by Megan Crane
“Jesus,” he muttered. “I fucking love real tits.”
He wanted them in his mouth. He wanted to shove them together and slide his hungry cock between them. He wanted to see what color her nipples were, hard and hidden behind the gold tassels she wore, and he wanted to spend a whole lot of time sucking on them like candy. He had to make do with his hands instead.
Sophie stiffened, a crazy heat on her cheeks and her breath coming fast. Too fast. He felt her shake against him, the kind of fine, high tremble that came from deep inside, and he took her mouth again in a wet, deep, searing possession that was dangerous in public. He didn’t give a shit. He ate at her lush mouth, he rode her sweet little pussy through his jeans and what passed for her clothes, and then he pinched her nipples through the pasties. Hard.
And she went so tight and rigid he thought she might break in two.
He cupped the back of her head and tipped her face into the crook of his neck, following an urge he didn’t entirely understand, to keep what was happening to her all to himself, and he ran the hard thrust of his aching cock up high against her, banging that clit of hers again. And then again.
“Come, baby,” he ordered her, his mouth at her ear. “Come all over me.”
He heard a soft, high noise, cut off fast and then muffled, and he could feel her mouth open against his neck as she shook and shook, coming for him just as he’d commanded, in wave after shuddering wave, right there against the back wall of a Bourbon Street bar in broad daylight.
He’d never been so hard in his life.
For a long while, he stood there, Sophie limp and panting against him, wrapped up in his arms. He eased back from between her legs because it was that or just slide his way inside and go a little nuts, and he was losing perspective on the pros and cons of that one, fast. But once the red haze eased its claws out of him, Ajax gave in to another impulse he didn’t really get and smoothed his hand down her back. Up, then down, like he was soothing her. Like he was patting her.
Like he was the kind of man who gave a shit.
Before he could investigate all the ways he didn’t like that line of thought at all, Sophie stiffened against him. His smartass girl was back. He could feel her cute little fists press against his abdomen again. He felt as well as heard her pull in a deep breath. And then she pushed back from him, hard, and this time, he let her.
Her butt hit the wall and she threw out a hand to catch herself before she tumbled to the floor.
“A little unsteady?” Ajax drawled.
“Fuck you,” she gritted out, low and furious, like she wasn’t standing there with black shit all over her face from the sweat and maybe a tear or two, she’d come so hard.
Her lips were puffy from his mouth, she was still shaking and probably still so wet he’d bet she was worried someone could see it from across the bar. He wondered if he could, and he was a lot more inclined to run with that impulse, having felt all that sweet, juicy evidence when he’d been rocking her fucking world.
Fully fucking clothed, no less.
“Is that an invitation?” He eyed her, feeling a little less solid than he usually did, and he didn’t want to look at that too closely. “Because I don’t care who sees me fuck, little girl. I consider it a public service. Thought you might disagree.”
He watched, fascinated, as she swallowed, as if it hurt. She looked past him, back to the bar and Tulane and whoever else was watching the show, and he knew what she didn’t, that no one had really seen anything. That he’d blocked her. That the most the little perverts could do was jack off later to their imaginary versions of a fairly intense kiss.
But he didn’t feel the need to tell Sophie that.
Sophie looked back at him after a minute, and she didn’t look tough any longer, or cool and snooty the way she’d been at first. She looked lost, and he felt like a dick, but she didn’t speak. Not one word. She turned on her heel and she walked away from him, slapping her way through the back door that he knew led down the hall past where Priest’s office had been and then out into a private courtyard.
Ajax stood where he was for a moment, making sure to put a grim eye on every one of the assholes who’d no doubt get their little preppy dicks out later, imagining Sophie in her tassels and hooker shoes. Little shits. They all looked away, as expected, and not one of them was brave enough to look back. Which meant it was unlikely that they’d be dumb enough to come after Sophie again, either.
He, meanwhile, had the sinking feeling he was exactly that dumb, no matter the ghost he was sure he could see glowering at him from across the bar, reminding him whose daughter he’d just been that close to doing. Right here.
You’re a piece of shit, he told himself, but it was tough to take that to heart when his dick was still hard and he had the taste of her in his mouth.
He shifted that same hard look to Tulane, who actually squeaked when their eyes met and staggered back a few steps like he might vault over the bar and come for her perky ass next.
“Relax,” he growled at her. “I don’t do mice.”
She made another squeaky noise, and did not look at all comforted by that information. Ajax wanted to smile, but didn’t. Of course he didn’t. That would be too easy. And despite the reason for his return and the fact Priest would likely rise from his grave to rip his balls off if the old man knew the direction of Ajax’s thoughts, he was having too much fun.
He practically whistled a happy tune as he stalked through the door and followed Sophie outside, taking the metal stairs attached to the back of the bar up toward the rambling old apartment that took over the top two floors of the building.
It had been ten long, lonely, jacked-up years. But Ajax was finally home.
Chapter 3
Sophie cried in the shower.
And hated herself for it with every great, wracking, gasping sob that made her clutch at the slick walls to keep from crumpling into a ball of pure misery near the drain.
But hating herself for being a weak little girl didn’t seem to help anything. It only made her feel worse, like that much more of a weak little girl.
