“Fuck you,” she gritted out, low and furious, like she wasn’t standing there with black shit all over her face from the sweat and maybe a tear or two, she’d come so hard.

Her lips were puffy from his mouth, she was still shaking and probably still so wet he’d bet she was worried someone could see it from across the bar. He wondered if he could, and he was a lot more inclined to run with that impulse, having felt all that sweet, juicy evidence when he’d been rocking her fucking world.

Fully fucking clothed, no less.

“Is that an invitation?” He eyed her, feeling a little less solid than he usually did, and he didn’t want to look at that too closely. “Because I don’t care who sees me fuck, little girl. I consider it a public service. Thought you might disagree.”

He watched, fascinated, as she swallowed, as if it hurt. She looked past him, back to the bar and Tulane and whoever else was watching the show, and he knew what she didn’t, that no one had really seen anything. That he’d blocked her. That the most the little perverts could do was jack off later to their imaginary versions of a fairly intense kiss.

But he didn’t feel the need to tell Sophie that.

Sophie looked back at him after a minute, and she didn’t look tough any longer, or cool and snooty the way she’d been at first. She looked lost, and he felt like a dick, but she didn’t speak. Not one word. She turned on her heel and she walked away from him, slapping her way through the back door that he knew led down the hall past where Priest’s office had been and then out into a private courtyard.

Ajax stood where he was for a moment, making sure to put a grim eye on every one of the assholes who’d no doubt get their little preppy dicks out later, imagining Sophie in her tassels and hooker shoes. Little shits. They all looked away, as expected, and not one of them was brave enough to look back. Which meant it was unlikely that they’d be dumb enough to come after Sophie again, either.

He, meanwhile, had the sinking feeling he was exactly that dumb, no matter the ghost he was sure he could see glowering at him from across the bar, reminding him whose daughter he’d just been that close to doing. Right here.

You’re a piece of shit, he told himself, but it was tough to take that to heart when his dick was still hard and he had the taste of her in his mouth.

He shifted that same hard look to Tulane, who actually squeaked when their eyes met and staggered back a few steps like he might vault over the bar and come for her perky ass next.

“Relax,” he growled at her. “I don’t do mice.”

She made another squeaky noise, and did not look at all comforted by that information. Ajax wanted to smile, but didn’t. Of course he didn’t. That would be too easy. And despite the reason for his return and the fact Priest would likely rise from his grave to rip his balls off if the old man knew the direction of Ajax’s thoughts, he was having too much fun.

He practically whistled a happy tune as he stalked through the door and followed Sophie outside, taking the metal stairs attached to the back of the bar up toward the rambling old apartment that took over the top two floors of the building.

It had been ten long, lonely, jacked-up years. But Ajax was finally home.

Chapter 3

Sophie cried in the shower.

And hated herself for it with every great, wracking, gasping sob that made her clutch at the slick walls to keep from crumpling into a ball of pure misery near the drain.

But hating herself for being a weak little girl didn’t seem to help anything. It only made her feel worse, like that much more of a weak little girl.

So she turned up the water temperature until it was nearly painful and she cried a little more and she told herself that it was the grief and the shock working themselves out, that was all. And that Ajax was, too. It even made a kind of psychological sense, if she remembered her college classes right.

Her father was dead. That still didn’t make any sense. Maybe it never would. He’d left on one of his rides as usual yesterday with his normal, gruff see you when I see you as he’d powered up that window-shattering engine in the courtyard. He’d roared out onto Bourbon Street the way he always did. And then there were cops at the door and Sophie was expected to believe he was simply…gone.

How could she possibly have processed it overnight? She hadn’t. She couldn’t have. She kept expecting him to walk back in the door. For all this to be a mistake.

But then Ajax had appeared, like a ghost in this city that was messy with them, and brighter somehow than all the rest.

And she’d known that he wouldn’t show up unless Priest really was dead.

Ajax had been her father’s favorite surrogate son before he’d disappeared ten years ago, and now he was so much hotter and wilder and more dangerous than he’d been when she was eighteen. And this time, he’d looked at her the way he’d look at any woman. No longer like she was the Catholic schoolgirl, Priest’s untouchable daughter, but like she was exactly the sort of woman an outlaw biker like Ajax threw up against walls.

She’d always wanted to be that kind of woman—or she had when she was eighteen.

This was what people did with grief, she told herself fiercely. They acted out. They did stupid things. She braced her hands against the warm wall of the shower stall and let the water run all over her and told herself it was only to be expected.

She’d almost convinced herself of it when she walked out of her bedroom a little while later and stopped dead.

Because Ajax was sitting in the kitchen like he belonged there, drenched in afternoon sunlight and even better looking than he’d been in the more dimly lit bar downstairs. Sophie caught her breath. His legs were stretched out before him as he sprawled in one of the chairs at the table, his cellphone clamped to his ear, looking for all the world as if he was there waiting on her father, as he had a thousand times before, ten years back.

And though he didn’t acknowledge her in any way, Sophie knew he saw her. That assessing blue gaze had been on her before she’d looked up and met it, and she felt more naked now, dressed in jeans and a tank top and her face scrubbed clean, than she had when she’d been essentially naked and he’d been all over her.

“Didn’t call to hear your autobiography, asshole,” he said into the phone, all rough-edged menace and silken threat. “I don’t give a shit. Priest is dead. Get your punk ass on a plane.”

He listened, his face hard and that mouth of his set, and Sophie felt as if she was breaking out in hives—but she wasn’t. She knew she wasn’t. She was remembering the huge, hot length of him trapped in his jeans and so hard against her. She was remembering that impossible mouth of his all over hers, so dirty and thorough at once, the scratch of his dark gold beard and the slick intoxication of his tongue. She’d brushed her teeth twice and she could still taste him. She could still feel his hands on her breasts, and her nipples, still raw from the removal of the adhesive-backed pasties and oversensitive to even the slightest touch of her soft tank top, simply ached.

But she was wet between her legs again, wet and needy and infinitely restless, as if she hadn’t embarrassed herself in front of the bar staff and her regulars only a little while ago, in a way she didn’t really want to think about now that she was the owner by default, she assumed, as well as the boss.

Grief, she told herself sternly. It was nothing but grief and poor impulse control.

And him. He’d made her come because he’d felt like it. Because she’d taunted him, maybe, and he didn’t put up with that shit. Because that was the world Ajax lived in. That was who he was. If he wanted something, he took it.