Free Make You Burn by Megan Crane Page A

big, sad, knowing eyes that were twisting shit up inside of him like he’d taken shrapnel to the side. Repeatedly.
    “No,” she said very quietly. Almost sadly, damn her. “You don’t look like a boyfriend at all. You look like exactly who you are.”
    —
    Ajax’s gaze went arctic, and the effects of that shot through Sophie like a sudden, serious drop in temperature. Like instant winter somewhere far to the north of sweaty Louisiana. She thought her teeth might chatter.
    He didn’t answer her. Not with words. He grabbed her upper arm, hauled her off her stool and onto her feet with that offhanded strength of his that made her stomach flip over in sheer, feminine delight, then started towing her across the clubhouse floor.
    That was less delightful, but she wasn’t foolish enough to try to shake him off. It wouldn’t work, for one thing, and even if it did, what was her plan then? Shake off Ajax and look around this place for allies who might help her make her way home? Now that they’d been partying for a while and were all wolf smiles and hot, greedy eyes? She wasn’t a fucking idiot.
    “What’s the matter with you?” she asked. Or possibly it was a demand, in that particular, not exactly polite tone.
    Be careful,
she warned herself.
This is not a safe place, and next to Ajax, it looks like a convent.
    He glared at her. He took his time with it, making sure she felt it everywhere. Making sure she wasn’t laboring under the impression that the softer version of him she might have glimpsed here and there over the course of the day was still around anywhere. Asshole.
    “I need to fuck,” he growled at her. “You want to do something about that, I’m good to go. I can fuck you right here, and happily. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told.”
    She felt a thumping mess of things all at once at that, as she assumed was his intention. Temper. Humiliation. Hurt. That shameless stirring deep inside of her, that she
wanted
to fuck him, right here. Anywhere. And pure fury at being talked to that way when he
knew
she couldn’t haul off and hit him or disrespect him at all in front of these men who would take unkindly to that sort of display. She was sure she was glaring back at him with murder in her eyes, and she meant it.
    But beneath all of that, and much louder, was something else. The bone-deep certainty that this was Ajax hurting. That this was how he handled it. Hurt and pain and confusion. Men like him didn’t analyze their feelings and talk them out in safe spaces with careful words. They went to bars, not therapists. They were far more stripped down, like the dangerous machines they’d built their lives around. They rode rough or not at all. That was just the deal.
    If she’d been his old lady, she would have fucked him then and there. Because that was how a biker bitch handled her man when he talked egregious shit he probably didn’t even mean. She’d watched that particular dynamic play out a thousand times when she was a girl. Hell, she’d seen far too much of her own father dealing with his emotions the biker way, especially over the past few years with a selection of giggly blond sluts. She knew she could handle one pissed-off Deacon and whatever was eating him at the moment—
    But she wasn’t his old lady.
    And how many times had Sophie sworn to herself that she’d never be
anyone’s
old lady? That she wanted other things for her life, maybe a goddamn parade of pussy boyfriends and the exact relationship Ajax had laid out for her, thank you very much. It didn’t matter what her life looked like, as long as it didn’t look like this.
    So she didn’t say a fucking word. As ordered.
    Ajax’s big, tough hand clenched hard around her arm, and it almost hurt, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of squealing about it like a little bitch. She only cocked her head to one side and waited. Daring him.
    To go harder. To make it really hurt. To step up, if he was