Make You Burn is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Loveswept eBook Original
Copyright © 2015 by Megan Crane
Excerpt from Fire Me Up by Rachael Johns copyright © 2015 by Rachael Johns
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Fire Me Up by Rachael Johns. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
eBook ISBN 9781101884676
Cover design: Okay Creations
Cover photograph: CURAphotography/Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Dedication
About the Author
The Editor’s Corner
Excerpt from Fire Me Up
Chapter 1
She was an accident waiting to happen.
To him, if he had anything to say about it. And he usually did.
Sean Harding—who answered only to his biker road name, Ajax, and he could count the number of times he’d had to correct someone about that on one hand—figured she was his own fucked-up “welcome back” card after ten years of exile from the only home he’d ever known.
And as welcomes went, she’d do.
She was a lick of sweet sugar on a sweaty Louisiana afternoon like this one, still hot as hell in early October. She wore tight and sparkling gold hot pants that made her fine ass into a kind of bayou music, sexy and dark. She walked in high, high heels that showed off long legs made to wrap tight around a man’s back while he fucked them both through the nearest wall. She had on a giant, golden feather headdress that moved when she did, a glittery mask across her eyes in case he’d forgotten he was back in the great and gritty pageant of New Orleans and all its masquerades, and most important, she wore nothing but tasseled gold pasties on her perfect, mouthwatering tits.
None of which would have been worthy of notice or comment after dark on Bourbon Street, in all its edgy commotion and the enveloping, inviting sin from every side, but it was high noon on a goddamned Tuesday and she was moving gracefully in and out of groups of tourists in pastels and fanny packs who were still sober enough to keep their hands to themselves—if not their eyes. Or their cameras.
Home sweet fucking home, Ajax thought in a hard kind of satisfaction, following the twitch of her ass as she sauntered straight down the center of dirty, dangerous, sometimes magical Bourbon Street in the direction of the Priory, the bar that had once been the center of his entire world. Almost like she knew he was heading there now, and was leading him home like the horny, not-too-bright but clearly exhibitionist stripper he sincerely hoped she was.
Well. It had been home until ten years ago, when Priest, the only version of a father Ajax had ever acknowledged, much less respected, had issued the order that changed everything. And Ajax might have told his actual, biological father to go fuck himself—a message he’d backed up with his fists, a piece of rebar, and his first arrest for assault when he’d been all of fourteen—but Priest had been the president of the Deacons of Bourbon Street Motorcycle Club and Ajax didn’t defy his MC’s orders. He’d been the VP, a position he’d fucking earned. He’d obeyed and enforced his president’s orders, even the ones he didn’t like, because they’d been good for the club and that was the only thing that had mattered to him.
It still was.
Even if that kind of blood loyalty meant he’d had to leave his beloved club, his brothers, and his city behind in the wake of a bullshit deal gone bad, all part of Priest’s attempts to bring the once-outlaw MC over to the right side of the law. Less hassle, more money, Priest had said, and Ajax had backed him.
Ajax had always backed Priest. He’d taken an oath to the Deacons when he was sixteen, the youngest full member ever to be patched into the club, and he’d meant every word. He was a man whose oaths were inked into his skin, his promises visible art he had carved into his body, proudly. He didn’t break his fucking promises.
He believed in the life he’d chosen. Even if he’d been exiled from that life for the past ten years.
But now Priest was dead. And that changed everything. It had brought Ajax home at last. He’d been on his bike and headed east from Houston within an hour of getting that call from the Deacons’ old lawyer.
He hadn’t particularly enjoyed the life he’d crafted for himself since he’d left New Orleans. Ajax had been an excellent mercenary, mostly because he hadn’t given much of a shit if he survived an operation. And maybe because of that, he and the outfit he’d worked for were damned good at what they did. Sometimes they’d acted as security for shady motherfuckers who wanted the nuclear option at their fingertips should shit fall apart, which it often did. Sometimes they’d operated as their own form of Special Forces for assholes who could afford to buy their own personal armies. They sold their services to the highest bidder and they didn’t ask any questions. It was nothing Ajax hadn’t done in one form or another for his club, but it wasn’t his club.
It was never his club.
Mercenary work was a collection of dangerous men who happened to band together and might at any moment shoot one another in the back if shit went down that way, never a brotherhood. Never any kind of family.
Never a cause Ajax would consider wearing on his own skin.
Ajax had always intended to return to his home and his club one day. Preferably by riding his shit-kicking Dyna, black as sin and a hundred times louder, straight into the heart of the French Quarter with his cut on his back and his middle finger held high. But ten years of working as a hired gun in some of the world’s least hospitable places—worse, even, than the shithole shack out in the bayou where he’d been born and beaten on by his drunk asshole of a father for his first fourteen years—had taught him the value of reconnaissance and restraint. Or anyway, how to fake it when it suited him.
Thinking about ancient history and all the grief that went along with it pissed him off.
And when Ajax got pissed off, he fought or he fucked until he felt right again, and not always in that order.
So when Miss Gold Hot Pants pushed her way past a pack of drooling engineer-types, all chinos and narrow shoulders, to enter the Priory, Ajax decided it was a sign. He could keep his grief and his fury to himself. And he wouldn’t mind a quick, hot, satisfying bang in the Priory toilets to take the edge off the only version of mourning he’d allow himself, before he got down to business. It wouldn’t be the first time.