And the fact he wasn’t, that he’d been content to have this woman rub him like a fucking house cat when there were whores all around him, was like throwing himself headfirst into an ice bath.

“I’ve been hard as fuck all day and this dick isn’t going to suck itself,” he told her. Just this side of vicious, and he adjusted his aching cock in his jeans as emphasis. “Do I look like one of your pussy boyfriends, who’s gonna roll with that for six months in the hope you eventually put out?”

And still he couldn’t make himself look away from Sophie Lombard’s big, sad, knowing eyes that were twisting shit up inside of him like he’d taken shrapnel to the side. Repeatedly.

“No,” she said very quietly. Almost sadly, damn her. “You don’t look like a boyfriend at all. You look like exactly who you are.”

—

Ajax’s gaze went arctic, and the effects of that shot through Sophie like a sudden, serious drop in temperature. Like instant winter somewhere far to the north of sweaty Louisiana. She thought her teeth might chatter.

He didn’t answer her. Not with words. He grabbed her upper arm, hauled her off her stool and onto her feet with that offhanded strength of his that made her stomach flip over in sheer, feminine delight, then started towing her across the clubhouse floor.

That was less delightful, but she wasn’t foolish enough to try to shake him off. It wouldn’t work, for one thing, and even if it did, what was her plan then? Shake off Ajax and look around this place for allies who might help her make her way home? Now that they’d been partying for a while and were all wolf smiles and hot, greedy eyes? She wasn’t a fucking idiot.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. Or possibly it was a demand, in that particular, not exactly polite tone.

Be careful, she warned herself. This is not a safe place, and next to Ajax, it looks like a convent.

He glared at her. He took his time with it, making sure she felt it everywhere. Making sure she wasn’t laboring under the impression that the softer version of him she might have glimpsed here and there over the course of the day was still around anywhere. Asshole.

“I need to fuck,” he growled at her. “You want to do something about that, I’m good to go. I can fuck you right here, and happily. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told.”

She felt a thumping mess of things all at once at that, as she assumed was his intention. Temper. Humiliation. Hurt. That shameless stirring deep inside of her, that she wanted to fuck him, right here. Anywhere. And pure fury at being talked to that way when he knew she couldn’t haul off and hit him or disrespect him at all in front of these men who would take unkindly to that sort of display. She was sure she was glaring back at him with murder in her eyes, and she meant it.

But beneath all of that, and much louder, was something else. The bone-deep certainty that this was Ajax hurting. That this was how he handled it. Hurt and pain and confusion. Men like him didn’t analyze their feelings and talk them out in safe spaces with careful words. They went to bars, not therapists. They were far more stripped down, like the dangerous machines they’d built their lives around. They rode rough or not at all. That was just the deal.

If she’d been his old lady, she would have fucked him then and there. Because that was how a biker bitch handled her man when he talked egregious shit he probably didn’t even mean. She’d watched that particular dynamic play out a thousand times when she was a girl. Hell, she’d seen far too much of her own father dealing with his emotions the biker way, especially over the past few years with a selection of giggly blond sluts. She knew she could handle one pissed-off Deacon and whatever was eating him at the moment—

But she wasn’t his old lady.

And how many times had Sophie sworn to herself that she’d never be anyone’s old lady? That she wanted other things for her life, maybe a goddamn parade of pussy boyfriends and the exact relationship Ajax had laid out for her, thank you very much. It didn’t matter what her life looked like, as long as it didn’t look like this.

So she didn’t say a fucking word. As ordered.

Ajax’s big, tough hand clenched hard around her arm, and it almost hurt, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of squealing about it like a little bitch. She only cocked her head to one side and waited. Daring him.

To go harder. To make it really hurt. To step up, if he was throwing down.

She knew exactly how to play this game, and she could see the knowledge of that glitter there, like a warning in his too blue eyes.

He muttered something under his breath, and God only knew how hideous it must have been given the things he felt comfortable saying straight to her, and then he was moving again, dragging her through the gauntlet of goodbyes and straight on out of the warehouse at last.

She could breathe again, out in the warm bayou night, the air full of salt and the earthy, musky scent of the swamp. Plants and flowers and lush, green things.

Ajax held on to her for a moment too long, peering down into her face with his jaw set hard and that knife-edged glitter in his eyes, but then he let her go.

And Sophie didn’t know what that feeling was that rushed through her then. She called it relief, but it was too dark. Too heavy.

It felt a whole lot more like regret.

She fished her phone out of her pocket and checked her messages while Ajax stalked over to his black Harley. She felt disoriented by the familiar markers of her real life while she was so far away from it, off in another world with a man she hardly knew in this new, harder incarnation, acting the part she’d never meant to play while the life she knew carried on without her. Her bar manager had arrived at the usual time and was taking care of business. Some drunk fool had knocked himself out trying to launch himself through one of the windows of the art gallery, but no worries, the Australian woman who ran the gallery assured her, the window was fine. The idiot had been taken off to the hospital for a saline drip and some stitches.

Just a random Tuesday night on Bourbon Street, Sophie thought, and she almost smiled at that, but then the next message started playing. She froze.

“What is it?” Ajax’s question came immediately, as if he’d sensed the change in her from five feet away.

She could still hear that simmering fury in his voice, and she could see it in every line of his body as he straddled his bike and pulled on his riding gloves with deliberate jerks, but none of that mattered. She let the hand holding the phone drop to her side and could hear the tinny sound of whoever had called next, talking to her thigh.

“That was the funeral home. They have a date and time and…he…”

She shook her head. She refused to cry, damn it, not even out here in the dark where no one could see her, but that took a minute. That took breathing deep through her nose and pressing her tongue to the roof of her mouth and waiting for that hitching thing in her chest to fade.

Ajax took a minute to speak and when he did, his voice was lower.

“When?”

Sophie shoved her phone back into her pocket and that took a certain amount of finesse and a few breaths, and then she pushed her hair out of her face and she blinked away the blurriness.

“Friday.”

Ajax took that in, sitting back on his bike, his feet on the ground. His head dropped forward, just a little, and she wondered how he did it. How he stayed so hard all the time, like he was indistinguishable from the metal machine he sat on. All roar and steel. Nothing inside to love, so nothing to hurt. Safe and fast and free.

But she studied that bend in his neck, maybe the most vulnerable she’d ever seen him, and she knew that wasn’t true. It might be what he wanted, what they all wanted, from this life of theirs. It might even be what he told himself. None of that made it true.