Even then his dick, that fucking asshole, took a little more convincing.

They walked down to the edge of the French Quarter to get a taxi, and she frowned at him like he was an animal she’d expected to gnaw on her leg when he held the door for her.

“I’m a southern man, Sophie,” he gritted out at her. “I can hold a goddamned door.”

“I assumed bikers did that with their dicks,” she said sweetly. “Usually because they’re so busy swinging them around wherever they go.”

“Sophie.”

“Sean.”

“Get the fuck in the cab.”

He told himself not to think too much about how he could have dealt with that mouth of hers if they’d been heading pretty much anywhere else on earth. So he sprawled out there in the back of the cab and he tried to ignore the heavy caress of her shampoo scenting the air. And the way she sat there, that tight body of hers inches away from him, as the taxi poked its way into the gritty, sweltering heart of New Orleans.

Outside the French Quarter, the Big Easy was a different city altogether. Tougher and far less touristy. And everywhere he looked, he saw remnants of that cunt of a storm that had crushed this place and him, too, ten years ago. The genteel decay that had always marked this fanciful place, built pretty to hide too many secrets and the dark, lush embrace of the waiting bayou beyond, was far more obvious now. Whole blocks were razed in some places while many of the buildings that still stood were missing big chunks, and entire neighborhoods all these years later were almost unrecognizable to a man who had once had the whole of the Crescent City mapped out in his head like the tattoos on his own flesh.

She was broken and she was beautiful, his high-class Creole whore of a hometown. Creeping vines and streetcar poetry, cracks in the sidewalks and zydeco in the thick air. This was home.

The taxi pulled up outside their destination and Ajax growled at Sophie when she tried to pay for it. She sniffed in reply, and he let that go, too. He climbed out after her and waited while she stopped and glared ahead of them at the building that housed the morgue.

“It’s okay,” he said, and he didn’t know what to do with the urge to comfort her that worked its way through him then. He’d never felt anything like it before.

“I didn’t ask you to come here and pretend to give a shit about me,” she snapped back at him. Of course she did. “You’re here for my father, as always. I don’t need to be patronized.”

And Ajax was at a fucking morgue with the daughter of the man he’d respected the most in the world, so he sucked that the fuck up.

But when she marched forward like a force of nature only to stop dead yet again, this time with her hand on the door and that lost look on her face again, he’d had enough. He pulled her away from the entrance and he turned her to face him with his hands on her shoulders, his fingers brushing against the tips of those delicate wings inked deep into her skin.

“You got something you need to prove with this?”

“Of course I don’t have anything to prove and could you please not be such a dick for even one second—”

“Why the fuck do you want to go in there and see this shit?” he demanded, his voice harder than it should have been, scraping out of him and into the afternoon around them. “What the hell is that gonna do? He wouldn’t want you anywhere near him like this and you know it.” He gripped her harder, tugged her closer. “You know it.”

“He’s my father.” Her voice cracked, but she kept her chin high and she was looking at him hard, like she was afraid she’d break down if she looked away or gave herself a break. “I’m his daughter. I…have to identity him. I owe him that.”

“I’m his second-in-command,” Ajax said gruffly, like the soldier he hadn’t been in a long time, and he didn’t understand what was happening here. That sheen in her green eyes that was doing shit to his head. That thing wrapped tight around him, pulling hard, making his ribs ache. He couldn’t remember ever standing around with a woman he badly wanted to fuck, feeling something else entirely. He didn’t like it. “This my job. Let me do it.”

Chapter 4

He walked differently when he came out of the morgue, Sophie thought. Straighter, maybe, like he’d taken a few hits in there. Harder, like they still hurt.

She pushed off the side of the building where she’d been waiting and met him, and she hadn’t truly understood until that moment how much she’d been holding out that tiny, wistful kernel of hope that the police had been mistaken. That this was all a big misunderstanding and her dad was off on a bender somewhere, too lost in cheap bourbon and loose women to bother calling home. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

But Ajax looked at her, his face utterly expressionless. His mouth was a tough, stern line and there was an awful gleam in his blue eyes. And Sophie understood that there was no escaping this.

It was happening. It was real.

Lombards didn’t cry—in public, anyway—so she stood there and held that hard look of his, no matter how it hurt her. It was the only vigil she could keep.

Ajax reached over and fit his tough hand against her cheek, with a careful sort of strength that struck her as far more tender than it probably should have, and then he held it there. Her heart thudded hard and her stomach twisted into a bulky knot. Tears spiked, in her chest and her nose and behind her eyes, no matter how she tried to blink them back. Sophie held on to his hand with her own, those brash rings of his warm and hard beneath her fingers and the strength in his palm harder still, and she’d never know how long they stood like that.

There was nothing to say. She appreciated that Ajax didn’t try.

The October afternoon heaved on around them. People walked into the building and then out again, letting out a blast of ice-cold air-conditioning every time the doors swung open. She could hear cars chugging past in the street. There were magnolia blossoms and the scent of sweet olive in the air, mixed in with asphalt and the heat, the usual city perfume. Everything was perfectly, horribly normal in all directions, except her father was in a bag somewhere and the man standing in front of her had terrible bruises in his gaze.

He swallowed, and she wondered if that was his version of the sobbing, tearing, expanding rawness she could feel beating against her chest and battering at the backs of her eyes. She didn’t think it would ever stop.

She didn’t see how it could.

“Come on,” he said, and his voice was lower than she remembered it. It was a rough bass line she could feel inside of her, vibrating against her sternum and then radiating out until it hit her toes. “Let’s get out of here.”

He didn’t speak more than a couple of words to the next taxi driver until they made it to the street where he’d parked his car, some beige sedan with Louisiana plates that surprised the hell out of her. Ajax didn’t strike her as the kind of man who would condescend to drive a mediocre car, when forced to drive a car at all.

“Nice car,” she said, and maybe that was why he didn’t hold her door for her this time. She told herself she didn’t care either way. “Have you been in Louisiana all these years?”

“Texas, mostly.” He slid her a cool blue look. “And don’t fucking insult me. This embarrassing piece of shit is not mine.”

And she didn’t want to think. She certainly didn’t want to feel. So she climbed in and let him drive them away, out of New Orleans and into the thick green countryside. She didn’t ask where they were headed. She didn’t ask why. She had that raw, swollen hollow inside of her, so she curled herself around it and tried to get used to the unwieldy, impossible weight of it.