Possession

by Tori Carrington

  Daisy…

  It was still sometimes hard to believe that she had a child, much less a four-year-old daughter who was so much sunshine and light to her seriousness and shadows. Up until her return to New Orleans, she’d employed a live-in nanny to help with the responsibilities of a single-parent household. She knew lots of professional women who did the same. But she’d been struck to the core when she’d returned home late one night to find her own daughter throwing her skinny little arms around the college student and saying she wished she were her real mommy.

  There had been something inherently wrong with the scene. And it wasn’t something Akela had planned for when she’d gotten pregnant, then married fellow agent Dan McGuire. They’d divorced shortly after Daisy was born because they’d found out that not only did they not share much as a couple, but as parents their philosophies couldn’t be reconciled. Simply, Dan had believed all responsibility for raising their child—outside a daily five-minute play session—rested solely on her shoulders. It hadn’t taken long before Akela had begun to wonder why she needed him around at all, especially because of the extra work he created with his laundry and the dinner he insisted should be waiting for him no matter how late he got in.

  Of course, by returning to New Orleans and the home she’d grown up in, Akela sometimes pondered if she’d traded a teenage nanny for her own mother. But ever since moving back into the house, Patsy had demonstrated a need to bond with a granddaughter whom she’d seen only twice a year at holidays. So Akela had taken a step back and given her the space she’d believed her mother needed.

  But she was beginning to wonder if the time had come for her to reinstate herself as the primary caretaker in her daughter’s young life. Truth was, even though she was under the same roof with her daughter, she missed her.

  She closed the file, emptied her cup in the sink and put it into the dishwasher, then climbed the back stairs to the bedroom at the far end of the hall, a room connected to hers that had once been the green guest room.

  The house she’d grown up in was mammoth by anyone’s standards. With seven bedrooms, each having its own connecting bath, the hundred-year-old residence was large enough to host much of New Orleans’ upper-class society. Although aside from the rare Christmas party, the house had always held only her parents, her, and the maid, though now her daughter, too.

  Only as an adult did Akela find all the space a waste somehow, more suitable to a large family with lots of kids than an aging couple, their single daughter and granddaughter. Growing up, she hadn’t known better, had never lived anywhere else, so had never had cause to question having so many rooms no one used. But now…

  “Grammy, do you think there’s such a thing as good ghosts and bad ghosts?”

  Akela paused outside the doorway to her daughter’s bedroom, the four-year-old’s growing vocabulary never failing to amaze her.

  “No, sweetling, I don’t. I think there are only good ghosts.”

  “But if there are good ghosts, then there have to be bad ghosts, don’t there? Or else how would we know the difference between the two of them?”

  Akela smiled and knocked briefly on the jamb before entering the large, well-appointed room, a room befitting a princess with everything pink and white and frilly. And if ever there were a little girl who fit that description, it was her blond-haired little cherub.

  “Mommy!”

  The four-year-old launched herself at Akela, who now stood near the end of the bed. She easily caught her and crowded her to her chest. She noticed her mother’s frown of disapproval, but Akela was thankful she didn’t comment on the exuberant display of affection that she, herself, had gone without while growing up.

  “Hey, sweet pea,” she said, kissing the side of her daughter’s fragrant hair and hugging her tightly. So small. So perfect. It was sometimes difficult to believe that she’d made this delightful creature. “Are you enjoying story time?”

  “Oh, yes,” Daisy said. “Very much so.”

  Akela drew back and looked into her round, soft face. “I was thinking that maybe tomorrow night Mommy could read to you. What do you think of that?”

  The delight on her daughter’s face was diluted by the disappointment on her mother’s. Akela ignored it and concentrated on the little girl in her arms instead.

  “I’d like that very much.”

  “Good.” She rounded the bed. “So are you all set? Teeth all brushed? Face washed?”

  “All ready,” Daisy said, scrambling under the covers Akela held for her then tucked in around her slender body.

  “Grandma, would you like to say good-night first?” Akela asked pointedly.

  She didn’t miss the flash of irritation on her mother’s face.

  “Good night, Daisy Mae.” She kissed her granddaughter’s cheek and gave the covers a final pat.

  “Good night, Grammy.”

  “Grandmother,” her mother corrected.

  “Yes, right. Good night, Grandmother.”

  Akela bit her bottom lip, wondering if her mother just couldn’t help herself. The constant corrections, the grooming, the teaching. Of course, all the lessons had obviously been lost on Akela. While she could outmanner most, she found she no longer wanted to. There was something…cold about holding one’s head just so and acting the paragon of discretion over all else, especially over honest emotion.

  She waited until Patsy had left the room then sat down on her daughter’s bed.

  “Are you happy here, baby?” Akela asked, tucking Daisy’s almost white hair behind her tiny shell ears.

  “Oh, yes, Mommy. Very much so.”

  The phrase was a new and often used one and never failed to make Akela smile.

  “I hear you’re doing very well at day school.”

  Daisy nodded. “I like it.”

