Make You Burn
Authors: Megan Crane
Make You Burn
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Loveswept eBook Original
Copyright © 2015 by Megan Crane
Excerpt from
Fire Me Up
by Rachael Johns copyright © 2015 by Rachael Johns
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
L
OVESWEPT
is a registered trademark and the
L
OVESWEPT
colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
Fire Me Up
by Rachael Johns. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
eBook ISBN 9781101884676
Cover design: Okay Creations
Cover photograph: CURAphotography/Shutterstock
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She was an accident waiting to happen.
To him, if he had anything to say about it. And he usually did.
Sean Harding—who answered only to his biker road name, Ajax, and he could count the number of times he’d had to correct someone about that on one hand—figured she was his own fucked-up “welcome back” card after ten years of exile from the only home he’d ever known.
And as welcomes went, she’d do.
She was a lick of sweet sugar on a sweaty Louisiana afternoon like this one, still hot as hell in early October. She wore tight and sparkling gold hot pants that made her fine ass into a kind of bayou music, sexy and dark. She walked in high, high heels that showed off long legs made to wrap tight around a man’s back while he fucked them both through the nearest wall. She had on a giant, golden feather headdress that moved when she did, a glittery mask across her eyes in case he’d forgotten he was back in the great and gritty pageant of New Orleans and all its masquerades, and most important, she wore nothing but tasseled gold pasties on her perfect, mouthwatering tits.
None of which would have been worthy of notice or comment after dark on Bourbon Street, in all its edgy commotion and the enveloping, inviting sin from every side, but it was high noon on a goddamned Tuesday and she was moving gracefully in and out of groups of tourists in pastels and fanny packs who were still sober enough to keep their hands to themselves—if not their eyes. Or their cameras.
Home sweet fucking home,
Ajax thought in a hard kind of satisfaction, following the twitch of her ass as she sauntered straight down the center of dirty, dangerous, sometimes magical Bourbon Street in the direction of the Priory, the bar that had once been the center of his entire world. Almost like she knew he was heading there now, and was leading him home like the horny, not-too-bright but clearly exhibitionist stripper he sincerely hoped she was.
Well. It had been home until ten years ago, when Priest, the only version of a father Ajax had ever acknowledged, much less respected, had issued the order that changed everything. And Ajax might have told his actual, biological father to go fuck himself—a message he’d backed up with his fists, a piece of rebar, and his first arrest for assault when he’d been all of fourteen—but Priest had been the president of the Deacons of Bourbon Street Motorcycle Club and Ajax didn’t defy his MC’s orders. He’d been the VP, a position he’d fucking
earned
. He’d obeyed and enforced his president’s orders, even the ones he didn’t like, because they’d been good for the club and that was the only thing that had mattered to him.
It still was.
Even if that kind of blood loyalty meant he’d had to leave his beloved club, his brothers, and his city behind in the wake of a bullshit deal gone bad, all part of Priest’s attempts to bring the once-outlaw MC over to the right side of the law.
Less hassle, more money,
Priest had said, and Ajax had backed him.
Ajax had always backed Priest. He’d taken an oath to the Deacons when he was sixteen, the youngest full member ever to be patched into the club, and he’d meant every word. He was a man whose oaths were inked into his skin, his promises visible art he had carved into his body, proudly. He didn’t break his fucking promises.
He believed in the life he’d chosen. Even if he’d been exiled from that life for the past ten years.
But now Priest was dead. And that changed everything. It had brought Ajax home at last. He’d been on his bike and headed east from Houston within an hour of getting that call from the Deacons’ old lawyer.
He hadn’t particularly enjoyed the life he’d crafted for himself since he’d left New Orleans. Ajax had been an excellent mercenary, mostly because he hadn’t given much of a shit if he survived an operation. And maybe because of that, he and the outfit he’d worked for were damned good at what they did. Sometimes they’d acted as security for shady motherfuckers who wanted the nuclear option at their fingertips should shit fall apart, which it often did. Sometimes they’d operated as their own form of Special Forces for assholes who could afford to buy their own personal armies. They sold their services to the highest bidder and they didn’t ask any questions. It was nothing Ajax hadn’t done in one form or another for his club, but it wasn’t his club.
It was never his club.
