Make You Burn

  Ajax shook his head, and he felt something like paralyzed even though he could feel the way his heart thudded in him the same way he could feel her soft, slippery cunt in his hand and he didn’t get how she made him feel powerless one minute and like a god the next. And he’d tear down this city for her with his own two hands if she wanted it, no matter that he’d only just come home after all those years in too much darkness, and she was looking at him like she still didn’t know that.

  How the fuck could she not know that?

  “It’s all yours,” she said again, her voice cracking.

  “Sophie,” he ground out, like there was fucking glass in his mouth, and he was surprised he wasn’t bleeding. And that she couldn’t see it. “What the fuck does that matter? So are you.”

  —

  Sophie couldn’t see anything but that stark, haunted blue gaze of his. It was filling her up, too full, overflowing—and he still had that half-feral, half-furious look on his face and his hand buried between her legs.

  And that burning, blinding, tearing fury that had rocketed through her, leaving her sobbing in the courtyard and then staggering down Bourbon Street ebbed away. It melted into something else. Something huge and precarious that balanced far too delicately inside of her and made it hard to breathe.

  She wasn’t a civilian. She knew exactly what it meant when a man like Ajax called her his.

  Her heart kicked at her, a low and urgent roll. Her stomach dropped and then clenched tight.

  His. His woman. His property. More ironclad than if she took his name or wore his ring.

  Sophie had never been chosen by anyone. Never been cared for like that, so deeply and so hugely that a man would demand she wear his name on her back for all to see. Claiming her even when he wasn’t in the room. Expecting his brothers to defend her as if she was a part of him, an extension of him. Her throat felt tight. Her eyes burned.

  And she didn’t know how to believe him.

  But something in that way he watched her, too closely and too carefully for a man so ferocious, told her that maybe he was fragile after all. Maybe only right here. Maybe never again.

  And no one had to tell her he would likely rather die than have that pointed out to him.

  She eased that big hand of his out of her panties and let her skirt fall back down to her feet, but she held on to him. She tugged him closer and held his hand against the bare skin of her abdomen, and she felt him shudder, as if he’d expected her to fight him.

  “You’ve only been back home for a few days,” she said carefully. Very carefully. “It’s been an emotional time.”

  “You’re mine,” he told her, and there was a fire in those wild blue eyes, a dark and uncompromising flame, and it burned through her. It shook her. “I want my name on your skin. I want you wearing it on your back. I want to leave marks all over you, all the time. I want you, Sophie, in every possible way, and I want to be damn sure every other asshole you come across knows it.”

  “You want to fuck me.”

  “Yeah.” His mouth moved, though it wasn’t quite a smile. Not quite. It was too harsh. Too carnal. “Pretty much all the fucking time.”

  “You’re talking about making me your old lady,” Sophie said, and she didn’t want to insult him. She didn’t want to wound him. And maybe it told her a few things, how desperately she wanted to protect him from that. From everything. “And what I know about old ladies isn’t all that appealing.”

  “If someone keyed my bike I’d rip his fucking head off.” He shook his head, like she wasn’t making sense. “What the fuck do you think I’d do to someone who even looked at you funny?”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” His hand was big and battered against hers, sticky from before, and hot against her stomach. And she tried to remind herself how hollow she felt, how raw—but it was hard to focus when he was so close to her. When he was touching her. When he was studying her face, his own something like grim, with an intensity that shook her. “I grew up watching a lot of old ladies get doors slammed in their faces any time there was club business. It might have affected them, it might have been their lives too, but they didn’t get heard.”

  “You think the old ladies you knew didn’t make themselves heard when their men were at home and they were in private?” Ajax shook his head. “Because they were all so shy and retiring like you? I told you what I wanted, babe. Don’t recall asking you to get a fucking lobotomy.”

  “Ajax—”

  “You either trust that I can take care of you or you don’t.” His voice was flat. Certain. “The day I fall down on that job, sure, you can ask me anything you think you need to know about club business. But, Sophie. Hear me. That’s never going to happen.” He shifted, his gaze still hard on hers. “Any other fucking insults? Now’s the time, babe. I’m only having this conversation once.”

  She tried to breathe through that great big thing inside of her, tilting this way and that, balanced on such a sharp and terrible edge. She swallowed hard.

  “I watched your brothers and, hell, my own father, fuck their way through every whore in the Big Easy every night of the week and then go home to their old ladies and pretend it didn’t happen. Or make no effort at all to hide it. I watched a lot of women do a lot of crying over men who said what they needed to say to make it stop and then did what they wanted anyway.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to live like that. I won’t.”

  He seemed to grow larger all around her, more taut and more dangerous, though he never shifted his hard gaze from her face.

  “Is this about pussy?” His mouth flattened. “You wear my name, Sophie, I’m not going to be sticking my dick in anything else.”

  That thing in her broke open. It roared through her then. So intense and so harsh she almost doubled over, and it took her a stunned moment to recognize what it was: longing.

  “I’m sure you mean that,” she said quietly, and he had no idea how much she wanted to let herself believe that. Believe him. Believe that she could love someone who would actually love her back, for a change. “But I’ve never known a biker who felt that was a promise worth keeping when he got bored or horny.”

