by Megan Crane
“Looking for a date?” Ajax asked. And maybe his voice was a little too hard. Maybe that gave him away, he thought when Greeley smirked. He knew he should care about that more than he did. “Maybe you don’t want the woman who has to bury her father this week, dickhead.”
His friend grinned, wholly unrepentant. “You’ve been away too long, man. I like them broken.”
Ajax had the sudden urge to break his old friend in half, so he related to that.
But he only laughed. “Then you don’t want to mess with the little girl Priest Lombard raised,” he said. “All by himself, if you get me. She’s a lot of things, but broken isn’t one of them.”
And then he walked away before he was forced to make a claim on Sophie he didn’t want to make—but would, he acknowledged with some surprise, rather than sit back and allow a situation where someone else might try. The thought of any one of these assholes touching that sweet ass of hers made him want to beat them all down. His old friend Greeley first.
He was feeling a little edgy when he made it through the crowd of perverts and fucking deviants—his people, and fuck, he’d missed this life—to Sophie’s side. She was sitting right where he’d left her, though she’d swiveled around so she could lean back against the bar and keep an eye on the crowd. She wasn’t staring around in horror or even particular interest. She wasn’t lolling back in invitation and she wasn’t sitting up straight like a tight-assed missionary who’d knocked on the wrong door. She looked like exactly who she was: not quite an old lady, and definitely not a sweet-butt whore.
Mine, he thought, a scalding hot burst of possessiveness slamming into him. He gritted his teeth and ignored it.
The crossed arms and set expression of the prospect next to Sophie at the bar suggested not everybody had read the don’t fuck with me signals she was sending out, and Ajax released the poor fool from duty with a nod.
He liked it when Sophie’s gaze shifted and landed on him.
She was so cool, so controlled. But now he knew how hot she ran, how sweet and wet she was when she shivered against him, and he loved it. He knew the truth about her. All these animals sniffing around, and all they got was that haughty air of hers and nothing but her polite disinterest.
He’d take a little more than that.
When he reached her, he walked right up to her, bumping into her crossed legs.
“Open,” he muttered.
He saw temper in her green eyes, that mutinous glare that turned him on. But Priest had raised his daughter right. Ajax knew she wouldn’t fight him here. And sure enough, she didn’t.
She opened her legs and he stepped between them, but he didn’t rub himself all over her the way he’d done earlier. The way he wanted to again. He leaned closer, caging her with his hands on the surface of the bar behind her, and got his face nice and close so he could breathe her in.
“See?” She smelled like her shampoo, and something sugary on her skin. Heat and longing. Sophie. “You don’t really want to fight me, baby.”
“What I want and what I’ll actually do when it would be stupid to call attention to myself are two different things.”
“And one of them is an excuse.”
He put his face against her neck, feeling that shiver that was the truth of this thing between them skate through her when he put his mouth against her neck. Not a kiss. A touch. A tasting.
She shivered harder.
“You keep digging your nails into your thighs like that, you’re gonna leave marks,” he murmured into the crook of her neck, and then he watched the swell of gooseflesh move over her skin and down her chest, like a confession. He growled his approval. “And let’s be really clear about this. If someone’s leaving marks on you, Sophie, it’s gonna be me.”
Chapter 5
Sophie jerked her head back to glare up at him and Ajax laughed.
He liked that, too. That, like she’d said back in the Priory earlier today, she wasn’t afraid of him.
He hadn’t realized how long it had been since he’d been with a woman who wasn’t. But then, Sophie had been raised by the only man Ajax had ever known who’d been scarier than him.
She searched his face, her expression showing nothing.
But her eyes blazed.
And they both knew she wasn’t going to do a thing about it. Not here. Not with all these eyes on them. Not in a place where she was Priest’s daughter and Ajax’s problem right up until there was a reason to think she was nothing more than a dumb bitch, and there was no protecting her if she crossed that line.
It was no small thing that these were lessons he didn’t need to teach her. He hadn’t had to warn her not to talk to any of the women here, no matter how unfriendly that might seem, because she wasn’t one of them and wouldn’t want to be passed around the way they were. He hadn’t had to tell her to watch her smart mouth or keep her tone civil if anyone spoke to her, or even if only he did. He hadn’t had to worry that she might start some shit while he was occupied with the men, because she knew better.
She knew all of the complicated layers to this place, this life, these people. All of the rules. She knew that the Devil’s Keepers were Ajax’s friends, but that didn’t make them hers, especially without a property patch on her back.
Christ, she was fucking perfect.
Ajax had never wanted a woman as his. As property. But if there was ever a woman worth rethinking his position on that for, it was this one.
Priest had never wanted this life for his little girl, but somehow, despite that or, hell, maybe because of it, he’d raised her so that she was absolutely perfect for it anyway. Fit to ride behind a king.
And Ajax was so hungry for her he thought it might actually kill him.
Sophie shifted then. She lifted her hands from her lap and she slid them onto his chest and it wasn’t lost on Ajax that this was the first time she’d touched him of her own volition. Everything inside of him went quiet. Tight. He thought if she stopped, he might lose his cool.
