She shuddered, hard, and he stroked down, thrusting two fingers deep inside and rubbing the heel of his hand nice and hard against that needy clit of hers.

“You don’t know me at all,” she threw at him, but her voice was breathy and her hands clutched at his cut and her hips rose to meet him, as greedy as the clutch of her hot pussy around his fingers. “I hate biker clubs. I hate the drama. I hate the bullshit. I hate the rules and the endless battles about who disrespected who by wearing the wrong color on the wrong bike in the wrong town without asking permission from this club or that—”

“You’re so full of shit.” Ajax leaned in, rubbing his chest against those plump, hot tits until her nipples poked at him. “You love this life and even if you didn’t, too bad. You’re neck deep in it and you always have been. Better figure out how to swim, babe.”

He pumped into her harder, ground that clit of hers against his palm, watched the sweat bead on her upper lip and her neck arch back.

“I want a normal life,” she whispered, as much to the stones all around them and the noisy street nearby, the shadows and the thick Louisiana air, as to him. Maybe to herself.

Ajax laughed and upped the pace, fucking her on his hand and watching her while he did it. His woman. His property. His.

“You want the rush, babe,” he told her. “Look at you. You crave it.”

He ground down against her and then stopped. Abruptly. Her eyes shot open, lust and need and mutiny at once in those green depths.

“I want the suburbs and a Camry,” she said, like her chest wasn’t heaving. Like there wasn’t a red flush high on her cheeks and she wasn’t about to come on his hand, because he fucking owned that ass of hers. “I want a meek, biddable husband who works at an insurance company and I want to join the fucking PTA.”

“Yeah?” He thrust into her hard, then eased out slow. “You gonna wear something like this while you’re dying of boredom with the douchebag husband you keep on a leash? Or maybe that stripper dress? No, I know, the gold pasties.” He pulled out completely and stroked all around those plump folds of hers, so sweet and hot and dripping with need, kept stroking until she was stiff and tense and trembling against him. “Sure thing, babe. You’re standing in an alley with a biker’s hand deep in your pussy at noon, but really, you’re destined for the PTA.”

Her green eyes lit up with fury and something else. Something that tore at him and kicked at him and pissed him off all over again. “I want a normal life, Ajax.”

“No.” He was pitiless. “You don’t.”

And then he pinched her plump little clit with absolutely no mercy and Sophie screamed. High-pitched and long and he didn’t cover it because he didn’t give a fuck if she alerted the entire French Quarter. She shook apart right there. She dropped her head against him and came against his palm in rolling jerks, and he fucking loved every second of it.

He kept her there as her breathing slowed again and her body stopped rocking convulsively into his palm. He held her with his hand wrapped up tight in all the molten perfection of her cunt and his other hand a fist in her hair, and he waited for her to look at him again.

She took her time doing it.

“You need to have my back,” he told her, harsh and low and serious. “Don’t fucking ambush me like that again.”

That look in her eyes intensified and he still hated it. It was much too raw. It was too much like grief. Like tears.

“This was my childhood, Ajax. It was my whole life. It was the only thing that was mine.” Her green eyes were miserable. “I couldn’t be in the club. I couldn’t make up for the sons he’d lost. But I could run that bar. I could take care of that, at least.” She shrugged, but her hands were softer against his chest and he realized, from a distance, that it was inside him, the thing that still ached. That still felt broken. “And now it’s yours, like none of that mattered.”

Ajax shook his head, and he felt something like paralyzed even though he could feel the way his heart thudded in him the same way he could feel her soft, slippery cunt in his hand and he didn’t get how she made him feel powerless one minute and like a god the next. And he’d tear down this city for her with his own two hands if she wanted it, no matter that he’d only just come home after all those years in too much darkness, and she was looking at him like she still didn’t know that.

How the fuck could she not know that?

“It’s all yours,” she said again, her voice cracking.

“Sophie,” he ground out, like there was fucking glass in his mouth, and he was surprised he wasn’t bleeding. And that she couldn’t see it. “What the fuck does that matter? So are you.”

—

Sophie couldn’t see anything but that stark, haunted blue gaze of his. It was filling her up, too full, overflowing—and he still had that half-feral, half-furious look on his face and his hand buried between her legs.

And that burning, blinding, tearing fury that had rocketed through her, leaving her sobbing in the courtyard and then staggering down Bourbon Street ebbed away. It melted into something else. Something huge and precarious that balanced far too delicately inside of her and made it hard to breathe.

She wasn’t a civilian. She knew exactly what it meant when a man like Ajax called her his.

Her heart kicked at her, a low and urgent roll. Her stomach dropped and then clenched tight.

His. His woman. His property. More ironclad than if she took his name or wore his ring.

Sophie had never been chosen by anyone. Never been cared for like that, so deeply and so hugely that a man would demand she wear his name on her back for all to see. Claiming her even when he wasn’t in the room. Expecting his brothers to defend her as if she was a part of him, an extension of him. Her throat felt tight. Her eyes burned.

And she didn’t know how to believe him.

But something in that way he watched her, too closely and too carefully for a man so ferocious, told her that maybe he was fragile after all. Maybe only right here. Maybe never again.

And no one had to tell her he would likely rather die than have that pointed out to him.

She eased that big hand of his out of her panties and let her skirt fall back down to her feet, but she held on to him. She tugged him closer and held his hand against the bare skin of her abdomen, and she felt him shudder, as if he’d expected her to fight him.

“You’ve only been back home for a few days,” she said carefully. Very carefully. “It’s been an emotional time.”

“You’re mine,” he told her, and there was a fire in those wild blue eyes, a dark and uncompromising flame, and it burned through her. It shook her. “I want my name on your skin. I want you wearing it on your back. I want to leave marks all over you, all the time. I want you, Sophie, in every possible way, and I want to be damn sure every other asshole you come across knows it.”

“You want to fuck me.”

“Yeah.” His mouth moved, though it wasn’t quite a smile. Not quite. It was too harsh. Too carnal. “Pretty much all the fucking time.”

“You’re talking about making me your old lady,” Sophie said, and she didn’t want to insult him. She didn’t want to wound him. And maybe it told her a few things, how desperately she wanted to protect him from that. From everything. “And what I know about old ladies isn’t all that appealing.”

“If someone keyed my bike I’d rip his fucking head off.” He shook his head, like she wasn’t making sense. “What the fuck do you think I’d do to someone who even looked at you funny?”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” His hand was big and battered against hers, sticky from before, and hot against her stomach. And she tried to remind herself how hollow she felt, how raw—but it was hard to focus when he was so close to her. When he was touching her. When he was studying her face, his own something like grim, with an intensity that shook her. “I grew up watching a lot of old ladies get doors slammed in their faces any time there was club business. It might have affected them, it might have been their lives too, but they didn’t get heard.”