Strip You Bare by Maisey Yates Page A

ordered all the necessary items for the mansion the first night he’d slept in it. If he had to abandon the luxury hotel where he’d been sleeping since he first arrived in New Orleans, he wasn’t about to downgrade.
    Ajax would think that was hilarious. The fact that Prince was too good to sleep on sheets that didn’t have a high enough thread count. If Ajax even knew what that meant. He hadn’t exactly had any heart-to-heart talks with his old brother about what the other man had been up to since leaving New Orleans, but he imagined he hadn’t gotten himself a luxury penthouse apartment.
    He wrapped the towel around his waist and walked back out into the bedroom. And Sarah was gone.
    Fuck.
    He hoped to God she hadn’t walked herself home on those damn high heels. She was just stubborn enough—and blind enough about the city’s dark side—to do something like that.
    He didn’t want her to get herself killed.
    And, he just wanted her again.
    He was hard again and while he knew full well he could walk down Bourbon Street, pick up a woman in about ten minutes, and have her back here with her dress pushed up and her panties pulled down, that wasn’t what he wanted.
    Luxury
. That was his weakness.
    Always had been.
    Sarah Delacroix was luxury personified. As exclusive as it got. He was the first man to get past the velvet rope, so to speak. He found that pretty damn irresistible.
    Of course, now he’d chased her off. He didn’t know how to deal with virgins. He imagined they took things pretty seriously, all things considered. It was just another reason he shouldn’t have touched her.
    He didn’t know how to take this stuff seriously.
    He also didn’t know how to defer his pleasure.
    And he also wanted to make sure she wasn’t fucking dead. Maybe an overreaction to a stroll through the Quarter at night, but even this early on a Saturday, there were people out tripping balls. They wouldn’t see a woman walking toward them, they would see a dragon.
    Though, honestly, she might be better off if they saw her as a dragon and not a woman.
    He dug through his stuff and found a pair of jeans, tugging them on, before pulling a black T-shirt over his head. Then he grabbed his phone and dialed a number he would rather not have to.
    “Travis. You at the Priory?”
    “Yeah,” Travis said, not bothering to ask who it was. Even with all the years, all the distance, all the everything, he knew.
    “Find out if Sophie can get me Sarah Delacroix’s home address.”
    By the time Sarah sat down on her couch in her sweats, with her glass of wine, she was shaking.
    This was her typical evening routine, a little silence, a little wine. Not usually preceded by hard, aggressive, amazing sex in her family’s beautiful historical home. That was new.
    She startled when she heard a pounding sound on the door, sloshing her wine over the edge of the glass, a dark red spot pooling on her pale sweatpants.
    She froze, because she wasn’t expecting anyone, and she wasn’t about to open the door for a stranger.
    “Sarah.” It was that voice again, that familiar, wonderful voice.
    The voice that had told her, absolutely, coldly, that he did not like to talk after.
    She was a little pissed at that voice, and the man attached to it.
    “What do you want?”
    She heard a clicking sound, and the rattle of her doorknob, and suddenly her door was standing wide open, Micah filling the doorway. “Not standing out in your hallway is the start of what I want.” He took a step into the living room and slammed the door closed behind him. “Getting you naked again would be the next thing.”
    “I didn’t say you could come in.”
    “I didn’t ask if I could come in. I don’t ask.”
    No, he didn’t. He took, he conquered. And standing there, he looked like every teenage fantasy of a bad boy. Ink on full display, that tight black T-shirt clinging to the muscles she now knew with startling intimacy, those tight jeans hugging his thighs like