Текст книги "Make You Burn"

Автор книги: Megan Crane

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter 14

“Please tell me this is not how you deal with shit,” Ajax growled. He pushed himself off the wall and he started toward her, rubbing his hand against that place where his chest felt like it gaped wide open, like he’d been fucking shot, and how could she not get that? She’d held the fucking gun herself. “You shoot your fucking mouth off like that when we both know you know better and then you run away like a goddamn child?”

That broken look on her face that he didn’t like at all shifted to a flash of temper, and prick that he was, he liked it a whole lot better.

“You got something to say to me, Sophie? Say it. I’m all ears.”

“Did I stutter back in the Priory?” she threw at him. “My bad. Let me try again. Fuck. You.”

Ajax laughed, and he could see from her face that it sounded about as harsh as it felt.

“I ever strike you as a reasonable man, babe?” She folded her arms as he came at her, not giving an inch, and he hated that he could find that so damned hot when he was legitimately pissed at her. “You laboring under some impression that I’m not three seconds away from kicking your ass halfway to Texas?”

Sophie glared back at him, her mouth set in a flat line. “Don’t threaten me, asshole.”

“You should know better, baby. I don’t make threats.”

She rolled her eyes. She didn’t look the least bit afraid of him or even remotely intimidated, not even when he was coming at her down the middle of Bourbon Street like a goddamned freight train. Tourists leapt aside and dove for cover, but Sophie only glared at him.

And as pissed as he was, it still made his cock twitch, that traitorous little shit.

He shook his head, still feeling the slap of her betrayal back in the bar. He hadn’t expected that kind of bullshit from her. Cash, Prince—they’d put a lot of work into pretending they were shiny new people with bright new lives, and who knew what people like that would do to keep that shine going? But Sophie was different. Sophie belonged right here. With him. He thought she knew that.

How the fuck could she not know that?

“First of all,” he gritted out, “you know better than to take that tone with me in front of the club. You know it won’t fly. It’s disrespectful and it’s bullshit. And second of all, you should know that no matter what the fuck your father did or didn’t do with his goddamned will, the club is not going to leave you hanging. I’m not going to leave you hanging. Which I’m sure he knew. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Forgive me.” Her tone was like acid and there was no give on that pretty face of hers, no matter how close he got to her. He couldn’t help but admire her balls, even as he kind of wanted to wipe that tough-girl expression off and make her sob. The way she did when she called out Oh my God and then came all over him. “The next time my father dies and leaves my entire life and everything that matters to me to four people he hasn’t laid eyes on in ten years, I’ll be sure to think more about your feelings.”

Ajax thought his head might fucking explode, and maybe it did, because Sophie’s eyes widened and she backed up when he got within touching distance. And he wasn’t going to lie to himself. The part of him that was never going to be anything but a bayou trash piece of shit liked it. A little healthy concern for her own well-being might go a long way.

“If I were you”—and he was stalking her now, watching her through narrowed eyes as she moved too fast and a little too unsteadily away from him, backing herself up on the nearest uneven curb and nearly slamming into a lamppost—“I’d spend a little more time worrying about my feelings and a little less time feeling sorry for yourself because your daddy didn’t love you the way you think he should have. Newsflash, little girl. Fathers suck. Grow the fuck up and deal with it.”

Her mouth fell open and she slowed her backward scramble, which wasn’t smart at all, because he was on her then. He jumped that same curb and got directly in her face.

“My god,” she whispered, her voice shaking, but he could see it was from temper, not any kind of pain, “you’re a fucking monster.”

“I’ve never been anything else,” Ajax told her with stark, harsh honesty. Then he ducked, plowed his shoulder into her belly so the air left her in a little oof, and hauled her up and over his shoulder as he straightened. “And guess what, babe? It’s not about to change. This is the whole fucking package.”

He smacked his hand down hard on her ass and she jolted against him and then, predictably, started punching him in the back where she hung over him. She even packed a pretty decent punch, for a girl.

And of course that made his cock want to do its own kind of punching.

Ajax wheeled around and started back toward home, staring down anyone who dared look at him twice in that particularly grim and unsmiling way he’d learned a long time ago. Fuck with me, I’m begging you, he thought when a fat fucker with a face redder than the Tampa Bay Buccaneers T-shirt straining over his beer belly frowned at him. But the bitch looked away, because that was what bitches always did. Always.

Sophie squirmed and fought, and he dealt with her kicking by clamping her legs down with one arm. He let the punches rain down where they would. Like a fucking massage.

“Keep it up,” he growled at her as he ducked back in the alley that led to the courtyard behind the Priory. “You’re just pissing me off more.”

