“Call me that again,” he suggested, in what he considered a friendly manner given the insult she’d just thrown at him, though he wasn’t entirely surprised when Tulane backed away from him in a wide-eyed rush, “and I might be the last thing you ever see.”

“Let me guess,” she replied, “you spent all this time in charm school?” Was it his imagination that she sat taller on her stool, then arched her back just enough to make those tits stick out a little farther? Like she was trying to fuck with him? “Between you and me, you might think about asking for your money back. I don’t think it took.”

He forgot who she was for a moment, forgot the respect she was owed because of her father. He grinned at her instead, the way he would any other bitch who got in his face like that, flinging down challenges from across a public bar like he was some dickless frat boy. Ajax had always had a pretty face. No one tended to notice it much after the first time he grinned at them like that, though.

“No need to resort to all this flirting, baby,” he told her softly. “If you want to hop on and ride my dick, just ask.”

Sophie smiled at him, and it was not a nice smile. It was all the proof he needed that she wasn’t that sweet little girl he remembered—and that he was a sick fuck, because it fascinated him to see she had her father’s fangs when she felt like showing them. He wanted them sunk in his neck. He wanted her to draw blood.

He wanted her, bad.

“Noted,” she said in that snooty drawl of hers that, thanks to battalions of nuns over the years, sounded more like high-class Georgia than the Louisiana swamps that had made them both. Sophie Lombard, the pampered little princess of the Deacons MC, all grown up and bitchy besides. He couldn’t believe it. Much less the way she waved a hand at him, dismissively, which pissed him off—but in no way lessened his desire to get a taste of her. Soon. “Now get the fuck out of my bar.”

—

The demon incarnate laughed.

He lounged there at her bar like it was his, far too beautiful and much too dangerous, like he was still her father’s favorite weapon and it was still ten years ago, when that might have mattered.

And he laughed.

Like Sophie was still a little girl, beholden to the lawless whims and half-assed schemes of men like him, battered and rough and wild straight through, unfit for society and unwilling to change even a goddamned inch. No matter who it hurt.

He was just like her father. But her father was dead and Ajax didn’t belong here. Not anymore.

Her father. Grief and loss and that familiar, hopeless fury lashed at her like the business edge of a Louisiana rainstorm, but she beat it back. Not here. Not now.

Lombards kept their tears to themselves. No matter what it cost them. And it didn’t matter that Sophie was tired of paying that particular tax. She was still a Lombard. Her father had depended on her. The more he’d retreated into his backroom office these last few years, the more he’d left the bar and everything else in her hands, the more she’d showed him she could live up to his notion of what it meant to be a Lombard, even if she hadn’t been a member of his club of assholes and degenerates.

She’d been more than that. She’d been his blood.

I’ll always take care of you, he’d told her a million times, especially when he’d been drunk. You’re my blood, angel.

Sophie thought that meant more than a gang tattoo and a few Harleys. It had, to her. She kept telling herself it had meant more to him, too.

But then Ajax stopped laughing, and that was worse.

“You should mind your fucking manners, Sophie,” he said quietly. Much too quietly.

To someone who didn’t know him, he probably sounded about as friendly as a huge, built, flint-eyed guy with that many tattoos and that particular way of carrying himself—like a threat on a very short leash—could sound.

Sophie knew better, and not only because she could see the impossible blue of his eyes.

“Or what?” she asked, making herself sound as bored as possible.

Behind the bar, poor Danielle was staring at her as if Sophie had lost her mind. Maybe she had. Maybe that was what this thing inside her was.

It had started when the police had turned up yesterday to tell her the news. That finally, impossibly, Theodore “Priest” Lombard, legendary president of the Deacons of Bourbon Street Motorcycle Club and Sophie’s only family in the world, had taken one fast turn too many on his beloved Harley. It had fused into the crazy urge she’d had to wander the Quarter dressed like this, hiding her grief and her loss and her urge to lie down in the fetal position somewhere and never get up again in plain, gold-pastied sight.

And then Ajax had rolled into the Priory like he’d never been away. The gritty old bar was the only thing she had left of her father and the only thing that was really hers anyway after all these years of running it by herself. And here came Ajax with all of that old biker shit clinging to that ruthless body of his—and so much like her father it hurt Sophie to look at him—and that thing inside her had simply…imploded.

If she stopped running her mouth, she didn’t know what would become of her.

Maybe she’d die, too.

She could feel Ajax’s gaze on her like a touch, a little bit dirty and very, very thorough, and she was fiercely glad she was practically naked. Men were simple and bikers were even more elemental than that. He’d be a lot more likely to look at her exposed skin than the pulse she could feel doing backflips and assorted acrobatics in her neck and her wrists and deep between her legs. It would give her away in an instant if he could jerk his attention from her tits, but why would a guy like Ajax do a thing like that?

But even as she thought that, his gaze met hers again. It was hard and shrewd, and she felt a little chill of something too much like foreboding creep down her exposed spine.

“Or I might lose my patience with you, little girl. You want to see what happens then, say the word.”

She’d lost her father and she’d loved that man, for all that he’d been infuriating, hypocritical, secretive, and wholly incapable of grasping that she was a grown woman who didn’t need his permission to do as she pleased. It was beside the point that she’d wanted his approval anyway. That she’d tried to take the place of all his lost brothers over the years, as if running this bar better than he ever had could bridge that gap. Still, she’d thought she’d done it. He’d even thanked her, in his typically gruff way. This place would sink without you, he’d told her one whiskey-infused evening when he’d been feeling uncharacteristically emotional. Maybe I would, too.

And it had been one thing to put up with biker caveman bullshit from the man who’d raised her all on his own. She wasn’t taking it from anyone else. Not even if the anyone else in question looked like her hottest fantasies made flesh and sent straight to the French Quarter to test her resolve.

But that was between her and her vibrator.

“And that means what, exactly?” she asked Ajax, not bothering to hide her disdain. Or maybe that was her temper. It was hard to tell the difference today, or separate that out from the grief for her father, burning hot in her belly like a live wire. “You going to shout a lot and act real scary and then run away from home for ten years? Oh, wait. You already did that.”

Chapter 2

This time when Ajax laughed, it made every single part of Sophie’s body clench down hard in instant, molten reaction and a chill down her back ice over in warning—but it was too late.