She held his gaze for a minute and then she dropped it again, concentrating on her task with a studiousness that made him want to do her right there, right then. Just strip off those tight jeans and toss her long legs over his shoulders and sink into her until neither one of them gave a shit about anything else.
He figured it would take one good thrust.
He was trying to think of any particular reason not to do just that when Sophie shifted again, tracing the ridges of his abdomen like she’d found something wonderful. Ajax sucked in a breath, dropping his head back down to the crook of her neck where she was heating up, need starting to make her sweet skin glisten.
One cut line and then another, she climbed the hard ladder of his six-pack through his T-shirt with those delicate fingers of hers. Then she leaned in and ran her palms up, running over his pectoral muscles and dragging slightly on his nipples, then down. Then she went up again, this time running her hands over the leather of his cut and the patches that proclaimed his identity, one after the next.
She didn’t have to ask him what they meant, because she knew.
And there was a different kind of reverence in the way her fingers traced over the patch that proclaimed him the outlaw he was, and the one above it that called him her father’s VP. There was something almost solemn in the way she traced the name of the club that lay over his heart. Once. Twice.
Ajax had no idea why he was standing so still, letting her explore him so gently and carefully in a warehouse far off in the bayou, when there were a thousand other things he could be doing—like getting his dick wet before he exploded like a fucking kid. But he didn’t say that, the way he already would have at any other time with any other woman, and he could tell himself anything he wanted to explain that away. He tried. But he knew it was the way she was looking at him.
Like he was a work of art, not a man. And certainly not the kind of man that he knew, without reservation, he was and always had been.
Ajax had lost most of his ill
usions a very long time ago, right about the time he’d taken that rebar pipe to the man who would have killed him, and happily, if he hadn’t. His own father. And then whatever was left of them when he’d had to either leave his home and his club, or disobey the direct command of the only man whose orders he’d ever willingly chosen to follow. After ten years in the mercenary game, playing a far worse monster than the monsters he’d been hired to handle and protect and kick ass for, he didn’t have any space left for fantasies. He didn’t want any part of those lies. He knew what he was.
But he found that when Sophie slipped those hands of hers onto his face, running her palms over his beard to rub him all over his cheeks, he had the desperate urge to be whatever the fuck he had to be, to keep her looking at him like that.
“What are you doing?” His voice was quiet. He almost didn’t recognize it.
Her eyes flew to his like she was guilty of something, but she didn’t drop her hands. “I don’t know.”
Did he want her to know? Ajax couldn’t answer that. But he felt a wild snarl start deep inside him, vicious and dark, and the only way he’d ever relieved that kind of thing was by pounding. Either on someone with his fists or into someone else with his dick and he didn’t much care which.
He only knew he couldn’t stand this. He couldn’t stand here, in front of all these people, and let her do this to him.
Not that he knew what the fuck she was doing, either.
He tugged her hands from his face and didn’t put them on his dick, because her father had just died and he was a goddamned gentleman when he felt like it. Like he’d told her once already.
“You want me to fuck you tenderly, little girl?” he asked her, his voice like a dull roar in his ears though he knew he wasn’t shouting. That he was being very, very quiet. Too quiet. “Is that what this is? You think we’re gonna hold hands for a while, work up to getting my mouth on your tits sometime, maybe see if I can lick your pussy on your birthday if I’m real lucky?”
She blinked, and Ajax didn’t want to see whatever was about to flash across her face. Disappointment, maybe. Hurt. He didn’t want to deal with it. He didn’t want to acknowledge it. He pushed away from the bar, out of the danger zone he hadn’t realized he’d walked right into, like a dumbass.
Sophie studied him for a long moment, and Ajax was aware of everything around them. Hyperaware, like he was prepping for an attack and it could come from any quarter. He could hear the Devil’s Keepers brothers having their good time, in all the usual ways. He heard the particular pitch of giggling that only ever came from strippers and porn stars, because only women who were paid to make that sound would make it at all, much less that often. He heard some action movie playing, with shit blowing up and every now and then, beneath it, the slick, rhythmic sounds and low moans of sex. Lots and lots of sex, and he wasn’t having any of it.
And the fact he wasn’t, that he’d been content to have this woman rub him like a fucking house cat when there were whores all around him, was like throwing himself headfirst into an ice bath.
“I’ve been hard as fuck all day and this dick isn’t going to suck itself,” he told her. Just this side of vicious, and he adjusted his aching cock in his jeans as emphasis. “Do I look like one of your pussy boyfriends, who’s gonna roll with that for six months in the hope you eventually put out?”
And still he couldn’t make himself look away from Sophie Lombard’s big, sad, knowing eyes that were twisting shit up inside of him like he’d taken shrapnel to the side. Repeatedly.
“No,” she said very quietly. Almost sadly, damn her. “You don’t look like a boyfriend at all. You look like exactly who you are.”
—
Ajax’s gaze went arctic, and the effects of that shot through Sophie like a sudden, serious drop in temperature. Like instant winter somewhere far to the north of sweaty Louisiana. She thought her teeth might chatter.