  “I strike you as a man who doesn’t know his own mind?”

  “You strike me as a man with a lot of options, most of them with fake tits,” she retorted.

  Ajax stared at her for a long moment. Too long. He pushed back then, taking his hands off her, if not stepping away, and it didn’t matter. It still felt like he’d left gaping holes behind.

  “I knew,” he said, his voice rough, “the first time I walked down Bourbon Street and saw a line of those motherfuckers riding their bikes into this alley, one after the next, like they had no fear of death at all.” He looked out toward the street as if they were still there, those ghosts of men long gone. As if he could see them now. “I was fourteen but I wasn’t a kid. I’d taken a bus in from the bayou because I couldn’t stay in my parents’ shithole shack anymore. I’d never seen anything like this place. And I’d never seen anything like them.”

  “Ajax.”

  She didn’t know why she said his name then. Only that she wanted to soothe him as much as she’d wanted to run before—but of course, she hadn’t run, had she? She’d told herself she wanted to leave and then she’d stood there. Three feet away from the Priory, where he’d be certain to find her.

  Had she really wanted to run? Or had she wanted to see if he’d come after her?

  And either way, he’d answered that question, hadn’t he?

  “I wanted to be them, whoever they were,” he told her, his voice so low, as if she hadn’t spoken. So hard and sure. “I walked right into that clubhouse and I told them so.”

  Sophie tried to imagine a young, entirely feral Ajax strolling into the Deacons’ clubhouse with nothing but that astonishing beauty of his, murder in his pretty eyes, and that innate cockiness all of the brothers would have likely taken immediate exception to.

  “What did they do
?”

  “They laughed in my face.” There was a spark of laughter in his gaze then. “What do you think? But I kept coming back. Finally, the meanest of them told me if I was going to hang around like a whiny little rent boy, I should earn my fucking keep.” He jutted his chin at her. “That was Priest. And he wasn’t kidding. They made me work. It sucked and it wasn’t always fun or even close to fun. But I still knew.”

  She waited, and there was too much in his face then, in those gorgeous eyes. A hunger she didn’t entirely understand. And a hard certainty that made her want to understand more than she wanted her next breath.

  “That they were it,” he said quietly. “They were my family. Where I belonged. They were why I’d left the fucking bayou in the first place. I never doubted that. I still don’t. The Deacons are the only family I’ve ever had and the only one I want.”

  “Ajax.”

  “And it was the same when I saw you.”

  Sophie stopped breathing.

  “I call bullshit on that.” She was whispering, like she’d lost her voice. Or maybe her mind. She couldn’t tell. She couldn’t think. There was only what he’d said and that look on his face and it was bigger and brighter than all the world. “You saw a girl dressed like a stripper and your dick led you straight to me, that’s all.”

  “First of all,” Ajax said, and that low rumble of his sounded less furious than before, “my dick is very fucking discerning. And second, you were in Jackson Square three minutes after I set foot in the French Quarter again. I saw you from the other side of the church and that was it. I knew you were mine.” He reached across that wedge of space between them, framed her face with his battered hands, then slid them into her hair. “I don’t break my promises, Sophie. I wear them and I keep them, no matter what. You know this.”

  “Ajax…”

  “You know who I am.” His voice was low, his hands hot against her, and his blue eyes were everything. “You know what I am.”

  She stared up at him, and she loved him. And maybe that was all that mattered. Maybe that was what life was all about. Love, whatever it looked like. However you could. Maybe that was the addiction. And maybe she didn’t need to fight it.

  He pulled her closer to him, so she felt as if she had no choice but to wrap herself around him. You liar, a voice inside her whispered as she pressed herself against him and marveled in the way they fit. This is the choice.

  “The only reason I’m alive is because I make snap decisions under pressure, baby,” he told her. He tilted her face toward him. “And I’m always right.”

  “And so fucking humble.”

  His blue eyes gleamed. “Humility is for pussies.”

  “Ajax, you need to understand—”

  “I’m not planning to say this shit again,” he retorted, his voice as intense and gruff as his expression. “So listen up. I’m gonna find out what happened to your father. I’m gonna restore the club. And I’m gonna make you happy, Sophie, whether you like it or not. Those are promises. You feel you need it, I’ll put them in ink and wear them, too.”

  He was everything she’d told herself she didn’t want. An emblem of the life she hated and yet, as he’d said, the life where she was the most comfortable—so comfortable she’d stayed here all this time. The kind of man she’d never wanted, and yet that pulsing wetness between her legs reminded her that she’d never wanted any other man more.

  A man is what he does, her father had told her.

  And this man had come home the instant he’d heard Priest was dead, despite a decade away. He’d come with her to the morgue and identified her father when she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He’d taken care of her that whole long, insane day. And he’d stayed. She didn’t know what he’d been doing in his free time—though his battered knuckles gave her a few clues—but he’d come out of it with his theory about her father’s death. That told her that even if he was wholly dedicated to the club and his own role in it, he still really did care enough about her father to want justice.

  And she’d said things to him that Priest would have backhanded her for thinking, but Ajax hadn’t done that. He’d come after her. He’d told her he wanted her.

