Blog Tour: Make You Burn by Megan Crane (Excerpt, Review, Giveaway and Buy Links)
Make You Burn
Book One
197 Pages
Release Date: 08/04/2015
(Paperback)
Publisher: Random House | Imprint: Loveswept
Genre: Contemporary Romance | Erotic Romance | Series Romance
Series: The Deacons of Bourbon Street
Meet the Deacons of Bourbon Street, bad boy bikers who are hell on wheels—and heaven between the sheets. Megan Crane revs up an irresistible new series co-written with Rachael Johns, Jackie Ashenden, and Maisey Yates.
Sean “Ajax” Harding’s oaths are inked into his skin. Once second-in-command of the Deacons of Bourbon Street motorcycle club, he left New Orleans to protect the brotherhood, and only the death of his beloved mentor, Priest Lombard, could lure him back. Walking into the old hangout gives him a familiar thrill—especially when he gets an eyeful of the bar’s delectable new owner. A wild ride with her is just the welcome Ajax needs. Then he realizes that she’s Priest’s daughter, all grown up and totally off limits.
Sophie Lombard loved her father, not his lifestyle. She’s done with bikers . . . until Ajax roars into town—arrogant, tough, and sexy as ever. And although he treats her like the Catholic schoolgirl he once knew, Sophie’s daydreams tend to revolve around sin. With the very real possibility of heartbreak looming, Sophie knows better than to get too close to an outlaw. But every touch from Ajax is steamier than the Louisiana bayou—and heat like this may just be worth getting burned.
From Make You Burn by Megan Crane:
The demon incarnate laughed.
He lounged there at her bar like it was his, far too beautiful and much too dangerous, like he was still her father’s favorite weapon and it was still ten years ago, when that might have mattered.
And he laughed.
Like Sophie was still a little girl, beholden to the lawless whims and half-assed schemes of men like him, battered and rough and wild straight through, unfit for society and unwilling to change even a goddamned inch. No matter who it hurt.
He was just like her father. But her father was dead and Ajax didn’t belong here. Not anymore.
Her father. Grief and loss and that familiar, hopeless fury lashed at her like the business edge of a Louisiana rainstorm, but she beat it back. Not here. Not now.
Lombards kept their tears to themselves. No matter what that cost them. And it didn’t matter that Sophie was tired of paying that particular tax, too. She was still a Lombard. Her father had depended on her. The more he’d retreated into his back room office these last few years, the more he’d left the bar and everything else in her hands, the more she’d showed him she could live up to his notion of what it meant to be a Lombard even if she hadn’t been a member of his club of assholes and degenerates.
She’d been more than that. She’d been his blood.
I’ll always take care of you, he’d told her a million times, especially when he’d been drunk. You’re my blood, angel.
Sophie thought that meant more than a gang tattoo and a few Harleys. It had to her. She kept telling herself it had to him, too.
But then Ajax stopped laughing, and that was worse.
“You should mind your fucking manners, Sophie,” he said, quietly. Much too quietly.
To someone who didn’t know him, he probably sounded about as friendly as a huge, built, flint-eyed guy with that many tattoos and that particular way of carrying himself—like a threat on a very short leash—could sound.
Sophie knew better, and not only because she could see the impossible blue of his eyes.
“Or what?” she asked, making herself sound as bored as possible.
Behind the bar, poor Danielle was staring at her as if Sophie had lost her mind. Maybe she had. Maybe that was what this thing inside of her was.
It had started when the police had turned up yesterday to tell her the news. That finally, impossibly, Theodore “Priest” Lombard, legendary president of the Deacons of Bourbon Street motorcycle club and Sophie’s only family in the world, had taken one fast turn too many on his beloved Harley. It had fused into the crazy urge she’d had to wander the Quarter dressed like this, hiding her grief and her loss and her urge to lie down in the fetal position somewhere and never get up again in plain, gold pastie-ed sight.
And then Ajax had rolled into the Priory like he’d never been away. The gritty old bar was the only thing she had left of her father and the only thing that was really hers anyway after all these years of running it by herself. And here came Ajax with all of that old biker shit clinging to that ruthless body of his and so much like her father it hurt Sophie to look at him—and that thing inside her had simply . . . imploded.
If she stopped running her mouth, she didn’t know what would become of her.
Maybe she’d die, too.
She could feel Ajax’s gaze on her like a touch, a little bit dirty and very, very thorough, and she was fiercely glad she was practically naked. Men were simple and bikers were even more elemental than that. He’d be a lot more likely to look at her exposed skin than the pulse she could feel doing backflips and assorted acrobatics in her neck and her wrists and deep between her legs. It would give her away in an instant if he could jerk his attention away from her tits, but why would a guy like Ajax do a thing like that?
