Possession Read Free Page A

scurried to do as he asked.
    Lafitte dragged Akela back to her feet and held her face-to-face with him. Up this close, she could see the blue flecks in his green eyes, feel the heat of his body permeate the front of her blouse, feel the tips of her breasts chafe against his chest as she struggled against him.
    “You’re coming with me,” he said. “It would be best if you didn’t fight me.”
    “Best for whom?”
    He grinned at her.
    Akela’s breath caught in her throat.
    Then just like that, Lafitte was pushing her through the front doors and with a knowledge of the Quarter that far surpassed Akela’s, he snaked a path through clubs and bars and strip joints until Akela wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her way back without a map.
    Within minutes they stood behind a large Buick. He tightened the arm around her neck and she gasped for air, fighting him as he unlocked the trunk then moved so he could jerk her hands behind her back. Akela kicked backward, catching him in the knee with her heel, then shot forward, out of his grasp and toward safety. She got three feet when he grasped her and yanked her back.
    Akela sucked in a breath.
    “My intention is not to hurt you,” he said, twining strong fingers into her hair as he worked with his other hand to wind what felt like duct tape around one of her wrists.
    “Well, then, you failed.”
    “Not my fault.”
    “What would you have me do as an agent of the FBI?” she asked. “Go willingly?”
    “It would make things easier.” Something in his voice made her pretty sure he was grinning again.
    He released her hair and grabbed her free arm,winding duct tape around that one, as well, then binding her wrists together behind her back.
    Akela tried to jerk away from him. “You’re free. You don’t need me anymore.”
    He had finished tying her hands yet stood still behind her. “Mmm. Maybe what you say is true.”
    She whipped around to face him, damp tendrils of her hair sticking to her cheek. “So release me.”
    “Then again, maybe keeping you is my ticket out of the city.” Maintaining a restraining arm against her legs to keep her from kneeing him, he wound more duct tape around her ankles, then opened the car trunk and, more gently than she would have thought possible, placed her inside.
    He moved to close the hood. “Claire…is she…”
    Akela squinted at him. The name of the victim at the hotel had been Claire Laraway.
    Surely he wasn’t asking her if she was dead? He was the one who had killed her.
    “Just so you know,” she said. “Very soon that gun’s going to be back in my hands. And when it is, this conversation is going to go very differently.”
    He unrolled some more tape then bit off a short length of it with white, even teeth.
    “I already think there’s been enough conversation,” he said, then put the tape over her mouth and closed the trunk.
     
    C LAUDE DROVE through the narrow city streets, his stomach tight, his senses on high alert. The car was clean and couldn’t immediately be traced back to him because it was registered to his and his brother’s company, not to him personally.
    He braked at a stop sign and watched as a squad car cruised by on the street in front of him. Clean or not, it wouldn’t keep his likeness from showing up on the computer screens on every squad car in town. He reached for an LSU ball cap on the floor of the backseat then smoothed his longish hair back and put the cap on. After switching on the radio that was set to a zydeco station, he cranked up the volume, both to drown out the sound of the pretty agent kicking against the trunk and to make it appear to those he passed that he had nothing more pressing on his mind than making a run for a gallon of milk.
    Claire was dead. He didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out. When he’d left her, she’d been smiling, half-asleep, hugging a pillow between her bare breasts, her skin rosy pink, her eyes full of naughty suggestion. Acid lined his