Mercenary work was a collection of dangerous men who happened to band together and might at any moment shoot one another in the back if shit went down that way, never a brotherhood. Never any kind of family.
Never a cause Ajax would consider wearing on his own skin.
Ajax had always intended to return to his home and his club one day. Preferably by riding his shit-kicking Dyna, black as sin and a hundred times louder, straight into the heart of the French Quarter with his cut on his back and his middle finger held high. But ten years of working as a hired gun in some of the world’s least hospitable places—worse, even, than the shithole shack out in the bayou where he’d been born and beaten on by his drunk asshole of a father for his first fourteen years—had taught him the value of reconnaissance and restraint. Or anyway, how to fake it when it suited him.
Thinking about ancient history and all the grief that went along with it pissed him off.
And when Ajax got pissed off, he fought or he fucked until he felt right again, and not always in that order.
So when Miss Gold Hot Pants pushed her way past a pack of drooling engineer-types, all chinos and narrow shoulders, to enter the Priory, Ajax decided it was a sign. He could keep his grief and his fury to himself. And he wouldn’t mind a quick, hot, satisfying bang in the Priory toilets to take the edge off the only version of mourning he’d allow himself, before he got down to business. It wouldn’t be the first time.
He stared down the engineers until they dispersed like a cloud of tiny little flies—when he’d hoped they’d be wasted enough to mouth off to him so he could indulge in the great joy of shoving his boot up an ass or two—and then he followed her inside and just like that, he was home.
There were a lot fewer Deacons in the dim interior than there had been ten years ago. None, in fact. No Priest behind the bar, scowling ferociously around a Marlboro Red and refusing to serve the dumbass tourists who staggered in, drunk off their asses and too stupid to notice that they weren’t in a safe place. Something that was also true of the Big Easy herself, the faithless bitch, but that didn’t seem to stop folks from swarming down to the city anyway, like they
wanted
to make themselves another crime statistic or sad story the ghost tour operators would embellish for tips.
Ajax could almost see the ghost of the old man down there at the far reach of the bar, could almost smell his cigarette smoke as the ceiling fans moved it around and made it a part of the humid Louisiana air.
Fuck you, Priest,
he thought ferociously.
You weren’t supposed to die alone.
“I did it,” the girl with the perfect tits announced grandly to the mostly empty bar, because it was still early in the week and in the day, and only October besides. “I said I would do it and I did.”
She still had that sculpted back turned to him, a lush, supple thing with intricate angel wings tattooed on each of her shoulder blades. Girly ink, sure, but with a body like that, who was Ajax to question whether or not she was one of New Orleans’s resident saints? He could think of several ways he’d like to pray with a gritty little street angel like this one, and that was just his cock talking. His head had always been far more creative, even after zero sleep and a long, hot ride, to say nothing of the significantly less fun drive in from outside Baton Rouge. There wasn’t much left on this earth that Ajax feared, but only a dumbass rolled up into a city after a ten-year absence without his brothers at his back.
Ajax was a lot of things, including a little too hot for a stripper in a Vegas-style headdress at the moment, but he was no dumbass. Dumbasses tended to die ugly deaths in the places he’d been, this one included.
He moved to the bar, instinctively situating himself at the shortest part of its L, where he could keep his back to the mirrored wall and his eyes on the rest of the Priory, with those rolling doors pulled wide open to bring the hectic mess of Bourbon Street inside.
“I don’t get why you had to do it,” the current bartender said.
She looked cute and perky, like she’d gotten lost on her way to a sorority house at Tulane, which left Ajax completely cold. He missed the foul-mouthed, big-titted biker bitches and hot little sweet butts who’d worked here back in the day, all dressed in leather and attitude problems and visible ink. It caused him physical pain to think of the Priory—
his
Priory—as nothing more than a French Quarter tourist trap like that joke Pat O’Brien’s around the way, dispensing watered-down Hurricanes and bullshit to every imported frat boy in a fifty-mile radius.
“But,” Tulane continued with a blinding cheerleader’s smile that was completely out of place here to Ajax’s way of thinking, “I support your right to go topless in the middle of the Quarter if you feel like you have to, Sophie. You know that.”
