Make You Burn (13 page)

They all revved their engines, and it fused with the machine between her legs and the hard back of the man in front of her, a great and glorious howl of unendurable loss. It roared down Bourbon Street and echoed off the delicately wrought French-style balconies. It bounced back from the tall buildings lining Canal Street in the distance. It became the very air.

It lodged deep inside of Sophie, like some kind of primal recognition.

Then Ajax made a curt signal with his hand in the air, and they began to move.

It was a fifteen-minute ride out to the funeral home, and as much as she hated the reason for it, Sophie couldn’t deny the deep thrill she got from being at the head of so many powerful machines and so many dangerous men. The sense of
rightness
that started at the top of her head and wound its way down to her feet.

The procession was slow. Police waved them through intersections and civilians in their cars stopped and gawked. Children pointed, as if the wave of bikes was a roll of thunder, storming through the Louisiana morning.

Sophie sat tall. This was all for her father, this show of respect. This was what he’d earned in his life, year after year of commitment to his ideals and his beliefs and his brothers. She couldn’t help but take pride in that. In him.

At the funeral home, the hearse pulled into the convoy and they headed for the cemetery, slower. Making sure that Priest’s last ride was smooth and righteous.

Sophie held on to Ajax as if he was her anchor, and he never wavered. He sat there, imposing and stoic at once, as they rolled through the gates and into the typical New Orleans cemetery with its aboveground tombs and the ghostly little alleyways between them that made them into cities of the dead.

They pulled up as near as they could get to Priest’s chosen tomb, and Sophie climbed off the bike. She waited until Ajax stood beside her, and for the rest of the Deacons to fall into place behind them. She heard the rippling effect of all that quiet as the rows upon rows of bikes went silent.

Sophie didn’t care if it made her look weak, because she didn’t feel weak—but she wanted that connection. She needed it. She held on to Ajax’s strong, tough arm as they walked the last little way, like any bereaved member of the family would with such a ruthless guide at her—

But they were stopped before they could reach the tomb. By the same officer who had been at the funeral home yesterday, and what appeared to be a few of his friends.

“That’s far enough,” he barked at them, all puffed-up chest and hands on his hips. He directed his scowl at Ajax. “I think we’re going to have anyone in one of those vests stay on this side of the tomb during the interment. We don’t want a situation.”

Beneath her hand, Sophie felt Ajax go rock hard and lethal.

Behind her, she heard the kind of muttering from the assembled men that sounded like Harley engines revving and could end only in blood.

“There is no situation,” Sophie said, loud and calm and clear. “This is my father’s funeral and these are my father’s friends. They’re invited guests.”

“They’re criminals,” one of the other cops muttered derisively, and Sophie gripped Ajax’s arm harder when he focused all his fierce blue attention on the sound.

And worse, grinned.

“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” she said crisply, before Ajax could say something far more inflammatory. “And even if you’re not mistaken, attending a funeral is not a criminal act. You need to step aside.”

“I told you yesterday,
Ms.
Lombard, that we need to keep a handle on things,” the first officer told her in that same sanctimonious voice, with that same inflection on
Ms.
he’d used the day before. “Why don’t you tell your guard dog to back down.”

And he made the great mistake of waving a dismissive hand at Ajax, who actually growled. And tensed even further, as if he was about to launch himself directly at the officer’s smug face, and Sophie couldn’t have that. She couldn’t allow it.

Not if she could stop it.

“His name is Ajax,” Sophie snapped. Ajax went very still beside her and beneath the hand she was digging into his arm, but she couldn’t look at him. She was too busy staring down the line of cops before her. “I suggest you call the man you’re insulting by name.”

“Ma’am,” the cop began.

But Sophie kept going, even though she could feel Ajax boring holes into the side of her head with that gaze of his, intense and wild. She was sure it would leave scars, but she’d handle that later.

“I would also suggest that you treat him with the respect he deserves,” she bit out, still cool and sharp. “That you respect the fact he’s the acting president of the same club my father ran and that all these men here take very seriously. That you find a way to respect the fact that regardless of your opinions, they are all here to honor my father. But if you can’t bring yourself to do any of that, respect this.” She drew herself up to her full height and glared at Officer Douchebag as if she expected him to burst into flame with the force of it. And the truth was, she did. “This is a family service and you are trespassing. And unless you plan to arrest every single one of us, I’d suggest you step aside.” She paused the barest instant. “Now.”

There was a taut, brilliant sort of silence. It stretched out from the six cops to Sophie and Ajax, then rolled out behind them into that great sea of bikers who, Sophie knew without a single word being spoken, had her back in every conceivable way.

The policemen blinked, one after the other. They exchanged shifty sorts of looks. And then they stepped back.

It was a measure of the respect due the occasion that no one cheered, Sophie thought, but it was a close thing. For her, anyway.

