Authors: Megan Crane
Sophie blinked. “I didn’t think you’d answer that. Much less admit it.”
“Was that you saying no down there?” he asked quietly. “I couldn’t hear it over the sound of you shooting off that mouth of yours and then coming apart in my hands. My bad.”
She nodded. “Of course. Why am I surprised that you’re terrible?”
A crook of those lips, hotter somehow with that dark gold beard of his to frame them. “You’re not surprised that I’m terrible. You’re surprised that you like it.”
Sophie refused to think about that little bomb that felt an awful lot like truth. She crossed her arms and winced when the movement dragged her tank top over her sensitive nipples, and he saw that, she was sure he did. She didn’t think he missed a thing.
“You didn’t answer my question. You could have made your calls downstairs, in the street, or wherever the hell you’re staying. You didn’t have to break into my house.”
Ajax’s mouth curved. “You think I broke in?”
“I know I locked the door.” She was Priest Lombard’s daughter and this was New Orleans, not Disneyland. “I always lock the door.”
“I have a key.”
“You disappeared ten years ago. You kept your key?”
He didn’t reply, and she didn’t feel like another trip down memory lane. Back to when she’d been a curious teenager with a strict father and he’d been so beautiful his smile made the gargoyles weep. Back when she’d had to awkwardly navigate around this house with him always underfoot, always oozing that deadly, feral charm of his all over the kitchen table, but never at her. Back when Ajax had been her father’s confidant in a way she never was and now never could be—there was no point thinking about any of that. It only made that raw thing inside her worse.
“Well, you can’t stay here. You’re not actually my brother, despite the way my father treated you. You don’t have any right to come rolling in here like you’re
my
family and I have some obligation to put you up.”
“Never thought I was your brother, babe.”
That took on a different shade of meaning, given what had happened between them downstairs, but she couldn’t focus on that just yet. Or maybe ever.
“Sophie.” And that blue gaze of his was serious then. “I was his family, if not yours. You know that.”
He didn’t ask her what her plan was, because, of course, he didn’t have to. If he refused to leave, what could she do? There was no forcing him. And Lombards didn’t call the cops.
Are you really this person?
she asked herself tightly.
Ajax was his favorite. Are you really going to shit all over that because you’re jealous?
The funeral would be later this week, she assumed. Next week at the latest. Then all of these things she wanted gone from her life would fade back into the shadows and the gutters where they belonged, Ajax along with them. She could deal with him for a few days, surely. She could deal with anything for a few days.
“I made the third bedroom into a yoga studio,” she gritted out, which wasn’t entirely true. She’d once done a yoga DVD in there, yes. But she was hoping the idea might horrify him straight down to his adamantly anti-hippie soul. “It’s not really a guest room anymore.”
Ajax did something with his mouth and those gleaming blue eyes of his, where he grinned at her and even laughed a little bit without actually doing either one of those things, and she felt that like he was on her again, hard against her, so hard it made her shiver deep inside.
“I tell you what. You want to come on in and tie yourself into knots on the floor and then show me all the ways you’re as flexible as you are hot, I won’t complain.”
She made a low, frustrated noise, and forgot her half-formed good intention to stop being a jealous little brat. Only partly because he’d had that heat in his voice when he’d said that, and it could hardly be a part of her grief process she planned to excuse away if she kept doing it, could it?
“Maybe I just don’t want you here. Does that matter to you?”
“Probably not the way you want it to.”
She started to speak but he rose then, shoving his phone in his pocket and then raking his dark blond hair back from his face, and he looked exactly like the man he was. A cool, tough outlaw who did as he pleased. And Sophie was just one more example of the collateral damage men like him stacked up along the way. Her entire existence was a monument to the hard life and hard choices of one more self-professed outlaw who’d died before his time. She wanted to slap the living one in front of her across his face.
Ajax’s eyes narrowed, and she realized she’d stepped toward him with her hands in fists.
Not smart.
“You looking for something to regret, Sophie? You’re not gonna like what happens if you swing at me. I were you, I’d tell me what your fucking problem is instead.”
