by Megan Crane
None of this shit made any sense.
But no one in his life had ever stood up for him unless they were bound to him by oaths and blood and brotherhood. His club. The army. The dangerous band of fucking assholes he’d done his mercenary work with, because surviving shit was its own kind of bond. He trusted each and every one of those men to honor the vows they’d made. To survive. To their country. To their brotherhood.
No one else had ever pretended to care about him or support him. Not his own waste of a family, that he’d left behind in the bayou so long ago now he didn’t think he’d recognize any of those fuckers if he saw them on the street. Not the social workers who’d claimed they wanted to help him, the teachers who’d told him what a waste of space he was, the hundreds of women he’d fucked, any of the people who’d been supposed to give a shit.
Only Sophie.
And she’d said his name.
She’d finally called him by his name.
He slid his hands over her cheeks and held her face, so pretty, so perfect, between them. She was wedged deep into his skin like she was another tattoo, dark ink and block letters, punched deep. Like she would take months of lasers and a lot of pain to remove. Ajax didn’t know how to feel about that.
Only that it had happened. It was real. She was a part of him whether he liked it or not.
Whether she did.
She was his. He meant what he’d told her. He wasn’t giving her up.
“Sophie,” he began, frowning down at her as he said it, “I don’t know what the fuck—”
“Shut up, Ajax,” she said, and she smiled up at him, as if she knew how it felt to hear the name he’d earned in her mouth like that.
Not the name his drunk loser of a father and his doormat of a mother had slapped on him at birth. Not the name the police and the army had used to control him and order him around.
Ajax was the name that marked him a man. The name his brothers had given him. The name that had set him free.
Sophie shifted forward, pulling her face from his grasp and settling her hands on his waistband with that easy grace of hers that made his cock ache as much as his chest did. Her gaze was dark and filled with all those things he wanted to say, but couldn’t. Everything that burned between them. Everything that had happened. Everything that was still happening, right now, that was caught in his throat like some bastard was trying to choke him out.
Sophie sat back, her rounded ass on her heels, and worked his zipper down. Slowly. Carefully. His cock was hard and more than ready, and tried to pound its way out with every new swath of space she opened up. Jesus. She hadn’t even touched the fucker yet and he was already tight in the balls and trying to hold himself back from coming all over her right now.
It was that look on her face. Reverent. Longing.
She was going to kill him.
He couldn’t fucking wait.
Sophie moved closer as she tugged the zipper down that final bit and pulled him out. She didn’t shove his jeans down, she just left them as they were, like she was too desperate to bother. She let out a needy sort of sigh or a breath that he could feel against the tight skin of his cockhead.
Then her voice. “Commando again?”
He could feel that, too. Her mouth. Her smart, clever, beautiful mouth, so near the head of his cock he thought he might bust a whole nut just thinking about what she might do next.
“Always, babe,” he grunted. “Saves time.”
“Pig,” she murmured.
And then she tipped forward and sucked him deep into the melting hot cavern of her mouth, and Ajax’s head blanked out. It simply all went—white.
She licked him while she sucked, flicking her tongue against his slit until he gave her a little taste, and then she hummed her approval. She wrapped both her hands around his shaft and pumped, gently at first, and then, as she moved to a swirling motion with her tongue and kept that insane suction going, she got a little harder.
A little harder and a little rougher. Like she fucking meant it.
He adjusted his stance, got his hands in her hair.
Sophie made that moaning sound that hit him like a punch, then took him deep.
Ajax wasn’t small. But she stretched her lips around him and swallowed him down, and he loved it. God, did he love it. And the way she looked up at him then with his cock lining her tongue and his balls as near her chin as he could get, her green eyes dark and hot and blissed out—she did, too.
That was the hottest part of it.
Again and again she took him, getting his dick nice and wet and sloppy in her mouth, sucking him in deeper and harder and better, so he came up against the back of her throat. And even then, she tried to take more.
And she was so hot, her head bent over him as she worked him, her mouth and her hands wicked and in that killer rhythm, the sweet line of soft back there below him as she swayed and dipped.
The prettiest dance he’d ever seen.
Her tank was rucked up, showing him her lower back and the high, soft curves of that taut ass of hers, where he had every fucking intention of writing his goddamned name. With his come, one of these days, because she was goddamned right. He was a fucking pig. And then again in ink, so it would stay there.
Dark and big and fuck you black, and maybe his handprint besides. So there was no mistaking whose ass that was.
This was his territory. This was his woman.
Sophie was his.
And she took him even deeper then, like she knew it.
It sent him hurtling toward the edge.
Ajax grabbed ahold of her head then, and he took control, fucking her mouth the way he’d been fantasizing about doing since she’d turned it on him that first day downstairs.
He went slow. Deep. An endless wet fuck, with her head tipped toward him and nothing in the whole goddamned world but his cock, her mouth, and how hard he was about to come. All for her.
She moaned something around him and moved her hands, reaching down to stroke him, taint to balls and back up the bottom of his shaft. Then again. And again.
