Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

I’d had kind of a huge crush on him back then. He was my ultimate type, after all. Quarterback. Square jawed. Dirty blond hair that was always cut and groomed perfectly. Tall, lean, but not too muscly.

Good smile.

Safe.

Evidenced by the fact that he was now a police officer.

I hadn’t entirely grown out of the crush, merely pushed it to the back of my mind since it wasn’t logical that the attractive police officer would be interested in the quiet, boring, glasses-wearing, beige-clad me.

But that didn’t mean his voice wasn’t comforting.

Though it didn’t stir anything inside me quite like the rough growl that had woken my body the night before. That had stirred something I didn’t even know existed inside of me.

Don’t think of that!

“Well, that’s exactly it,” Troy said, voice hesitant. “Would you mind coming down to the station?”

I froze. “The station? I wasn’t drinking or anything while I was driving. Heck, I don’t even drink period. And I swear I was driving the speed limit, though that probably doesn’t mean much to you, as people not driving the speed limit are likely to swear they were driving within it, but—”

A low and warm chuckle interrupted my freak-out and the visions of prison bars closing in on me. I logically knew that they didn’t lock you up for speeding, or swerving for a dog and crashing into a ditch, but my mind was still conjuring up incarceration. The mere thought of it had me breaking into a sweat. Locked doors, enclosed spaces.

No.

“Babe, I know you. Which means I know for a fact that you were driving within the speed limit, and I know you sure as hell weren’t drinking,” Troy said, amused.

All thoughts of prison left my head, making room for Troy’s words. “You know me?” I repeated on a whisper. I had been surprised he even knew my name and connected me to “the girl I had Biology with, right?” when I’d spoken to him earlier in the day.

“Yeah, Lauren, I know you,” he replied, his voice low and warm and… something else.

Something my throbbing brain likely imagined.

“So I’m not going to get put away for swerving for a dog and, like, misusing police resources or something?” I clarified.

Another warm chuckle. “No, Lauren. You’re not in trouble. And helping you out is definitely not a misuse of police resources. Best resource I’ve used in a long time, in fact.”

There it was again, that strange tone.

Was he flirting?

No. That was insane.

“C-can I ask why you need me down at the st-station?” I stuttered, trying to regain my even voice. I pinched the bridge of my nose in an effort to somewhat alleviate the headache radiating to the front of my face.

The lack of sleep probably had a lot to do with that.

Oh, and the smashing of my head against my steering wheel.

“Well, I went out to the spot this morning where you crashed, and your car wasn’t there.”

I stopped pinching my nose. “My car wasn’t there?” My previously quelled panic returned. “How is it not there? I mean, it’s not even drivable. It was in a ditch. Do you think someone stole it? Why would someone want to steal a crashed Hyundai? It’s one of the least-stolen cars in the country,” I babbled. “Well, number seven, but that’s still in the top ten. And that’s when it’s drivable—”

“Lauren, calm down,” Troy said, a smile in his voice. “We don’t know if it’s been stolen yet. Could’ve been someone saw it, decided to do a good deed, towed it themselves. But I think it would be a good idea for you to come down and make a report anyway.”

A good deed.

I froze on that thought.

An idea entered my mind. A much crazier idea than the police officer I’d had a crush on as a teenager flirting with me.

An idea about a certain motorcycle club and the garage attached to the clubhouse. The garage I assumed had the capabilities to remove a crashed car from the side of the road.

The motorcycle club whose patch was sewn onto the back of the leather I’d been clutching a handful of hours before. The man wearing the leather. The one who had held my arms pressed to his middle the entire ride into town. The one who gazed at me with a feral stare saturated with menace.

The man who’d left me on the curb at the hospital.

No, that didn’t make sense.

He wouldn’t leave me on the side of the road, anxious to get rid of me, and then do something nice like tow my car.

Troy had said “good deed.”

That man did not do good deeds.

One just had to look at him, feel the air around him, to know that much.

“Babe? You still with me?”

I jerked out of my stupor in order to inspect the fact that Troy had called me ‘babe’ twice in a conversation that had lasted less the five minutes. The longest conversation we’d ever had.