Read Make You Burn for Free Online

wispy little dreams she’d entertained while she’d been in college. She hadn’t gone off to a distant city and lived one of those glossy sitcom lives she’d imagined from time to time. She hadn’t pretended she was someone else for a few years like a lot of her high school friends had, before tucking their tails in and coming right back to New Orleans. She’d always stayed true to her blood and her family and her home.
    Sophie couldn’t do anything for the gruff, taciturn man who’d raised her. She didn’t know if he’d suffered last night. She couldn’t fix his relationship with the family he’d claimed he didn’t have and that he’d always adamantly refused to discuss with her anyway. She couldn’t change the fact that she’d been the unplanned result of his extremely casual liaison with a junkie stripper who’d decided she preferred meth to childrearing and was only heard from every once in a messed-up while. She couldn’t even be the innocent little girl Priest had claimed he’d wanted, sending her off to Catholic school and then monitoring her far too closely through her college years, and still trying his best to keep her close after that, too.
    But she could take care of the bar he’d poured his life into once the club fell apart in the wake of the storm. The bar he’d always told her was as much her birthright as the green eyes they shared. She could make sure it stayed on Bourbon Street forever, even if Priest couldn’t.
    “I knew Prince,” she said now, but she was thinking of her dad. “But that was a long time ago. Things change. People move on, have different priorities. That’s life.”
    “That’s bullshit.” Ajax’s voice was hard. Uncompromising. Like a gauntlet thrown down from across the living room. “I wear my priorities on my back. That doesn’t change, Sophie. The club itself might shift direction. The world might change. But the brotherhood never does.”
    God, she hated that.
    All of that. Everything he stood for, that her father had stood for, too. All those grandiose and epic things they thought they were. The rousing speeches, the unearned intensity, all for a bunch of dirtbags to sit around in matching jackets playing badass together on their way to one or another criminal activity. What was the point of any of it? Priest had loved that club more than he’d loved anything in his life, including his only child. Sophie had watched him wither away as the club’s influence had waned over the past ten years. She’d watched him take each new defection of one of the club members as a personal insult, and then an injury, too. He never would have called it heartbreaking, but that’s what it had been. Bit by bit. Like water torture.
    Meanwhile, he’d had a daughter the whole time. She hadn’t left him. She hadn’t betrayed him. Hell, she’d worked in his bar and lived in his house, and he’d still mourned his lost brothers—especially Ajax, who he’d often called the son he’d never had, if only when he’d been drunk—like they were the only family who had truly mattered to him.
    Sophie had always believed her dedication would win, in the end. That her loyalty and love would count for something.
    Ajax tilted his head slightly, watching her closely. “You got something to say about that?”
    “What could I possibly have to say about club business?” she threw back at him, and she didn’t work too hard to control her bitter tone. “I’m not a brother. I’m not anybody’s old lady and I’m certainly no sweet butt out for a good time. I’m the old president’s daughter, off-limits to everybody.” She sniffed. “Except you, apparently. Is that because he’s dead or because you’re a dick?”
    She half-expected him to come at her again, and her heart kicked at her, anticipation and adrenaline at once. Maybe she wanted him to, she acknowledged, when he only stayed where he was, that cool blue gaze of his punching holes through her forehead.
    “Probably