And it was fucking perfect.
It was the closest thing to riding his bike he’d ever experienced while standing still. Free. Fierce. Worth everything and anything to get that rush, that pull.
That endless glory.
He came in a rush, pouring himself into her, shouting out her name.
And she took that too, drinking every drop and even licking the tip when he was done like she wanted more, making him curse when goosebumps flashed over him.
His woman. His Sophie.
Ajax laughed. He shrugged out of his cut and tore off his shirt, dropping them both on the floor beside the bed. He shoved his jeans to his ankles, grabbed a condom from the pocket as he kicked off his boots, and then shook the jeans the rest of the way off. He was irritated that it took longer than one second to get to her.
He sprawled out on the bed next to her, hooking her around the waist as he went. Sophie laughed, and then he dragged her mouth to his and devoured her. He tasted the salt that was him and the sweet that was her. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. Ajax pulled back and rolled her so she straddled him. He felt the slick heat of her cunt against him, sopping fucking wet, like blowing him had done it for her the way it had for him. He grunted at that, need slamming into him all over again, as if he hadn’t just emptied himself down her throat.
She was a wonder. And he couldn’t get enough.
He knew then, he never would. He stopped trying to fight it. She was his. That was all that mattered.
“Like you on my bike,” he told her, wrapping his hands around her hips and lifting her up his body to brace herself against the iron headboard. “Want you on my face.”
She let out a shaky breath as he arranged her there, crouched over him, that sweet, ripe cunt right there in his face. God, the scent of her, greedy and wild. He was already getting hard again. He held her hips where he wanted them, then he pulled her down close and su
cked that sweet pussy deep into his mouth, like he could deep-throat her if he tried hard enough.
Sophie let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scream, or maybe it was just a crazy, fucked-up moan, but it hit Ajax like a shot of Jack. He growled against her.
He parted her folds with his face and then he licked his way in, tasting heat and cream and Sophie, his Sophie, all around him. He went a little nuts. He ate her hard and rough and everywhere, with an intensity that rolled around in him like a shout.
She ground herself against him and he lost himself in her hot, juicy cunt. He held her clit between his teeth until she shuddered. He licked up into her, with his tongue and his teeth and his chin. And when he felt her go rigid above him he stroked a finger deep into her before he replaced it with his mouth again, then reached around and worked that finger deep into her ass.
For a long, taut moment she was stretched out there between his mouth on her pussy and his finger in her ass, and he didn’t let up. He thrust into her hard from behind and he ate her rough from the front, and finally, finally, she broke.
“Oh my God, Ajax!” She screamed his fucking name at last. Just the way he wanted.
And then she was coming all over his face, sweet and hot, and Ajax had never been so happy in his entire fucking life.
He was also hard as a fucking nail, like he hadn’t come earlier at all.
She was still coming, shaking and moaning, her head thrown back as she rode him, when he pulled her off his mouth. He handled the condom. Then he shifted her down the length of his body and jackknifed up as he did it, slamming her down on his cock.
Hell yes, he thought, because he didn’t have the words, but he had this.
Deep. Hard. Fucking perfect.
He knew this. It was his ripped-up old chopper of a heart. It was the words he’d never said out loud, to anyone. It was his claim made real.
Just like he knew that look on her face, awed and desperate and filled with the same white-hot wonder that stampeded through him, was all his.
And then he began to fuck his woman, his woman, at last.
—
Sophie had a second to wonder how he could do that—get so hard again so fast—but then she didn’t care. About anything.
Because Ajax was deep inside her, working her up and down on him with that iron control and mad intensity that made her shiver from the inside out. And she didn’t know if she was still coming from before or coming again, or if this was all something else, something new. Like that look in his too-blue eyes when she’d woken up to find him standing there in her doorway, something like haunted.
But warmer. So very much warmer.
“Come again,” he growled at her, his face in the crook of her neck so his beard teased her skin. “Then we can get this shit started.”
And Sophie laughed, because she loved him, this impossible man who was nothing she’d ever told herself she’d wanted and everything she’d always craved. She loved him. She didn’t care if it was grief. If it was fleeting. They fit. His cock deep inside her, his fingers wrapped around hers at the tomb, her legs on either side of his and her chin on his shoulder on the back of his bike.
Like two fucked-up puzzle pieces that made one perfect whole, together.
Love was the only word that fit.
“Not kidding, babe,” Ajax muttered, darkly impatient. “Get your hands on that clit.”
Sophie obeyed him. She reached down between them as he moved her up and down on him, and she rubbed herself. It made lightning flash through her, jolting to her breasts and then doubling back in the clench of her pussy around his relentless, demanding cock. She was so wet and her clit ached and she almost couldn’t tell if she felt good or if she hurt and she wasn’t sure she cared either way.
Ajax did something different with his hips, one deep thrust and another, even harder, and she broke again. The orgasm swamped her, making her shudder so hard that she collapsed against him, her face in his neck and her arms looped around his wide shoulders, but barely holding on.