“Aside from the fact I have to go to the morgue and identify my father’s body right now, you mean?” she threw at him, like bullets, and she almost wished they were. Almost. “Nothing. No problem at all. How weird that I might want to come back here and cry myself to sleep in peace!”
That shit definitely wasn’t happening, but Ajax didn’t want to argue with her about it in the old apartment, where he could feel the ghost of the only man he’d ever considered a father figure all around him, sharp and real. Waiting for Ajax to step up and be a man, he was sure of it, especially after failing so spectacularly downstairs. He could almost hear Priest’s gravelly, pissed-off voice issuing that very order.
And Ajax had the distinct feeling he wasn’t going to keep his hands off Sophie Lombard the way he probably should, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her deal with the fucking morgue.
He waited in silence for her to finish dressing. She stalked over to the door and stamped her feet into very black, very butch motorcycle boots, swiping up her keys in one hand and shaking out her damp, wavy hair with the other, like that might dry it faster down here in the delta where nothing was ever really dry. Ajax didn’t let himself think too much about how smoking hot she looked in a pair of jeans plastered all over that ass of hers or that stretchy little tank top that hugged those juicy tits in front and let her tattooed wings peek out in back. Or those boots that he deeply appreciated because when she moved they gave her hips a little swagger that made him really, really want to get those hips and all the rest of that soft, curvy body of hers beneath him.
No point thinking about these things when it didn’t matter, and it definitely didn’t matter where they were going right now.
Even then his dick, that fucking asshole, took a little more convincing.
They walked down to the edge of the French Quarter to get a taxi, and she frowned at him like he was an animal she’d expected to gnaw on her leg when he held the door for her.
“I’m a southern man, Sophie,” he gritted out at her. “I can hold a goddamned door.”
“I assumed bikers did that with their dicks,” she said sweetly. “Usually because they’re so busy swinging them around wherever they go.”
“Sophie.”
“Sean.”
“Get the fuck in the cab.”
He told himself not to think too much about how he could have dealt with that mouth of hers if they’d been heading pretty much anywhere else on earth. So he sprawled out there in the back of the cab and he tried to ignore the heavy caress of her shampoo scenting the air. And the way she sat there, that tight body of hers inches away from him, as the taxi poked its way into the gritty, sweltering heart of New Orleans.
Outside the French Quarter, the Big Easy was a different city altogether. Tougher and far less touristy. And everywhere he looked, he saw remnants of that cunt of a storm that had crushed this place and him, too, ten years ago. The genteel decay that had always marked this fanciful place, built pretty to hide too many secrets and the dark, lush embrace of the waiting bayou beyond, was far more obvious now. Whole blocks were razed in some places while many of the buildings that still stood were missing big chunks, and entire neighborhoods all these years later were almost unrecognizable to a man who had once had the whole of the Crescent City mapped out in his head like the tattoos on his own flesh.
She was broken and she was beautiful, his high-class Creole whore of a hometown. Creeping vines and streetcar poetry, cracks in the sidewalks and zydeco in the thick air. This was home.
The taxi pulled up outside their destination and Ajax growled at Sophie when she tried to pay for it. She sniffed in reply, and he let that go, too. He climbed out after her and waited while she stopped and glared ahead of them at the building that housed the morgue.
“It’s okay,” he said, and he didn’t know what to do with the urge to comfort her that worked its way through him then. He’d never felt anything like it before.
“I didn’t ask you to come here and pretend to give a shit about me,” she snapped back at him. Of course she did. “You’re here for my father, as always. I don’t need to be patronized.”
And Ajax was at a fucking morgue with the daughter of the man he’d respected the most in the world, so he sucked that the fuck up.
But when she marched forward like a force of nature only to stop dead yet again, this time with her hand on the door and that lost look on her face again, he’d had enough. He pulled her away from the entrance and he turned her to face him with his hands on her shoulders, his fingers brushing against the tips of those delicate wings inked deep into her skin.
“You got something you need to prove with this?”
“Of course I don’t have anything to prove and could you
please
not be such a
dick
for even one second—”
“Why the fuck do you want to go in there and see this shit?” he demanded, his voice harder than it should have been, scraping out of him and into the afternoon around them. “What the hell is that gonna do? He wouldn’t want you anywhere near him like this and you know it.” He gripped her harder, tugged her closer. “You know it.”