  “And they apparently like you.” She tickled her plump belly, taking great joy in her daughter’s peal of laughter.

  Sometimes Akela wondered how it was she’d gotten to be so lucky. While some might judge her situation with the detachment of an outsider, call her to task for divorcing a man who hadn’t really done anything wrong, or for having a child at all given her chosen vocation, she couldn’t imagine her life without the four-year-old in it. Without her wide, baby-toothed grin. Her constant questions. Her ceaseless enthusiasm. Not a day went by that she didn’t grow in some way, be it physically, emotionally or intellectually. And Akela reveled in every subtle and obvious step, wanting to hold on to the youngster tightly with both hands even as she prepared to loosen that same grip so she could grow into a balanced and independent young woman.

  Of course, that Daisy was the complete opposite of her was the source of some confusion. She responded well to her grandmother’s lessons, seeming, in fact, to blossom under Patsy’s attention, while Akela remembered being in constant eye-roll mode.

  She picked up a framed photo of Daisy from the nightstand and stared at it. Only closer inspection showed it wasn’t her daughter at all, but herself at around the same age.

  Had she really been all that different from the little girl now watching her curiously from the bed?

  She put the frame back down. “Sleep tight, munchkin,” she said, kissing Daisy soundly. “And don’t let those bedbugs bite.”

  “See you in the morning light,” the four-year-old said with an exaggerated yawn.

  Akela slowly left the room, switching off the lamps but leaving the door open a crack so the hall light could break the darkness. The one thing she remembered as a child was the darkness.

  “You indulge her too much,” her mother said when she’d reached the stairs.

  “And you’re too stern with her.”

  Even as Akela said the words, she knew they weren’t fair. They were said in a knee-jerk reaction to her mother’s criticism, a childish one she was beginning to doubt she’d ever truly grow out of.

  “Look, Akela, I don’t wish to argue with you.”

  “Good, because I don’t want to ar
gue with you, either, Mother.”

  She began to go back downstairs, then paused midway down. “Just so you know, now that we’re settled and Daisy has gotten used to you and Dad, I’m going to be taking a more active role in my daughter’s life.”

  “As well you should.”

  “Which means you’re going to have to take a less active one.”

  Her mother fell silent.

  She didn’t mean to hurt her mother—really, she didn’t. But if this arrangement was going to work, she would need the room to redefine her relationship with her young daughter, and that included the retreat of her own parents.

  Patsy nodded. “Very well, then.”

  CLAUDE LAY BACK on the bed in the seedy hotel room, the ceiling fan doing little but churning the hot air and pushing it back at him. He was alone—no willing female at his side—not for lack of opportunity, but for lack of interest, more specifically his interest. A first for him, in a string of firsts he’d been encountering lately. Women had always been a source of escape for him, although he really hadn’t understood the meaning of that word until now. Because despite everything hanging over his head, he couldn’t seem to escape one woman: Akela Brooks.

  He picked up the wind-up brass alarm clock from the bed stand and stared at it in the dim light shining in from Bourbon Street. After midnight. He put the clock back down, listening to the dueling sounds coming from two different jazz bands from two different bars and the people talking as they passed the open windows. It wasn’t all that long ago that he’d been one of those people. Out for the night to see what it had to offer. Maybe finding a companion and going with her to a room not unlike the one he was in now.

  But the only woman he wanted was the one he couldn’t have.

  He dry washed his face and shut off the television in the corner, then tossed the remote to the foot of the bed. Sleep was pretty much out for him. The more he seemed to dig for information on Claire, the deeper he seemed to be implicated in her murder. Hell, if he didn’t know better, he might begin to think he had murdered her.

  He reached for his cell phone, pressing the keypad so the display lit up. Then he dialed the last number he should be dialing if he knew what was good for him.

  AKELA REREAD the passage in the original police report one of Chevalier’s men had taken, unable to concentrate on the words or their meaning. She shifted on the two pillows she’d positioned behind her back and glanced toward the closed window and the lace sheers preventing her from seeing more than the glow of the moon just beyond. She sighed and put the papers down on the table before flicking out the light and focusing across the room at nothing outside, and everything inside herself, longing for an unnamable something. Fresh air, perhaps, instead of the conditioned air that filled the house. The scent of things growing, rather than the freshener that always made the place smell like roses.

  Claude.

  She hadn’t been able to get her mind off Claude since coming up to her room a couple of hours earlier. She kept wondering where he was. Whether he was alone. And if he wasn’t, then whom he had chosen to spend the night with.

  She caught herself rubbing her arms and stopped.

  She wasn’t used to this feeling. This obsessing over someone, especially someone who was not only a fugitive from the law but opposite to the kind of men she’d been attracted to before now. Someone who had made her come to life in a way no other man had been capable of.

  She pushed from the bed and stepped toward the window, not stopping until she had the sheers pushed back and had opened the pane, breathing in deep gulps of the humid air. Rather than making her feel better, the memory of what it had been like in the bayou, rasping for breath after having sex with Claude, came rushing back.