So she turned up the water temperature until it was nearly painful and she cried a little more and she told herself that it was the grief and the shock working themselves out, that was all. And that Ajax was, too. It even made a kind of psychological sense, if she remembered her college classes right.
Her father was dead. That still didn’t make any sense. Maybe it never would. He’d left on one of his rides as usual yesterday with his normal, gruff see you when I see you as he’d powered up that window-shattering engine in the courtyard. He’d roared out onto Bourbon Street the way he always did. And then there were cops at the door and Sophie was expected to believe he was simply…gone.
How could she possibly have processed it overnight? She hadn’t. She couldn’t have. She kept expecting him to walk back in the door. For all this to be a mistake.
But then Ajax had appeared, like a ghost in this city that was messy with them, and brighter somehow than all the rest.
And she’d known that he wouldn’t show up unless Priest really was dead.
Ajax had been her father’s favorite surrogate son before he’d disappeared ten years ago, and now he was so much hotter and wilder and more dangerous than he’d been when she was eighteen. And this time, he’d looked at her the way he’d look at any woman. No longer like she was the Catholic schoolgirl, Priest’s untouchable daughter, but like she was exactly the sort of woman an outlaw biker like Ajax threw up against walls.
She’d always wanted to be that kind of woman—or she had when she was eighteen.
This was what people did with grief, she told herself fiercely. They acted out. They did stupid things. She braced her hands against the warm wall of the shower stall and let the water run all over her and told herself it was only to be expected.
She’d almost convinced herself of it when she walked out of her bedroom a little while later and stopped dead.
Because Ajax was sitting in the kitchen like he belonged there, drenched in afternoon sunlight and even better looking than he’d been in the more dimly lit bar downstairs. Sophie caught her breath. His legs were stretched out before him as he sprawled in one of the chairs at the table, his cellphone clamped to his ear, looking for all the world as if he was there waiting on her father, as he had a thousand times before, ten years back.
And though he didn’t acknowledge her in any way, Sophie knew he saw her. That assessing blue gaze had been on her before she’d looked up and met it, and she felt more naked now, dressed in jeans and a tank top and her face scrubbed clean, than she had when she’d been essentially naked and he’d been all over her.
“Didn’t call to hear your autobiography, asshole,” he said into the phone, all rough-edged menace and silken threat. “I don’t give a shit. Priest is dead. Get your punk ass on a plane.”
He listened, his face hard and that mouth of his set, and Sophie felt as if she was breaking out in hives—but she wasn’t. She knew she wasn’t. She was remembering the huge, hot length of him trapped in his jeans and so hard against her. She was remembering that impossible mouth of his all over hers, so dirty and thorough at once, the scratch of his dark gold beard and the slick intoxication of his tongue. She’d brushed her teeth twice and she could still taste him. She could still feel his hands on her breasts, and her nipples, still raw from the removal of the adhesive-backed pasties and oversensitive to even the slightest touch of her soft tank top, simply ached.
But she was wet between her legs again, wet and needy and infinitely restless, as if she hadn’t embarrassed herself in front of the bar staff and her regulars only a little while ago, in a way she didn’t really want to think about now that she was the owner by default, she assumed, as well as the boss.
Grief, she told herself sternly. It was nothing but grief and poor impulse control.
And him. He’d made her come because he’d felt like it. Because she’d taunted him, maybe, and he didn’t put up with that shit. Because that was the world Ajax lived in. That was who he was. If he wanted something, he took it.
And Sophie might have been exhausted and emotional, but she knew one thing: that wasn’t her world. Her father had kept her as removed from it as he could and now he was dead, whether she could get her head around it or not, and Ajax was nothing more than a fossil. Archaeological remains of a life she’d always hated and didn’t want any part of now that she could choose for herself.
The old king of the Deacons was dead. Sophie wanted to bury his kingdom along with him, because she didn’t want it infecting her life any longer, and she’d spent many hours wide awake last night with her head full of all these details. Because details were a whole lot better than imagining what her father had gone through. If it had hurt. If he’d known. If he’d been scared, alone—
No. Better to plot out the small things she could control. What to do with the wrecked motorcycle, when she could formally identify him and have him taken to a funeral home. What bills she’d need to pay now that this was all her responsibility. What, if anything, would change without her father around—since he’d surrendered the running of the Priory to Sophie right about the time she’d made noises about moving out after college. Better to immerse herself in the overwhelming little details of the complicated life he’d left behind him and hide from the reality of his death.
But it hadn’t occurred to her that the four club brothers Priest had loved above all others, despite the fact they’d wandered off after the storm ten years ago, might come back. Sophie hadn’t planned to rally the remains of the Deacons of Bourbon Street. She’d figured the brothers who were still in the city would do whatever it was they did when a club with declining membership and no real club officers lost one of their own, and it wouldn’t affect her at all. Because that was all over now. Surely that was over. She hadn’t heard her father mention “club business” in years.
Except Ajax appeared to have other ideas.
“Pucker up, princess,” he was saying into the phone. “You either have a skull on your back or you don’t. Which is it?” He listened with obvious impatience. “Then I better see your ass tomorrow. The end.”