“He’s my father.” Her voice cracked, but she kept her chin high and she was looking at him hard, like she was afraid she’d break down if she looked away or gave herself a break. “I’m his daughter. I…have to identity him. I owe him that.”
“I’m his second-in-command,” Ajax said gruffly, like the soldier he hadn’t been in a long time, and he didn’t understand what was happening here. That sheen in her green eyes that was doing shit to his head. That thing wrapped tight around him, pulling hard, making his ribs ache. He couldn’t remember ever standing around with a woman he badly wanted to fuck, feeling something else entirely. He didn’t like it. “This my job. Let me do it.”
He walked differently when he came out of the morgue, Sophie thought. Straighter, maybe, like he’d taken a few hits in there. Harder, like they still hurt.
She pushed off the side of the building where she’d been waiting and met him, and she hadn’t truly understood until that moment how much she’d been holding out that tiny, wistful kernel of hope that the police had been mistaken. That this was all a big misunderstanding and her dad was off on a bender somewhere, too lost in cheap bourbon and loose women to bother calling home. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
But Ajax looked at her, his face utterly expressionless. His mouth was a tough, stern line and there was an awful gleam in his blue eyes. And Sophie understood that there was no escaping this.
It was happening. It was real.
Lombards didn’t cry—in public, anyway—so she stood there and held that hard look of his, no matter how it hurt her. It was the only vigil she could keep.
Ajax reached over and fit his tough hand against her cheek, with a careful sort of strength that struck her as far more tender than it probably should have, and then he held it there. Her heart thudded hard and her stomach twisted into a bulky knot. Tears spiked, in her chest and her nose and behind her eyes, no matter how she tried to blink them back. Sophie held on to his hand with her own, those brash rings of his warm and hard beneath her fingers and the strength in his palm harder still, and she’d never know how long they stood like that.
There was nothing to say. She appreciated that Ajax didn’t try.
The October afternoon heaved on around them. People walked into the building and then out again, letting out a blast of ice-cold air-conditioning every time the doors swung open. She could hear cars chugging past in the street. There were magnolia blossoms and the scent of sweet olive in the air, mixed in with asphalt and the heat, the usual city perfume. Everything was perfectly, horribly normal in all directions, except her father was in a bag somewhere and the man standing in front of her had terrible bruises in his gaze.
He swallowed, and she wondered if that was his version of the sobbing, tearing, expanding rawness she could feel beating against her chest and battering at the backs of her eyes. She didn’t think it would ever stop.
She didn’t see how it could.
“Come on,” he said, and his voice was lower than she remembered it. It was a rough bass line she could feel inside of her, vibrating against her sternum and then radiating out until it hit her toes. “Let’s get out of here.”
He didn’t speak more than a couple of words to the next taxi driver until they made it to the street where he’d parked his car, some beige sedan with Louisiana plates that surprised the hell out of her. Ajax didn’t strike her as the kind of man who would condescend to drive a mediocre car, when forced to drive a car at all.
“Nice car,” she said, and maybe that was why he didn’t hold her door for her this time. She told herself she didn’t care either way. “Have you been in Louisiana all these years?”
“Texas, mostly.” He slid her a cool blue look. “And don’t fucking insult me. This embarrassing piece of shit is not mine.”
And she didn’t want to think. She certainly didn’t want to feel. So she climbed in and let him drive them away, out of New Orleans and into the thick green countryside. She didn’t ask where they were headed. She didn’t ask why. She had that raw, swollen hollow inside of her, so she curled herself around it and tried to get used to the unwieldy, impossible weight of it.
Ajax drove fast, like he thought he could outrun it.
They moved through the lowlands, brown here and lush there, gnarled old trees and sullen waterways. They crossed the great, muddy expanse of the Mississippi River on the far side of Baton Rouge before he turned off the interstate and headed into the swamps. Sophie rested her head against her window and let the magic of a bayou sunset wash over her, purples and oranges and plump clouds woven in and out of the sunken trees like minor benedictions. And Ajax sat beside her, big and tough and strong enough to make the whole world and even that grief gnawing at her insides feel small in comparison, and even more, let her imagine that she wasn’t completely alone in the world now.