  She could see how much he wanted her. She could feel it.

  Better figure out how to swim, babe, he’d said.

  Sophie jumped in.

  “No one else has ever claimed me,” she said, and his hard mouth shifted then, into that lazy grin that made everything inside her clench tight and then shudder loose. He lifted her toward him, wrapping his arms around her and dragging her against him, from his flat stomach to his hard cock.

  “No one else ever will,” he promised her, and then his mouth was on hers.

  Demanding and desperate. Fierce and almost punishing.

  Another promise.

  Sophie held on to his face and battled it out, their tongues sliding and tangling, their fists in each other’s hair, and his big hand up beneath her shirt to palm her nipple.

  Ajax groaned. He hitched her up higher and held her there. His eyes were glittering and something like feverish, and she felt it everywhere. The most beautiful blue she’d ever seen.

  He took her mouth again, and he propped her up against the alley wall. And he kissed her like he was dying. Deep and wild, and she felt his big, battered hands moving between them, yanking up her long skirt and shoving her panties to one side.

  She felt him shift, and heard the sound of his zipper, and then he was shoving into her with no ceremony at all. The plump head of his cock sunk into her and they both groaned.

  “So fucking wet,” Ajax grated out. “You’re always so fucking wet.”

  He thrust the rest of the way inside of her, deep and hard and wrong, out here almost in the street in the daylight with the city walking by a few feet away, and Sophie didn’t care at all. Not at all. Not when he was huge and hard and fucking into her like he couldn’t help himself. Not when it felt this good.

  Not when she’d never wanted anyone like this, and she understood then that she never would. That this was another promise. And they would both keep it.

  Ajax pulled her thighs apart farther and settled them higher and more open against him, her knees tucked up into his cut and her back to the wall. And she could see beyond him to the street, where nobody was paying them the slightest bit of attention. No one was looking down a dark alley. No one even noticed.

  Sophie got it then. This was being free. This was the closest thing there was to flying without wings.

  “What if I fall in love with you?” she asked him breathlessly.

  He laughed that dirty laugh of his that made her heart flip over and spin, and he didn’t stop that filthy, perfect rhythm, stretching her with each deep, long thrust and slamming against her clit each time.

  She was already there. She was right there.

  “Pay attention, Sophie,” Ajax said, his mouth at her ear. “What the fuck do you think we’ve been talking about? What the fuck do you think this is?”

  Then he showed her. Twice.

  Chapter 15

  A year later, on a sultry October day in New Orleans that was much too hot already and it wasn’t even noon, Sophie dug her bright gold hot pants from her dresser and pulled them on, smoothing them into place over her hips.

  She remembered the last time she’d worn them. Vividly. The way that insane heat between Ajax and her had kicked aside the great hollow of grief and loss that had swamped her that day. The way it had felt, his wickedly clever mouth on hers for the first time. Then his hands. His whole tough body. Right there against the back wall of the Priory.

  She took her time applying the adhesive pasties to her breasts again, and tried not to think about how raw her nipples would feel when she took them off later. She remembered that, too. Just as she remembered how much Ajax had enjoyed her increased sensitivity, like the dirty bastard he was. She spent some time on her eye makeup, getting it as stripper chic as she could, and then she put a glittery mask over he
r eyes so it was all sparkle and fake lashes. She coiled her hair up out of the way, then pulled the dramatic headdress out of her closet and fastened it to her head. She’d forgotten the weight of it. The way it forced her to stand a little straighter and arch her back, pushing the tasseled ends of her pasties out that little bit farther. She eyed the whole package in the mirror in the corner of the bedroom that was no longer quite so feminine, and no longer entirely hers.

  It made her smile.

  Even if she hadn’t been able to feel the way Ajax had woken her up that morning in the tender shuddering low in her belly and the slickness lingering between her legs even after her shower, she’d have been able to see the stamp of him everywhere. His clothes on his side of the closet. A pair of his big, battered boots next to the mirror. His laundry mixed with hers in the hamper and his shit all over the dresser they’d moved in here for him. That faint scent of his, soap and pure Ajax, that Sophie was sure clung as much to her these days as the bed itself.

  She strapped herself into her best pair of stripper shoes, high and delicious, and then made her way through the apartment to the metal landing outside. The last of the morning was swelling into a hot afternoon, the thick swelter of the bayou air like a caress against her skin as she made her way down the stairs.

  And then Ajax was there at the bottom, his blue eyes hot on her like a different, harder sort of touch as she finally hit the stones of the courtyard.

  He was working on her dad’s pride and joy, the big red Harley the city had delivered in a twisted, mangled mess a few weeks after the funeral. For a long time, Sophie hadn’t wanted to look at it. She’d have thrown the hunk of scrap metal straight into the Mississippi River if it had been up to her. And she’d been furious that Ajax had insisted on keeping the bike right here, where she had no choice but to get an eyeful of it every time she walked past.

  It’s not a fucking shrine, babe, he’d told her once when she’d expressed her feelings on the topic—for maybe the hundredth time. It’s a promise. Don’t know how many times I got to tell you I keep the ones I make.