And Ajax laughed that filthy laugh that never failed to light a new fire in her, and this was no different. He laughed and then he rolled, still buried inside of her, pinning her down on the bed.
He levered himself up on his hands and he gazed down at her with that same haunting intensity stamped deep on his gorgeous face. That mouth of his was grim and beautiful and slightly damp in the triangle of his dark blond beard. His eyes were so blue they became the world.
Sophie held him deep inside of her, that massive cock of his hard and big despite how many times she’d already come and how wet she was. She clenched at him and his mouth shifted into that hard, delicious curve that she could feel like his teeth against her nipples.
He didn’t speak. He hauled her knees up, opening her wider, holding her where he wanted her. And he fucked her.
Long and slow and deep and hot.
He didn’t say all those things she was afraid to hear, no matter what she felt. He didn’t talk about property or patches. He didn’t call her his old lady or even his.
He didn’t have to say a word.
It was the way their gazes clung, tangled. The way he fucked her, raw and intense. And Sophie knew that for a man like Ajax, there was no making love. There was only this, and this was everything. It was the way he rocked into her, as if he owned her. It was the way she took him deep, the way they fit. It was the sound of their flesh in the heat they’d made around them, and that arrested, commanding gaze he never shifted from hers.
There was breath and sex and the two of them becoming one thing, forged in the fire that only danced here, and danced high.
And his name.
She chanted it like a spell. Like a song the voodoo priestesses sang for luck in the city’s dark corners, spinning the notes out into the night. She chanted it like magic, again and again, as he fucked into her and made them both real, made this real, made sex into promises and lust into vows.
Sophie didn’t know what he’d call it, but she knew it was love. Every inch. Every touch. Everything she was.
She chanted his name, and then she moaned it. And Ajax laughed in that way of his, as if he’d always known each and every contour of her soul the way he knew every fold of her pussy.
And this time, when she started shaking, when the wild, giddy, rough, and dirty pleasure burst wide open and swallowed her whole, she took him with her.
—
In the morning, Sophie felt like a stranger to herself. Made new, somehow. Fresh and fragile, and she didn’t know what to make of it.
Ajax checked his messages on his phone while she made them coffee, as if this was any random day in a life they shared, and she couldn’t let herself think about that. Not in the bright morning light that poured in the windows, illuminating everything that had seemed so simple in the dark. She thunked his mug down in front of him and he laughed at her attitude, hanging an arm around her hips and hauling her close to him while he lounged in his chair.
“You’ll suck my cock happily but serving me coffee is a problem for you?” he taunted her, some message droning in his ear. She could hear a tinny male voice in the distance. “Not gonna argue with your priorities, babe, but you know that doesn’t make any sense, right?”
“You want service, Ajax?” she asked sweetly, baring her teeth at him. “Get a maid.”
“How about you, dressed like a maid?” he countered, that lazy heat in his eyes. “I could make that work.”
She rolled her eyes, and opened her mouth to slap that back at him, but he went rigid. His expression shut down. His gaze shuttered and his mouth flattened into that hard line she remembered too well.
“What is it?” she asked when he put the phone down, and she knew it was a loaded question. Or a dangerous one.
Because last night was sex and love and that had been a gleaming truth. It still burned inside of her. But this was a brighter, harsher morning, and she’d stumbled up against another hard truth whe
ther she liked it or not.
Life with a man like Ajax meant there would always be questions he wouldn’t answer. And she would simply have to live with it if she wanted to live with him, because it would never change. She’d spent twenty-eight years dealing with the repercussions of that already, but a father wasn’t the same thing as a lover. Could she handle that kind of wall in a man who was otherwise without boundaries?
Could she accept that the only place he would ever be utterly honest with her all of the time was in bed?
Sophie didn’t know. And she didn’t have to know, because he hadn’t asked her to make anything work with him in any long-term way anyway, no matter how she might feel.
And he didn’t tell her his phone call was none of her business now—which was delaying the facing of that question, she knew. Only delaying it.
“Had an old friend take a look at your dad’s accident report.” He shifted in his chair, pulling her down across his lap and holding her there, and she refused to make the fact he was holding her into some fantasy story. She refused.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m a nosy fucker,” Ajax said, his voice hard. “And because something about this didn’t sit right.”
“You mean, that he’s dead?” Sophie asked flatly. She cleared her throat. “It’s not supposed to sit right. It’s death. It sucks and there’s no escaping it and if there’s a point to any of it, it’s lost on me.”
A faint smile moved over his dangerous face, that hard-stamped curve to his mouth, and it was like a hard knock, deep inside her chest.
“I wasn’t looking for philosophy, babe,” he said quietly. “I was looking for answers.”
Sophie understood, looking down into those fiercely blue eyes of his, that she didn’t want to know what he’d found out. That she wanted the ignorance. The darkness. That there was a reason men like Ajax, and her father, and all the brothers just like them, built these walls between the different aspects of their lives and guarded them so carefully.