  She heard a faint electronic chirp. She turned and looked toward the side of the bed where her cell phone had lit up indicating she had an incoming call. She slowly walked to pick it up, staring at the number on the display.

  Claude.

  Akela clutched the phone to her chest, wondering if she dared answer.

  Wondering if she dared not answer…

  13

  CLAUDE COULD IMAGINE Akela in a nice room somewhere across town staring at the phone and wondering whether or not to answer it. He couldn’t blame her. If his head were screwed on tightly, he wouldn’t have put her in the position he had. Then again, he’d had no choice in the matter. He hadn’t asked her to come out to the bayou looking for him. Yes, he had asked her to stay behind, though he’d never in a million years expected her to. But she had. And from that moment on he’d had absolutely no control over what happened next.

  The cell kept ringing. Surely by now she’d heard it and made her decision not to answer. He began to pull the phone away from his ear to disconnect when the line stopped ringing.

  “Hello?”

  The sound of her voice was like a salve to an open wound.

  “Akela,” he said on a breath.

  He didn’t apologize for calling her. And she didn’t ask him to. He guessed that maybe she’d needed to hear his voice as much as he’d needed to hear hers.

  He caught the sound of something on her end.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  There wasn’t an immediate response. Then he heard the click of what sounded like a door opening. Or closing.

  “I’m looking in on my daughter.”

  Claude’s chest tightened.

  Her daughter…

  He hadn’t stopped to consider that the capable, sexy agent would have a life outside her job. Hadn’t guessed at her being married, or divorced. Hadn’t thought of her as a mother.

  That she and another man had created a child together made him hurt in a way that he hadn’t known he could.

  “Her name’s Daisy. She’s four years old.”

  Daisy. The whimsical name made him smile.

  “She’s a beautiful blonde with a smile that’ll steal your heart.”

  He could envision Akela smoothing back the little girl’s hair while she slept.

  “And her father?”

  “Sees her every other holiday, a couple of weeks in the summer, and calls on her birthday.”

  “You were married?”

  “Yes.”

  But they weren’t any longer.

  The knowledge that Akela had belonged to another man, no matter for how brief a time, struck him to the bone somehow. He’d gotten the distinct impression that she had never made love to anyone as she’d made love with him. If that were the case, how could she have promised her heart to someone who didn’t move her?

  Claude clenched the bedsheet in his hand. Then again, wasn’t it he who drew the line staunchly between love and sex? So if there could be great sex without love, didn’t it stand to reason that there could also be great love without great sex?

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Akela said softly.

  If only she knew what he was thinking. “Where are you now?”

  “Back in my room.”

  “Alone?”

  He swore he could hear her smile. “Alone.”

  “What are the chances of tempting you out?”

  She paused, as if trying to figure out his question. “Out? As in outside the house?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Slim to none.”

  Claude stretched his neck and stared at the ceiling. “Because of your daughter.”

  “No. My parents and the maid are here. I can’t come because it wouldn’t be a very good idea.”

  He wanted to ask good for whom. It would be very good for him—and completely selfish. Because he was looking for a way to banish the clingy shadows of the night. And for whatever reason she was the only one who could do that for him right now.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “So you can come?”

  He heard her swallow. “No.”

  “Then it’s probably not a good idea if I tell you.”

  “No. I don’t suppose it is.”

&n
bsp; Akela stretched back across her bed, her mind telling her she should find a way to end this conversation, which shouldn’t be taking place. The moment he’d said her name, he’d connected a bridge from their time outside of time in the bayou to the here and now and reality. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that. Wasn’t sure she was ready for what it could mean.

  Still, she told herself, it wasn’t as if he was physically in the room with her, no matter how much she felt that he could have been. They were talking on the phone. That was okay, wasn’t it?

  She wasn’t sure whom she was asking that question. All she knew was how dark the night was, how hypnotic Claude’s voice.

  She’d never been one for long phone conversations. Not with her friends. Not with lovers. Not with her ex-husband. Yet she found herself reluctant to end her current call with Claude.

  For some reason she couldn’t put her finger on, the bed linens felt softer against her skin, left partially bare by her nightgown. Her nipples felt highly sensitive and she squeezed her thighs tightly together, compensating for an absence she felt down to her toes.

  “Where are your hands now?”

  Akela swallowed hard. “One’s gripping the phone…”

  “And the other?”

  “Lying on the top sheet. Why?”

  “Because I’d like to borrow them for a while.”

  Borrow them? As in pretend they were touching him?

  “Borrow them to touch you the way I wish I were touching you now.”

  Akela felt as if her entire body had been reawakened.

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment and she held her breath, wondering if he dared to continue.

  His voice came back, low and provocative. “First I want you to uncurl your fingers from the sheet.”

  She wondered how he knew she was doing that and slowly did as he asked, smoothing her palm against the sheet’s softness.

  “Now, I want you to rest it against your stomach.”

  “I’m lying on my stomach.”

  “Better.”

  She heard his voice catch and Akela thought of the picture she made in his mind, of her pressed against the mattress, the curve of her bottom offered up to him.