“You think the old ladies you knew didn’t make themselves heard when their men were at home and they were in private?” Ajax shook his head. “Because they were all so shy and retiring like you? I told you what I wanted, babe. Don’t recall asking you to get a fucking lobotomy.”

“Ajax—”

“You either trust that I can take care of you or you don’t.” His voice was flat. Certain. “The day I fall down on that job, sure, you can ask me anything you think you need to know about club business. But, Sophie. Hear me. That’s never going to happen.” He shifted, his gaze still hard on hers. “Any other fucking insults? Now’s the time, babe. I’m only having this conversation once.”

She tried to breathe through that great big thing inside of her, tilting this way and that, balanced on such a sharp and terrible edge. She swallowed hard.

“I watched your brothers and, hell, my own father, fuck their way through every whore in the Big Easy every night of the week and then go home to their old ladies and pretend it didn’t happen. Or make no effort at all to hide it. I watched a lot of women do a lot of crying over men who said what they needed to say to make it stop and then did what they wanted anyway.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to live like that. I won’t.”

He seemed to grow larger all around her, more taut and more dangerous, though he never shifted his hard gaze from her face.

“Is this about pussy?” His mouth flattened. “You wear my name, Sophie, I’m not going to be sticking my dick in anything else.”

That thing in her broke open. It roared through her then. So intense and so harsh she almost doubled over, and it took her a stunned moment to recognize what it was: longing.

“I’m sure you mean that,” she said quietly, and he had no idea how much she wanted to let herself believe that. Believe him. Believe that she could love someone who would actually love her back, for a change. “But I’ve never known a biker who felt that was a promise worth keeping when he got bored or horny.”

“I strike you as a man who doesn’t know his own mind?”

“You strike me as a man with a lot of options, most of them with fake tits,” she retorted.

Ajax stared at her for a long moment. Too long. He pushed back then, taking his hands off her, if not stepping away, and it didn’t matter. It still felt like he’d left gaping holes behind.

“I knew,” he said, his voice rough, “the first time I walked down Bourbon Street and saw a line of those motherfuckers riding their bikes into this alley, one after the next, like they had no fear of death at all.” He looked out toward the street as if they were still there, those ghosts of men long gone. As if he could see them now. “I was fourteen but I wasn’t a kid. I’d taken a bus in from the bayou because I couldn’t stay in my parents’ shithole shack anymore. I’d never seen anything like this place. And I’d never seen anything like them.”

“Ajax.”

She didn’t know why she said his name then. Only that she wanted to soothe him as much as she’d wanted to run before—but of course, she hadn’t run, had she? She’d told herself she wanted to leave and then she’d stood there. Three feet away from the Priory, where he’d be certain to find her.

Had she really wanted to run? Or had she wanted to see if he’d come after her?

And either way, he’d answered that question, hadn’t he?

“I wanted to be them, whoever they were,” he told her, his voice so low, as if she hadn’t spoken. So hard and sure. “I walked right into that clubhouse and I told them so.”

Sophie tried to imagine a young, entirely feral Ajax strolling into the Deacons’ clubhouse with nothing but that astonishing beauty of his, murder in his pretty eyes, and that innate cockiness all of the brothers would have likely taken immediate exception to.

“What did they do?”

“They laughed in my face.” There was a spark of laughter in his gaze then. “What do you think? But I kept coming back. Finally, the meanest of them told me if I was going to hang around like a whiny little rent boy, I should earn my fucking keep.” He jutted his chin at her. “That was Priest. And he wasn’t kidding. They made me work. It sucked and it wasn’t always fun or even close to fun. But I still knew.”

She waited, and there was too much in his face then, in those gorgeous eyes. A hunger she didn’t entirely understand. And a hard certainty that made her want to understand more than she wanted her next breath.

“That they were it,” he said quietly. “They were my family. Where I belonged. They were why I’d left the fucking bayou in the first place. I never doubted that. I still don’t. The Deacons are the only family I’ve ever had and the only one I want.”

“Ajax.”

“And it was the same when I saw you.”

Sophie stopped breathing.

“I call bullshit on that.” She was whispering, like she’d lost her voice. Or maybe her mind. She couldn’t tell. She couldn’t think. There was only what he’d said and that look on his face and it was bigger and brighter than all the world. “You saw a girl dressed like a stripper and your dick led you straight to me, that’s all.”

“First of all,” Ajax said, and that low rumble of his sounded less furious than before, “my dick is very fucking discerning. And second, you were in Jackson Square three minutes after I set foot in the French Quarter again. I saw you from the other side of the church and that was it. I knew you were mine.” He reached across that wedge of space between them, framed her face with his battered hands, then slid them into her hair. “I don’t break my promises, Sophie. I wear them and I keep them, no matter what. You know this.”

“Ajax…”

“You know who I am.” His voice was low, his hands hot against her, and his blue eyes were everything. “You know what I am.”

She stared up at him, and she loved him. And maybe that was all that mattered. Maybe that was what life was all about. Love, whatever it looked like. However you could. Maybe that was the addiction. And maybe she didn’t need to fight it.

He pulled her closer to him, so she felt as if she had no choice but to wrap herself around him. You liar, a voice inside her whispered as she pressed herself against him and marveled in the way they fit. This is the choice.

“The only reason I’m alive is because I make snap decisions under pressure, baby,” he told her. He tilted her face toward him. “And I’m always right.”

“And so fucking humble.”

His blue eyes gleamed. “Humility is for pussies.”

“Ajax, you need to understand—”

“I’m not planning to say this shit again,” he retorted, his voice as intense and gruff as his expression. “So listen up. I’m gonna find out what happened to your father. I’m gonna restore the club. And I’m gonna make you happy, Sophie, whether you like it or not. Those are promises. You feel you need it, I’ll put them in ink and wear them, too.”

He was everything she’d told herself she didn’t want. An emblem of the life she hated and yet, as he’d said, the life where she was the most comfortable—so comfortable she’d stayed here all this time. The kind of man she’d never wanted, and yet that pulsing wetness between her legs reminded her that she’d never wanted any other man more.

A man is what he does, her father had told her.

And this man had come home the instant he’d heard Priest was dead, despite a decade away. He’d come with her to the morgue and identified her father when she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He’d taken care of her that whole long, insane day. And he’d stayed. She didn’t know what he’d been doing in his free time—though his battered knuckles gave her a few clues—but he’d come out of it with his theory about her father’s death. That told her that even if he was wholly dedicated to the club and his own role in it, he still really did care enough about her father to want justice.