He let her mourn in peace and she held that close, like the imprint of his tough hand with those heavy rings against her cheek.
She saw the lights of the building before they came to it, glimmering at the end of a long stretch of the only flat road etched into miles of swampland in all directions. Sophie had never been to this place before, but she recognized it for exactly what it was on sight. She knew it by the Harleys lined up in front, each one of them gleaming and in pristine condition as the car’s headlights bounced over the long row of them, in marked contrast to the dilapidated-looking warehouse that rose up behind them. There were no particular markings anywhere that she could see, nothing announcing what this place was to the untrained eye, but that didn’t matter.
Sophie knew a biker clubhouse when she saw one.
And had all those clues failed to register, she certainly would have recognized the men who sauntered up to the car as Ajax parked it. She didn’t know them personally, she didn’t think, but again, that wasn’t necessary. She knew that low, dangerous walk. She knew the hard gazes that tracked the car and the people inside it. She knew those leather vests they all wore over their T-shirts and sweatshirts, covered in the patches that laid out the stories of who they were. She knew the tattoos that covered their arms and necks and hands. She knew the rings they wore that looked a lot like Ajax’s, and probably for the same purpose: of kicking that much ass, that much harder. She recognized the loose pants riding low on their hips that could conceal the weapons they almost certainly had tucked away, even now.
And she’d have known exactly what they were without all those signs, she thought. Wolves who masqueraded as men were still wolves in khaki shorts and polo shirts, with or without tattoos. This life was imprinted on their faces, their bodies, the way they moved through the world and surrounded the car. And it was imprinted in her brain, too.
Ajax didn’t speak as he turned off the engine. Sophie didn’t question him. He slid that cool blue look her way, and she imagined she felt it like another touch of his big, battered hands, and then he climbed out of the car. She heard the low rumbles of male voices that she identified in an instant as friendly, and then she watched the complicated rituals of masculinity performed before her in a series of intricate handshakes and shoulder bumps, man to man.
Sophie followed him more slowly, feeling the sultry bayou air slide over her skin like a caress as she got out and shut her door. She waited there, content to lean a hip against the car and watch the men from a safe distance. Because this wasn’t the Priory, where being Priest’s daughter had given her a certain amount of insulation in any given situation. And she didn’t see any other women around, which could mean any number of things either way. Better to hang back and wait and potentially be thought shy than rush in, cause some insult or misunderstanding, and then have to worry about unpleasant consequences.
The last hint of light was disappearing into the inky black bayou sky and she thought that meant something, as she watched it go. One whole day had passed without her father in the world. The first in all her life. She felt the loss of him hard, deep in that empty hollow she thought she was going to have to find a way to get used to, vibrating there in her gut. Raw and electric.
Grief,
she thought. It felt like the weight of the whole southern sky, pressing her down into the rich and fertile earth below. She wanted to lie down under it. She wanted to let it win.
She heard her father’s name, like a kind of whisper on the night’s scant breeze, but she didn’t look around until she heard Ajax say hers.
“This is his daughter,” he told the men standing around him, jerking his chin toward her. “Sophie.”
Sophie nodded a greeting, still on her side of the car. The men started toward the building, but she waited until Ajax, in conversation with the one she’d picked out at a glance as a club officer—young to be president, she thought, though it was probably only a matter of time if he wasn’t already—beckoned her over to him with a seemingly casual curl of his fingers.
Ajax didn’t look at her as she obeyed. He held his arm out and headed toward the building as if he planned to shepherd her through the door. He was still involved in his conversation and she thought he’d drop his arm when she drew close. He did, but not at his side. Ajax draped his big arm loosely around her shoulders instead, anchoring her close beside him.
And there was absolutely no need for a wild, bubbly joy to burst open inside of her at that, searing through her limbs and pooling hot and low in her belly.
Sophie knew that this was, at best, an indication of those inconsistent southern manners Ajax had mentioned earlier. Maybe a show of respect to her father. It could certainly mean nothing to him that she was wrapped up in him then, the heavy weight of that sculpted arm hot and heavy over her shoulders and the rest of him sleek and solid, almost too close to bear. That she could smell him again, and this time, that clean male scent brought back those moments in the Priory, Ajax rocking hard between her thighs and the whole world disappearing into that rough magic he’d woven so easily around her.
