she told herself. It was her job to help the mentally ill, not become one of them. Was it just the fear or the lack of oxygen that had her thinking this way? The situation was so volatile, so unpredictable, so outrageous, that her mind must be suggestible. Hypnotists took advantage of such suggestibility all the time. She just had to calm down and analyze this situation rationally.
The stranger obviously felt persecuted. It was a classic symptom of schizophrenia, but was it possible that she did know him? Was this was the man who had been stalking her?
Layla studied him more carefully. He was dark like an Arab or maybe a Greek, with full and familiar lips peeking out from beneath the stubble on his face. Surely if she knew this man, she couldn’t forget those features. He looked like some desert warrior, some Far East prince, but he spoke like an American, without even a hint of an accent. He was also large, with overly broad shoulders and big hands, but it was his eyes that Layla fixated on. Surely she would remember eyes like those, dark and burning like coal.
“Ray, is that your name?” Layla began. “My assistant said—”
“Remember me, damn you!” His shout reverberated throughout the room like a clap of thunder. It vibrated through her as he stared into her eyes. Too late, she tried to throw up a defense against the invasion of her mind.
And then he was inside her.
* * *
Sand. In all the minds Ray had explored, in all the labyrinths in which he’d hunted down his prey, he’d never encountered a mindscape like this. Layla Bahset’s was nothing but silence and sand. It had to be some kind of facade, a mirage. Where were her memories? Trudging through the dunes, Ray struggled to find the sights and sounds to tell him what she knew.
She must be blocking him, somehow. It couldn’t be possible for a woman with a life, with a past, to have an empty inner world. Up ahead, he noticed a darkened shape on the horizon, sand-swept and half-submerged. He squinted into the imaginary sunlight and pushed forward. What the hell was it? A triangle? No. A pyramid. Was that where she’d locked everything away?
Ray scrambled through the sand, focused on finding an entrance, when he felt the ground go soft beneath him. She’d buried all her secrets beneath this arid desert, and now she was trying to bury him along with them. The desert 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 he did 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 does.” The hooker looked at him in lurid appraisal for a moment, as if considering whether or not his dark looks and hard body were enough to make her stay. Then some wiser instinct took hold of her. “Never mind. I’m outtie.”
Ray sighed. Nobody ever wanted to do things the easy way. Before she broke eye contact, Ray seized her mind. “Sit down, Missy.”
She fell back into the chair as if pushed. He was relieved to find that it wasn’t a struggle. Except when it came to Layla Bahset, Ray was able to use this power whenever he needed people to look the other way at an airport, or give him money from their wallets. Most times, people didn’t realize what had happened, and shook it off. Unfortunately, Missy seemed acutely aware. “H-how did you do that?” The girl’s garishly painted fingernails clawed at the chair as she stammered, “You’re in my head. You forced me … “
“Look, I promise I won’t hurt you,” Ray said.
“I won’t touch you. I just need you to wake me up if I haven’t come back to myself in an hour.”
“You just want me to wake you up in an hour?”
“That’s right,” Ray said. “One hour.”
The call girl bit her lower lip, shaken but wary. “Anybody could do that for you. Why me?”
“Three reasons,” Ray said, ticking them off. “First, because it keeps a kid like you off the streets for an hour. Second, because hiring a hooker isn’t exactly suspicious behavior in this town. And third, because underage girls like you don’t talk to the police.”
“Why are you afraid of the police?” Missy was way too curious for her own good. “Are you, like, a drug dealer?”
Ray removed his coat and threw it over the back of a chair. It was too damned hot for a coat in Vegas anyway. “No.”
“Then you’re an addict,” she decided, eyeing the scars on his wrists. “You’re going to shoot up, and you want me to make sure you come out of it.”