Make You Burn Read Online Free PDF

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.
    And Sophie might have been exhausted and emotional, but she knew one thing: that wasn’t her world. Her father had kept her as removed from it as he could and now he was dead, whether she could get her head around it or not, and Ajax was nothing more than a fossil. Archaeological remains of a life she’d always hated and didn’t want any part of now that she could choose for herself.
    The old king of the Deacons was dead. Sophie wanted to bury his kingdom along with him, because she didn’t want it infecting her life any longer, and she’d spent many hours wide awake last night with her head full of all these
details.
Because
details
were a whole lot better than imagining what her father had gone through. If it had hurt. If he’d known. If he’d been scared, alone—
    No. Better to plot out the small things she could control. What to do with the wrecked motorcycle, when she could formally identify him and have him taken to a funeral home. What bills she’d need to pay now that this was all her responsibility. What, if anything, would change without her father around—since he’d surrendered the running of the Priory to Sophie right about the time she’d made noises about moving out after college. Better to immerse herself in the overwhelming little details of the complicated life he’d left behind him and hide from the reality of his death.
    But it hadn’t occurred to her that the four club brothers Priest had loved above all others, despite the fact they’d wandered off after the storm ten years ago, might come back. Sophie hadn’t planned to rally the remains of the Deacons of Bourbon Street. She’d figured the brothers who were still in the city would do whatever it was they did when a club with declining membership and no real club officers lost one of their own, and it wouldn’t affect her at all. Because that was all over now. Surely that was over. She hadn’t heard her father mention “club business” in years.
    Except Ajax appeared to have other