This was biker politics, nothing more. She knew it, told herself she hated it even if she understood it, but there it was.
Unattached, unclaimed women who wandered into rough and tumble biker clubhouses like this one, way out here with nothing but swamp in all directions, could expect a significantly earthier sort of welcome than one who walked in tangled up with Ajax. Sophie said nothing, because that was the smart move, and there was nothing to be gained by acting dumb in a place like this. Only a whole hell of a lot to lose.
She walked with him, telling herself she didn’t notice how easy it was to match his pace, as if they were tuned in to each other when she knew it was really a matter of biology and stride, not fate.
You dumbass.
She took in the club logo she thought she vaguely recognized on the back of the man in front of her that read
D
EVIL’S
K
EEPERS
. She let Ajax usher her inside as if he spent a lot of time walking around with her snuggled up next to him like one of his bitches.
Sophie ruthlessly stamped out the little spark of temper that ignited deep inside of her, and shoved her hands in her pockets. This wasn’t the place to get into all her complicated feelings. About bikers and their clubs and their stupid fucking rules. About this particular biker next to her, who buzzed with a particular kind of power that even all these hard, dangerous men recognized. Ajax was lit up with it. They were all scary and threatening but he was something more than that, and it was obvious.
Ajax is the High King of Threats,
a little voice whispered inside of her, like a taunt.
And how many daddy issues do you have that you think that’s hot?
There was nothing in Sophie that wanted to answer that. She concentrated on what was happening around her instead.
The warehouse they walked into was no different than all the other ones she’d been in over the course of her twenty-eight years, though as the daughter Priest had tried to shelter from the life in his inconsistent way, she’d never been at a clubhouse like this one unless it had been a planned family event. Old ladies and kids everywhere, various and sundry friends of the club in attendance, sometimes curious civilians along with them. Picnics and barbecues and wholesome games out in the yard. Catch and corn hole and horseshoes. Like
Sesame Street
in studded leather.
It was the peculiar dichotomy of the biker life, she was well aware—family men when it suited them and evil fucking bastards when it didn’t.
And here in the Devil’s Keepers’ clubhouse in the middle of nowhere, it was definitely not family night.
She looked around while trying to appear as if she wasn’t looking too closely at anything in particular, a skill she’d picked up a long time ago while growing up in the French Quarter. There was a big central area that the brothers clearly used as their hangout space and was, to her mind, decorated like a very lethal version of a fraternity house. There was a bar on one side of the room that she imagined prospects or the girls were expected to tend at the brothers’ whim, couches everywhere to facilitate a lot of hanging out around a few TVs and a couple of pool tables, and then a hallway that went off toward the back. That would likely lead to their offices if they had a legitimate business connected to this warehouse, bedrooms if the brothers wanted to stay here or fuck here or both, and no doubt whatever space they used for church, the full-patch-members-only meetings most biker clubs held at regular intervals. The building across the back courtyard from the Priory had been the Deacons’ clubhouse while Sophie was growing up, and she’d seen perhaps a bit more of what had gone on there than she should have—certainly more than Priest would have liked. These days, the once sacred Deacons’ clubhouse contained an eclectic art gallery.
She had to bite back her smile at that—and more, at what Ajax’s reaction was likely to be when he discovered that small fact.
“I’ll tell him you’re here,” the man who’d led them in told Ajax. Which meant he wasn’t the president after all. She focused on his cut.
S
ERGEANT AT
A
RMS
.
“He’ll want to pay his respects.”
“Appreciate that,” Ajax said in that low rumble of his.
The man looked at Sophie then. He didn’t introduce himself. She suspected that he was rarely in situations where he wasn’t instantly known. He nodded at her, his gray eyes grim.
“I knew your dad,” he said gruffly. “He was a good man.”
“Thank you,” she replied, surprised to find she meant it. “He was.”
Ajax didn’t let go of her when the other man walked away. He steered her across the room, headed for the bar, and Sophie knew enough to keep her expression neutral as they navigated the typical nighttime detritus of a place like this.