Ajax went still. Very still. The way he’d learned to do in far-off jungles where the faintest twitch of a single muscle meant a blown-off head, at best.
No fucking way,
he thought
.
And then again.
But he’d seen too much to believe in coincidences. What were the chances that
another
girl with the same name as Priest’s sweet little daughter—an actual Catholic schoolgirl ten years ago and in Ajax’s memory a fucking
baby
barely old enough to merit a training bra—would wander into the Priory and also happen to have a close relationship with the bartender? He stared at the golden hot pants and the angel wings. That ass. He ignored the roaring thing in him that urged him to clear the bar and put his hands on this girl he’d followed halfway across the city without ever seeing more of her face than a hint of jaw, a flutter of fake eyelashes—
Keep your hands to yourself, asshole,
he told himself harshly, though in his head he sounded a lot like the ghost he still half-saw looming there in the shadows at the other end of the bar.
She turned then, displaying those perfect fucking tits, which should have been illegal on the daughter of the man Ajax respected above all others, and he took his instant, unmanageable hard-on as a personal affront to every oath he’d ever made in this sacred space.
“My daddy told me I could dress up like a drag queen and wander the streets of the French Quarter over his dead body,” Sophie Lombard said as she tugged off the glittery mask—and there was no doubt about it, goddamn it, it was her. “So it was now or never, really.”
Ajax knew that face, though he took the stripper cosmetics and the hooker lashes as another insult, when the face he remembered had been scrubbed clean and sweet and pure. And when she peeled the acrobatic headdress from her head and sent it skidding a few feet down the dull sheen of the bar, her long, dark, wavy hair tumbled down past her shoulders, a thick and shining rope of it he wanted to wrap around his hands while he took her—
Jesus Christ.
He stared at her, willing this to be some kind of homecoming-inspired hallucination, but no. He was sober at the moment, he hadn’t touched the funky stuff in years, and this was Sophie Lombard all grown up. She was a lush little package, all taut curves and a belly ring, just like a couple of his preferred wet dreams. She had the most perfect set of plump, round tits he’d ever seen, even with the stupid tassels jutting from them, and they definitely should not have been on display for the entire fucking city like that. Or ever. What the hell was the matter with her? More to the point, he absolutely could not fuck her in the Priory toilets, no matter what bad decisions his cock was agitating for even now.
A man did not fuck the daughter of his beloved father figure when said father figure’s body was barely cold. Even if the daughter in question was dressed for a long night on the pole and had basically just advertised that she was for sale to the better part of New Orleans.
Not in the toilets, anyway.
When she only slipped onto a barstool, making no attempt to cover herself or change what passed for her clothes, Ajax decided he’d had enough. It was high time he took control of this shit.
Before he lost what was left of his.
“Hey, Sophie,” he said. He didn’t have to raise his voice to command the attention of the entire bar. He saw her stiffen like she recognized his voice and he couldn’t deny that he liked that. He was never meant to go unnoticed, not here. Not in the only place he’d ever belonged. “Is that what you’re wearing to the funeral?”
She turned toward him slowly. So slowly he had a lifetime or two to remember her as a little girl. Sophie of the big, wide eyes and sparkly little laugh. Sophie in thick dark braids and skinned knees. Sophie, who Priest would have died to protect, which meant any of the brothers would have done the same. Sophie, who had never been meant for a sticky dive bar and a pair of pasties, no matter how hot she looked in both.
Sophie, who glared at him down the length of the bar with a notable lack of the respect Ajax was used to receiving, especially from soft, breakable females who usually purred and got silly when they took a good look at him.
“Oh, hey there,
Sean,
” she replied after a long moment, her green eyes cool and haughty, like she was a goddamned queen instead of a half-naked girl with a death wish, throwing around a name she knew better than to use. “Long time no see.”
“Call me that again,” he suggested, in what he considered a friendly manner given the insult she’d just thrown at him, though he wasn’t entirely surprised when Tulane backed away from him in a wide-eyed rush, “and I might be the last thing you ever see.”
“Let me guess,” she replied, “you spent all this time in charm school?” Was it his imagination that she sat taller on her stool, then arched her back just enough to make those tits stick out a little farther? Like she was
trying
to fuck with him? “Between you and me, you might think about asking for your money back. I don’t think it took.”