He didn’t answer her. Not with words. He grabbed her upper arm, hauled her off her stool and onto her feet with that offhanded strength of his that made her stomach flip over in sheer, feminine delight, then started towing her across the clubhouse floor.
That was less delightful, but she wasn’t foolish enough to try to shake him off. It wouldn’t work, for one thing, and even if it did, what was her plan then? Shake off Ajax and look around this place for allies who might help her make her way home? Now that they’d been partying for a while and were all wolf smiles and hot, greedy eyes? She wasn’t a fucking idiot.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. Or possibly it was a demand, in that particular, not exactly polite tone.
Be careful, she warned herself. This is not a safe place, and next to Ajax, it looks like a convent.
He glared at her. He took his time with it, making sure she felt it everywhere. Making sure she wasn’t laboring under the impression that the softer version of him she might have glimpsed here and there over the course of the day was still around anywhere. Asshole.
“I need to fuck,” he growled at her. “You want to do something about that, I’m good to go. I can fuck you right here, and happily. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told.”
She felt a thumping mess of things all at once at that, as she assumed was his intention. Temper. Humiliation. Hurt. That shameless stirring deep inside of her, that she wanted to fuck him, right here. Anywhere. And pure fury at being talked to that way when he knew she couldn’t haul off and hit him or disrespect him at all in front of these men who would take unkindly to that sort of display. She was sure she was glaring back at him with murder in her eyes, and she meant it.
But beneath all of that, and much louder, was something else. The bone-deep certainty that this was Ajax hurting. That this was how he handled it. Hurt and pain and confusion. Men like him didn’t analyze their feelings and talk them out in safe spaces with careful words. They went to bars, not therapists. They were far more stripped down, like the dangerous machines they’d built their lives around. They rode rough or not at all. That was just the deal.
If she’d been his old lady, she would have fucked him then and there. Because that was how a biker bitch handled her man when he talked egregious shit he probably didn’t even mean. She’d watched that particular dynamic play out a thousand times when she was a girl. Hell, she’d seen far too much of her own father dealing with his emotions the biker way, especially over the past few years with a selection of giggly blond sluts. She knew she could handle one pissed-off Deacon and whatever was eating him at the moment—
But she wasn’t his old lady.
And how many times had Sophie sworn to herself that she’d never be anyone’s old lady? That she wanted other things for her life, maybe a goddamn parade of pussy boyfriends and the exact relationship Ajax had laid out for her, thank you very much. It didn’t matter what her life looked like, as long as it didn’t look like this.
So she didn’t say a fucking word. As ordered.
Ajax’s big, tough hand clenched hard around her arm, and it almost hurt, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of squealing about it like a little bitch. She only cocked her head to one side and waited. Daring him.
To go harder. To make it really hurt. To step up, if he was throwing down.
She knew exactly how to play this game, and she could see the knowledge of that glitter there, like a warning in his too blue eyes.
He muttered something under his breath, and God only knew how hideous it must have been given the things he felt comfortable saying straight to her, and then he was moving again, dragging her through the gauntlet of goodbyes and straight on out of the warehouse at last.
She could breathe again, out in the warm bayou night, the air full of salt and the earthy, musky scent of the swamp. Plants and flowers and lush, green things.
Ajax held on to her for a moment too long, peering down into her face with his jaw set hard and that knife-edged glitter in his eyes, but then he let her go.
An
d Sophie didn’t know what that feeling was that rushed through her then. She called it relief, but it was too dark. Too heavy.
It felt a whole lot more like regret.
She fished her phone out of her pocket and checked her messages while Ajax stalked over to his black Harley. She felt disoriented by the familiar markers of her real life while she was so far away from it, off in another world with a man she hardly knew in this new, harder incarnation, acting the part she’d never meant to play while the life she knew carried on without her. Her bar manager had arrived at the usual time and was taking care of business. Some drunk fool had knocked himself out trying to launch himself through one of the windows of the art gallery, but no worries, the Australian woman who ran the gallery assured her, the window was fine. The idiot had been taken off to the hospital for a saline drip and some stitches.
Just a random Tuesday night on Bourbon Street, Sophie thought, and she almost smiled at that, but then the next message started playing. She froze.
“What is it?” Ajax’s question came immediately, as if he’d sensed the change in her from five feet away.
She could still hear that simmering fury in his voice, and she could see it in every line of his body as he straddled his bike and pulled on his riding gloves with deliberate jerks, but none of that mattered. She let the hand holding the phone drop to her side and could hear the tinny sound of whoever had called next, talking to her thigh.
“That was the funeral home. They have a date and time and…he…”
She shook her head. She refused to cry, damn it, not even out here in the dark where no one could see her, but that took a minute. That took breathing deep through her nose and pressing her tongue to the roof of her mouth and waiting for that hitching thing in her chest to fade.
Ajax took a minute to speak and when he did, his voice was lower.
“When?”
Sophie shoved her phone back into her pocket and that took a certain amount of finesse and a few breaths, and then she pushed her hair out of her face and she blinked away the blurriness.
