Make You Burn (16 page)

“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.

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 her 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.

Sophie certainly hoped so.

Ajax straightened slowly, his hot gaze all over her, and that mouth of his in a hard line. He was wearing a white T-shirt under his cut that was plastered to him in this heat, licking over all those ridges that marked his sculpted abdomen and made her fingers itch to touch him again, and then maybe sneak below the jeans he wore low on his hips. He was all tattooed danger and that glittering, greedy thing in the way he looked at her. It still punched straight through her. It still made her ache.

One year later and she was even more addicted than she’d been back then, at the start. She kept waiting for that crazy rush to go away. For this longing, this wild hunger, to ease a little bit. For life with this man to feel
normal.
Run of the mill. Boring, even.

Something other than spectacular, but that hadn’t happened yet.

I’m addicted to you,
she’d shouted at him in the middle of an intense battle between them a few months into this thing. She couldn’t remember why she’d been so furious with him. Or maybe she’d been scared of how much deeper it felt with him, every damned day. No rest from it. No time out. Ajax had no boundaries. That meant loving him was equally limitless.
There’s nothing healthy about this bullshit! I’m the daughter of a junkie and I’m no better than she is and this drama might as well be me crouched on a street corner with a needle in my arm!

Ajax had laughed in her face, the dick.

You want to OD on me? Do it.
He’d loomed there in their living room, that pitiless look on his face and that grin on his lips, like he wanted this thing to hurt. Like he took pleasure in it. He’d moved his hands to his zipper.
Treat me like a crack pipe, babe. I dare you.

She’d taken that dare.

And sometime into that very long, very boundary-pushing night, Ajax had cradled her head in his hands while he’d moved in her, pinning her to the floor with his big body between her legs and her ankles high on his shoulders.

Some addictions aren’t all bad, Sophie,
he’d gritted at her, never losing that ferocious pace of his, his cock as hard as the expression on his face and both of them tearing her apart.
It’s what you do with them that counts.

Here, now, in the sunny courtyard on another October morning, Ajax pulled a bandanna out of his back pocket and wiped his hands, never shifting that hard blue gaze of his from her face.

“Got a hot date?” he asked, his voice that low, menacing rumble that still made everything inside of her clench tight. “Maybe with a pole?”

Sophie smiled at him as if her heart wasn’t beating any faster, the way it always did when she had his full attention. All that power. All that strength. All that lethal promise in his cool blue eyes and that battered body of his that backed it up every time.

God, she loved him.

“I’m going for a walk,” she told him, her voice as cool and casual as she could make it. “My daddy told me once that I could dress up like a drag queen and wander the streets of the French Quarter. Over his dead body, of course.”

“It’s not his dead body you should worry about, babe.”

Sophie let her smile deepen. “You look like you’re breathing just fine.”

She swiveled around then, and set off across the courtyard toward the alley that led out into the midday bustle of Bourbon Street. She made sure to saunter, to give him a show. She could
feel
him follow her. Even if she hadn’t heard his boots against the stones, she’d have felt that harsh blue gaze of his all over her ass, making her break out in goosebumps in exultant defiance of the Louisiana heat.

“You think all these douchebag tourists deserve to get a look at my property?” Ajax asked, from much closer behind her than she’d expected.

It took everything Sophie had not to jump—but she couldn’t control the way her heart thudded against her ribs, or the pulse of sheer longing that hit her hard, straight in her pussy. He didn’t touch her, but when she stopped moving at the mouth of the alley, she could feel the wild heat of his wall of a chest behind her. Almost pressing into her. Almost stealing her resolve away. He was good at that.

“Think maybe you should ask before you parade my shit half-naked down the middle of my city, babe?”

He sounded only mildly interested, but she knew better. She knew him now. She knew how his clever mind worked. She knew how he dealt with the emotions he pretended he didn’t have. She knew what kind of leader he was and she knew what kind of man he was. She knew he made being an old lady worth the questions she sometimes asked him that he couldn’t answer. So worth it. She’d never understood that part, looking in on it. She’d had no idea that intimacy could feel like this, precarious and necessary, vulnerable and strong all at once. Ajax was a revelation.

He was the love of her life.

And he was the kind of man who needed object lessons, not discussions. He was a doer, not a talker.

“This is our anniversary, asshole,” she said, tilting her head back so the headdress scraped against the stone wall of the alley and she could look at him. That gorgeous face of his, no less dangerous for all that dark blond, blue-eyed prettiness. He was still half feral. She thought maybe he always would be, and the truth about her, Sophie knew, was that she liked him that way.

One corner of his mouth crooked up. “I know what day it is.”

“This is how I celebrate.” She eyed him. “You have a problem with that?”

“What if I do?”

