Read Make You Burn for Free Online Page B

had that heat in his voice when he’d said that, and it could hardly be a part of her grief process she planned to excuse away if she kept doing it, could it?
    “Maybe I just don’t want you here. Does that matter to you?”
    “Probably not the way you want it to.”
    She started to speak but he rose then, shoving his phone in his pocket and then raking his dark blond hair back from his face, and he looked exactly like the man he was. A cool, tough outlaw who did as he pleased. And Sophie was just one more example of the collateral damage men like him stacked up along the way. Her entire existence was a monument to the hard life and hard choices of one more self-professed outlaw who’d died before his time. She wanted to slap the living one in front of her across his face.
    Ajax’s eyes narrowed, and she realized she’d stepped toward him with her hands in fists.
    Not smart.
    “You looking for something to regret, Sophie? You’re not gonna like what happens if you swing at me. I were you, I’d tell me what your fucking problem is instead.”
    “Aside from the fact I have to go to the morgue and identify my father’s body right now, you mean?” she threw at him, like bullets, and she almost wished they were. Almost. “Nothing. No problem at all. How weird that I might want to come back here and cry myself to sleep in peace!”
    —
    That shit definitely wasn’t happening, but Ajax didn’t want to argue with her about it in the old apartment, where he could feel the ghost of the only man he’d ever considered a father figure all around him, sharp and real. Waiting for Ajax to step up and be a man, he was sure of it, especially after failing so spectacularly downstairs. He could almost hear Priest’s gravelly, pissed-off voice issuing that very order.
    And Ajax had the distinct feeling he wasn’t going to keep his hands off Sophie Lombard the way he probably should, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her deal with the fucking morgue.
    He waited in silence for her to finish dressing. She stalked over to the door and stamped her feet into very black, very butch motorcycle boots, swiping up her keys in one hand and shaking out her damp, wavy hair with the other, like that might dry it faster down here in the delta where nothing was ever really dry. Ajax didn’t let himself think too much about how smoking hot she looked in a pair of jeans plastered all over that ass of hers or that stretchy little tank top that hugged those juicy tits in front and let her tattooed wings peek out in back. Or those boots that he deeply appreciated because when she moved they gave her hips a little swagger that made him really, really want to get those hips and all the rest of that soft, curvy body of hers beneath him.
    No point thinking about these things when it didn’t matter, and it definitely didn’t matter where they were going right now.
    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