“So what?” Thump. Thump thump. He could feel her getting hot and agitated against him as she tried to roll off him and kept failing to move much at all. “When are you ever not pissed off? How would I tell the difference?”

Ajax stopped halfway down the alley, well into the shadows, and tipped her over and onto the ground. She looked dizzy when her feet hit, and he didn’t care. Dizzy was fine with him. He backed her hard into the wall and caged her there, his face in hers.

“I don’t think this is how you want to play this, Sophie, but it makes no difference to me. Cry. Fight. Call me names. Punch me with your little hands and see which one of us that hurts more. Run away and see how long it takes me to catch up with you. Who cares? It’s all going to end the same.”

“One of us dead?” she threw at him, sounding tough and furious and unintimidated, even though he could see that wild pulse right there in her throat and knew she was faking it. “I nominate you.”

“Yeah?” Ajax held her in place with his chest against hers and a hand in her thick hair. He reached down, grabbing a fistful of her skirt and then another, getting all that fucking fabric out of his way. “How wet are you right now?”

She flinched, made a hissing sort of sound, and then bucked against him. “Get off me.”

“That’s what I thought.” He didn’t stop. He pulled the skirt up and then he slid his hand down to cup that cunt of hers, so white hot and juicy he could hear it when he shoved his fingers beneath her panties and then stroked his way over her clit with a rough urgency. She moaned, long and low. “You hate me. I can tell.”

She shuddered, hard, and he stroked down, thrusting two fingers deep inside and rubbing the heel of his hand nice and hard against that needy clit of hers.

“You don’t know me at all,” she threw at him, but her voice was breathy and her hands clutched at his cut and her hips rose to meet him, as greedy as the clutch of her hot pussy around his fingers. “I hate biker clubs. I hate the drama. I hate the bullshit. I hate the rules and the endless battles about who disrespected who by wearing the wrong color on the wrong bike in the wrong town without asking permission from this club or that—”

“You’re so full of shit.” Ajax leaned in, rubbing his chest against those plump, hot tits until her nipples poked at him. “You love this life and even if you didn’t, too bad. You’re neck deep in it and you always have been. Better figure out how to swim, babe.”

He pumped into her harder, ground that clit of hers against his palm, watched the sweat bead on her upper lip and her neck arch back.

“I want a normal life,” she whispered, as much to the stones all around them and the noisy street nearby, the shadows and the thick Louisiana air, as to him. Maybe to herself.

Ajax laughed and upped the pace, fucking her on his hand and watching her while he did it. His woman. His property. His.

“You want the rush, babe,” he told her. “Look at you. You crave it.”

He ground down against her and then stopped. Abruptly. Her eyes shot open, lust and need and mutiny at once in those green depths.

“I want the suburbs and a Camry,” she said, like her chest wasn’t heaving. Like there wasn’t a red flush high on her cheeks and she wasn’t about to come on his hand, because he fucking owned that ass of hers. “I want a meek, biddable husband who works at an insurance company and I want to join the fucking PTA.”

“Yeah?” He thrust into her hard, then eased out slow. “You gonna wear something like this while you’re dying of boredom with the douchebag husband you keep on a leash? Or maybe that stripper dress? No, I know, the gold pasties.” He pulled out completely and stroked all around those plump folds of hers, so sweet and hot and dripping with need, kept stroking until she was stiff and tense and trembling against him. “Sure thing, babe. You’re standing in an alley with a biker’s hand deep in your pussy at noon, but really, you’re destined for the PTA.”

Her green eyes lit up with fury and something else. Something that tore at him and kicked at him and pissed him off all over again. “I want a normal life, Ajax.”

“No.” He was pitiless. “You don’t.”

And then he pinched her plump little clit with absolutely no mercy and Sophie screamed. High-pitched and long and he didn’t cover it because he didn’t give a fuck if she alerted the entire French Quarter. She shook apart right there. She dropped her head against him and came against his palm in rolling jerks, and he fucking loved every second of it.

He kept her there as her breathing slowed again and her body stopped rocking convulsively into his palm. He held her with his hand wrapped up tight in all the molten perfection of her cunt and his other hand a fist in her hair, and he waited for her to look at him again.

She took her time doing it.

“You need to have my back,” he told her, harsh and low and serious. “Don’t fucking ambush me like that again.”

That look in her eyes intensified and he still hated it. It was much too raw. It was too much like grief. Like tears.

“This was my childhood, Ajax. It was my whole life. It was the only thing that was mine.” Her green eyes were miserable. “I couldn’t be in the club. I couldn’t make up for the sons he’d lost. But I could run that bar. I could take care of that, at least.” She shrugged, but her hands were softer against his chest and he realized, from a distance, that it was inside him, the thing that still ached. That still felt broken. “And now it’s yours, like none of that mattered.”

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.