“If you do,” she drawled, and then lifted her left hand to wave it in front of his face, “I’ll remind you that there’s no ring on this finger. I’m not wearing a property patch at the moment. I can do what I want.”

A different sort of light kindled in that hard blue gaze of his then, making her legs feel unsteady in her crazy shoes.

“You know the deal,” he said in his low voice, making her nipples pebble hard beneath her pasties while that nearly savage look in his eyes made it hard to breathe. “You want a ring? I want ink.”

Sophie made a great show of shrugging. “You first.”

Ajax laughed that filthy laugh of his, and it danced all over her the way it always did, making her feel delicious and dirty and his. A thousand times, his. But that was the point of this, she reminded herself.

“You always come first, babe,” he told her, and he reached out then, toying with her belly ring in a lazy sort of way that made her feel slippery and much too hot. He leaned in and got his mouth on her ear. “I want my name on that ass, Sophie. A property patch you can’t take off. Ever.”

It turned out that Sophie wanted that, too. So much it actually hurt her, like a stitch in her side nothing made any better, all this whole long year. But she knew her man. He respected a fight, not an easy surrender. He was made of fists and ferocity, and he expected her to stand up to him no matter what, not to break when he got loud or a little harsh.

That was the only way he could feel free to be himself. Nothing reined in. Nothing held back. The way she got to be with him.

So she eyed him for a minute. “Then you know what you have to do, don’t you?”

He grinned, fierce and far too hot, and let go of her belly ring.

“That sounds a lot like you giving me an ultimatum.” His voice was almost casual, when she could sense that he wasn’t at all and she could feel it in that tightening inside of her that was quickly becoming the only thing she could think about. “I’m not gonna lie, babe. It makes my dick hard to think you want a repeat of that lesson. Happy fucking anniversary to me.”

Sophie glared at him. She’d tried throwing an ultimatum at him all right. Once. Ajax had taken that as an opportunity to introduce her to the joys of erotic spanking and the kind of insane fucking that came after. She couldn’t say she’d hated it, exactly. Not when she’d come that many times, and that hard. But she also hadn’t sat down comfortably for a few days, to Ajax’s endless amusement.

Nor had she tried the ultimatum route again.

No matter how many times he dared her to.

“Not at all,” she said now, her voice as light and easy as the southern sunshine that danced its way along the street. “I’m not telling you what to do. Heaven forbid I try to impose my will on the great and mighty president of the Deacons of Bourbon Street, feared by all and sundry and challenged by none. Perish the thought! I’m just going for a walk. With no one’s name on my ass. The truth is, I like walking around like this. It’s performance art and deep in my soul, Ajax, I’m an artist. I might have to do it more often.”

That laugh again, darker this time. “You can try.”

But when she rolled her eyes and set out into the street, he didn’t stop her. He simply fell in behind her like her own, personal biker bodyguard, and let her do her thing.

A year ago, this had been an act of grief. Of loss. A little girl’s final act of pointless rebellion against the father she couldn’t bear to lose.

This year, everything was different. She missed her father terribly, still. She wished he was around to see how many of his fondest wishes had come true. She wished a lot of things when it came to Priest. That she’d known him better. That he’d shared his secrets when he still could. That he’d understood how much he was loved.

Sophie would be damned if the new president of the Deacons had the same trouble or the same lonely trajectory. He’d know how much he was loved, always. How much he mattered. She told him every day—with her body as well as her words—because everyone else under his protection couldn’t or wouldn’t, big tough men that they were.

She wanted to keep telling him the same thing forever. She wanted his babies. She wanted all that shit neither one of them had ever had. Two parents, happy kids. A real family of their own to go along with the family they’d made.

She did a long, slow loop through the French Quarter, drinking in the shocked looks and scandalized gasps like the sweetest sort of liquor. It had been fun last year, like a roller coaster ride through her hometown. But this year, knowing that every move she made was for Ajax, that he was watching her, that he liked it when other men ogled her as long as they knew better than to touch—

This year, it felt like jumping out of a plane miles above the ground, one badass parachute firmly attached. Last year had been the equivalent of flipping her father the bird. This year was a dance. This year was theirs.

It was their anniversary.

One wild-eyed, already-wasted idiot lunged at her near the painted red brick wall of a pub and grill as she looped her way back down Bourbon Street, and Sophie didn’t even flinch. She smiled as she heard a thud and the idiot hitting the ground in her wake.

“Hands off, motherfucker,” Ajax growled. “That’s mine.”

The truth was, she fucking loved that.

And she’d learned some things herself this year. When and how to push him. How to make her point in private and suck it up in public. She’d been raised knowing these rules. There was no changing them now because they chafed sometimes—there was only learning how to work in them and around them. This was the life. This was her man. If she wanted him—and she did, God help her, she did—then this was the deal.