Ajax led Sophie past the clump of antsy officers, acting as if they weren’t there. Only when they stopped at the entrance to the raised tomb and nodded a greeting toward the waiting minister did he turn to look down at her.

His expression was so fierce, so deeply intense, it made her skin feel singed.

“That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, in a voice thick with power and need and a hundred other things that made her heart skip in her chest, then begin to bloom a little bit. Pain or pleasure, she couldn’t tell. She didn’t care. It was all Ajax. It was all
this
. Then his voice got even lower. “You are. I don’t think I’m gonna let you go, Sophie. I don’t see that happening.”

“Ajax,” she whispered.

His eyes were so blue they hurt her, but she couldn’t look away.

Ajax.
She’d finally called him
Ajax,
and that changed everything.

She might as well have made a vow, loud and clear and in front of hundreds. Inked his name into her skin. Worn his colors on her back. Stamped his mark on her in blood.

Some part of her wanted all of those things, with a savage sort of fullness that made her something like dizzy. But not now.

Men filed in and stood around the tomb. Families and friends filled in the spaces between the bikers in their different cuts. There were so many people that she couldn’t see them all. They backed up the aisles between the tombs and not one of them complained.

This was about her father. This was his last ride.

And now he was free.

Next to her, Ajax stood like a stern, immovable rock. And as the minister began to speak, he reached down and took her hand in his, lacing his fingers tightly with hers and tugging her close.

Making her feel less alone, instantly. Less abandoned. Less adrift in the grief of this, of losing her only family so suddenly and so cruelly.

Making her his.

When the last liquored-up biker staggered out into the late night swamp that was Bourbon Street on a Friday and became the Big Easy’s problem instead of his, Ajax finally went to look for Sophie.

It had been hours since he’d last seen her. She’d stood there like a fucking queen in the middle of the Priory, surrounded by all those leather-faced, foulmouthed biker assholes—his brothers, one way or another, even if they weren’t Deacons—with their dirty bandannas and their gnarly beards and their greedy eyes that crawled all over her. Her bare arms, that glimpse of leg, the line of her neck, and the hint of her tits. Her hair twisted back like that and those delicate wings stretching out across her shoulders from beneath the straps of her black dress, tempting more than one motherfucker with a death wish to reach out and touch.

No one had, which was more to do with leftover respect for Priest than with Ajax, he was all too aware—and that was something he needed to change.

Because one thing was perfectly clear to him, if nothing else, and he’d accepted that when she’d used his road name—his
real
name—at the grave site. Sophie was his.

His
.

That truth had beat at him like a drum, pounding in his head and his veins and his cock, making it hard to do what he needed to do as the long, shitty day wore on and he had to live up to the responsibilities his president had left in his hands.

Got to talk to the lawyer about the legal bullshit tomorrow,
he’d told the various Deacons and anyone else who’d poked at him about the future of the bar and the strip joint and the club itself.
No point talking about what happens next until then.

And now, finally, he was climbing those back stairs at last, nothing on his mind but the sweet embrace of the Mississippi delta fall night and getting his hands on his woman again.

He’d never wanted a woman like this. He’d never wanted to own one. Claim one. But he’d never met a woman like Sophie before.

He was something like
desperate
and Ajax had no place to put that. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t who he was. But it was who he was with her.

And he didn’t have it in him to fight that. Not when he could have her instead.

He was in her bedroom then, with no memory of getting from the stairs outside to her doorway. Sophie jolted up from where she’d already been sound asleep, clapping a hand over her chest like she was holding her heart inside. But when her sleepy eyes met his, she blinked, as if whatever she saw on his face calmed her.

Or maybe it was just that she saw him, he thought, and he liked the idea of that a little too much.

“What happened?” she asked. She dropped her hand from her heart but fuck if his didn’t start kicking at him. “What’s wrong?”

Ajax didn’t know how to answer her. He didn’t know what the hell was happening to him. Only that she was too far away and he couldn’t take it. Not one second more.

She knelt up as he moved closer to the bed. She was wearing nothing but one of those little tanks of hers and a lacy, stretchy pair of panties that made her hips look like candy. And he was hard and he needed her and he wanted things he’d never, ever imagined he’d want.

Ajax wanted everything.

He wanted to hear her voice all the time, smoky and haughty and smartass and
his
. He wanted her to grip him the way she had on his bike today and at the funeral, like he was the only thing between her and the edge of a steep cliff. He wanted to smell her, her shampoo and her soap and that rougher, sweeter scent of woman and sex between her legs. He couldn’t get enough of her taste, her mouth and her skin and her cunt. He wanted to lose himself inside her. He wanted to sleep with her and fuck her and wake up with her and do it all over again, and he’d never wanted anything like that, ever. Maybe a second fuck, sure, because talented pussy was worth hitting a few times. But nothing else. Nothing that veered a little too close to
domestication
for his peace of mind.

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 sucked 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.