He finished the call and set the phone down on the tabletop, never shifting his gaze from Sophie, who swallowed hard. She needed her bravado back, clearly. She’d washed it down the drain, or maybe he’d dry-fucked it out of her against that damned wall, and—
“You okay?”
Ajax’s voice was a rough caress, as edgy as it was oddly soothing. Sophie felt wide open again. Vulnerable. She frowned at him, then down at her bare feet. She didn’t understand why her toes were curling into the polished wood floor of this comfortable apartment she’d grown up in and should have felt at ease in, no matter who else was here.
It had always been perfectly comfortable before. Her father’s matter-of-fact, masculine approach to furnishing was in evidence everywhere, from the big, solid furniture to the vintage motorcycle posters on the wall. When it had become clear that her dad wasn’t down with his little girl getting her own place, Sophie had tried to pretty this one up a little bit. She’d contributed the frames around the posters, the plants in the window boxes, the brightly patterned area rug on the floor that Priest had always laughed at and called fucking girly as shit. She knew the history of every single item in the big living room that fed into the long, open kitchen. She knew the squeak in the door that led outside and the sound different feet made on the external metal stairs leading down to the Priory in the courtyard or up to the converted attic space that made up the apartment’s sprawling second level. She could wander this place in the dark, blindfolded, and never so much as trip.
But it wasn’t comfortable now.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked Ajax.
He tapped the back of his phone with one long finger and confirmed her fears.
“Calling the brothers back for the funeral. The ones I can find, anyway. Not that most of them answer their goddamn phones.”
Her father would have considered any follow-up questions crossing that line over into his sacred “club business,” which meant it was none of hers. Yet one more rule of a world she hated and wanted nowhere near hers. But Ajax wasn’t her father.
“That’s how you talk to the brothers? I thought you were the VP. I’d have thought that required more politics than profanity.”
His mouth curved slightly at that, like he thought she was funny. “Anyone step up and take my position?”
“I wasn’t aware I was supposed to take notes on club hierarchy.” He only stared at her. Sophie sighed. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Then I’m still VP.” He nodded at his phone. “And that’s not how I talk to everyone. I left a couple of friendly fucking messages. That’s how I talk to a whiny little bitch who has convenient memory loss about where his loyalties lie.” A pause. “You probably know him as Prince.”
She did know Prince—or she had. He and Ajax were two of the four Deacons who had disappeared around the time of Katrina, and her father’s beloved club had never been the same since. She shouldn’t care either way. The club was her life and not her life at the same time. The club was all around her and she’d been raised to respect it if not accept it, and yet none of it was hers.
Except the bar. The Priory, where she’d been working since before she turned eighteen. She’d been running it since she was twenty-three. And the buildings arranged around this courtyard, which were, taken altogether, her childhood home. Priest had always told her she belonged right here, with him. Right where she started and right where he’d raised her himself.
Gotta be Lombards in the Quarter, Sophie, he’d said. Always have been, always will be.
She’d believed him. It was why she was still here, despite the wispy little dreams she’d entertained while she’d been in college. She hadn’t gone off to a distant city and lived one of those glossy sitcom lives she’d imagined from time to time. She
hadn’t pretended she was someone else for a few years like a lot of her high school friends had, before tucking their tails in and coming right back to New Orleans. She’d always stayed true to her blood and her family and her home.
Sophie couldn’t do anything for the gruff, taciturn man who’d raised her. She didn’t know if he’d suffered last night. She couldn’t fix his relationship with the family he’d claimed he didn’t have and that he’d always adamantly refused to discuss with her anyway. She couldn’t change the fact that she’d been the unplanned result of his extremely casual liaison with a junkie stripper who’d decided she preferred meth to childrearing and was only heard from every once in a messed-up while. She couldn’t even be the innocent little girl Priest had claimed he’d wanted, sending her off to Catholic school and then monitoring her far too closely through her college years, and still trying his best to keep her close after that, too.
But she could take care of the bar he’d poured his life into once the club fell apart in the wake of the storm. The bar he’d always told her was as much her birthright as the green eyes they shared. She could make sure it stayed on Bourbon Street forever, even if Priest couldn’t.
“I knew Prince,” she said now, but she was thinking of her dad. “But that was a long time ago. Things change. People move on, have different priorities. That’s life.”
“That’s bullshit.” Ajax’s voice was hard. Uncompromising. Like a gauntlet thrown down from across the living room. “I wear my priorities on my back. That doesn’t change, Sophie. The club itself might shift direction. The world might change. But the brotherhood never does.”
God, she hated that.
All of that. Everything he stood for, that her father had stood for, too. All those grandiose and epic things they thought they were. The rousing speeches, the unearned intensity, all for a bunch of dirtbags to sit around in matching jackets playing badass together on their way to one or another criminal activity. What was the point of any of it? Priest had loved that club more than he’d loved anything in his life, including his only child. Sophie had watched him wither away as the club’s influence had waned over the past ten years. She’d watched him take each new defection of one of the club members as a personal insult, and then an injury, too. He never would have called it heartbreaking, but that’s what it had been. Bit by bit. Like water torture.