But even as she thought that, his gaze was on hers again. Hard and shrewd, and she felt a little chill of something too much like foreboding creep down her exposed spine.
“Or I might lose my patience with you, little girl. You want to see what happens then, say the word.”
She’d lost her father and she’d loved that man, for all that he’d been infuriating, hypocritical, secretive, and wholly incapable of grasping that she was a grown woman who didn’t need his permission to do as she pleased. It was beside the point that she’d wanted his approval anyway. That she’d tried to take the place of all his lost brothers over the years, as if running this bar better than he ever had could bridge that gap. Still, she’d thought she’d done it. He’d even thanked her, in his typically gruff way. This place would sink without you, he’d told her, one whiskey-infused evening when he’d been feeling uncharacteristically emotional. Maybe I would, too.
And it had been one thing to put up with biker caveman bullshit from the man who’d raised her all on his own. She wasn’t taking it from anyone else. Not even if the anyone else in question looked like her hottest fantasies made flesh and sent straight to the French Quarter to test her resolve.
But that was between her and her vibrator.
“And that means what, exactly?” she asked Ajax, not bothering to hide her disdain. Or maybe that was her temper. It was hard to tell the difference today, or separate that out from the grief for her father like a live wire burning hot in her belly besides. “You going to shout a lot and act real scary and then run away from home for ten years? Oh, wait. You already did that.”
*ARC provided by the Publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review *
First Impression: Unique opening, with an in your face writing style that both keeps you at a distance and draws you right in.
I don’t know who the author pictured for inspiration for Ajax but in my head, I saw a cross between Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) and David Beckham in looks, and the imagery worked for me.
Make You Burn is a good read and a great start to the Deacons of Bourbon Street series, though I can see why parts of it would be off-putting to some. Ajax is a hard man who has lived a hard life, and his wounds still lay open and bleeding on Bourbon Street. He’s alpha to the core, and the kind of character that pushes you away because he doesn’t know how to let you in close, but he’s also exactly the kind of character that makes a reader like me long to know what makes him tick. What makes him react the way he does, treat people the way he treats them. He’s the kind of alpha male I wanted to simultaneously hit and then kiss, just to see how deep he devours.
Sophie is a different breed altogether from Ajax. Daughter of the motorcycle club’s recently deceased president, she’s been kept away from most of the more serious aspects of club business, and though she hasn’t seen Ajax in ten years, she remembers him, and she’s drawn to him because he helps her to avoid her grief and anger over her father’s death and his putting more family investment into his motorcycle club than in her—his only daughter. Sophie is understandably bitter and resentful of the motorcycle life—and of Ajax, her father’s favorite, though she fits right in with the biker crowd and gives as good as she gets most of the time.
Both lead characters were pretty brazen and doing all they could to avoid dealing with the big elephant in the room—her father’s death and where the club now stands, but Ajax and Sophie were hot together, almost volatile. They were like dynamite you could see lit and knew you should run from but were also a little bit fascinated to watch erupt.
The story itself feels like more of an erotic romance read than a straight contemporary romance, so I didn’t quite feel a deep emotional connection to either character while reading. I wish I had, especially given the reason they were brought back together, but because of the world they live in, and the biker way of life they’ve grown up inside, the darker, more erotic tone fit the characters and the story being told, and I did enjoy the story and the characters so, overall, it did work for me.
If you love intense alpha males, feisty females, and hot, erotic interactions, Make You Burn by Megan Crane is a searing start to what appears to be a great new series. I enjoyed it.
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Ebook copies of:
JUST A LITTLE CRUSH by Renita Pizzitola, CRUSHED by Lauren Layne, AGAINST THE CAGE by Sidney Halston, POSSESS by Laura Marie Altom, AFTER MIDNIGHT by Kathy Clark, MAKE YOU BURN by Megan Crane, MY HIGHLAND LOVER by Maeve Greyson, BREAKING NOAH by Missy Johnson and Ashley Suzanne, A FASHIONABLE INDULGENCE by K.J. Charles, FORBIDDEN by Jacquelyn Frank
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Megan Crane is a New Jersey native who had great plans to star on Broadway, preferably in Evita, just like Patti LuPone. Sadly, her inability to wow audiences with her singing voice required a back-up plan. Accordingly, she graduated from Vassar College and got her MA and PhD in literature from the University of York in England. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on AIDS literature, mostly so she could wallow in her obsession with the remarkable multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz and her idol, the bitter and hilarious David Feinberg. After many years in the rain and subject to the whim of seasons, she followed the sun to Los Angeles, where she lives with too many pets and an artist named Jeff. She is still plotting her Broadway debut.
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