Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

He stepped forward. “It’s my fuckin’ name. I look real to you?” he asked, his eyes never letting mine out of the shackles of his stare. And then he moved forward, kicking at my heels so my legs were splayed and he could press his iron body to my quivering one. So one very particular hard thing pressed against my stomach.

“I feel real to you?” he rasped, his lips almost against my mouth.

Every part of my body, every freaking cell cried out for him to kiss me. To do a lot more than kiss me. To soothe the ache between my legs that was more persistent and desperate than any of the pain in my body.

But he didn’t.

He yanked my hips forward, moving me around with enough speed to jostle my aching brain in my skull. I was set on the floor, my back no longer against the door.

And I was facing the door.

“I’m fuckin’ real, baby, and you’re gonna find yourself wishin’ I wasn’t,” Gage said, his entire body wired.

And then the door opened.

Slammed closed.

And I was left standing in the middle of the room, knees jelly, brain much the same.

Four

I didn’t see him for two days.

Forty-six hours, to be a little more exact.

And yes, I’d counted. Through the work I’d forced myself to do—at home, per Niles’s order—through the books I’d forced myself to read, the chores I’d made myself do, I’d thought of him.

Of the words he’d hurled at me. About us. About me being his. I mulled over the way he’d held his body, the way he’d structured his expression. As if it was painful to admit such things.

As if it was beyond his control.

But it wasn’t. He was the one who chose to tow my car. He was the one to stop in the first place. Then he was the one to drag me into that room, stare at me the way he did. Say those words.

He didn’t have to do any of it.

But neither did I.

I didn’t have to go to the compound; I could’ve sacrificed my pride and let Troy handle it. I didn’t have to get up in his face like I did—like I’d never done before—nor did I have to let him drag me into the clubhouse.

Because he would’ve let me go if I’d struggled. I somehow knew that. Just like I inexplicitly knew that he’d wanted me to struggle.

Because it was beyond his control.

Whatever it was yanking us together.

Again, it was the thing I’d scoffed at in every book and movie about romance. About two people being drawn to each other without logical explanation. Everything worked within logic, even love. It was pheromones, hormones, family ties, shared morals, shared interests.

For all the romance and ‘magic’ surrounding the sought-after emotion, it could be easily explained within the realms of logic.

But I was a fool to think logic could explain this.

Why my mind had been unwilling to let him go since he’d stormed out of that room. Why I’d gotten less than eight hours of sleep in two nights because the darkness was full of his shadow.

Of my own shadowed desires.

And it was why I lost the ability to breathe the second I opened my door forty-six hours after he’d stormed out of that room in the clubhouse.

Because he was standing there.

At my door.

Taking up every inch of it.

My eyes roamed up his body hungrily. Took in his faded jeans, his long black tee molded against the abs underneath it. The worn leather of his cut. The art covering the small amount of muscled skin on show. The beard hiding his jaw. The eyes that burned into my very core. The pure air around him pulsated with his presence.

And he was a total presence. Something that hit you physically. Painfully.

I let out a breath it seemed I’d been holding for forty-six hours.

I expected him to speak. Because a man who looked like that, a man who commanded the freaking air, who commanded the freaking oxygen I breathed, who threatened—no, promised to kill police officers, who turned up at a woman’s door at eight o’clock in the morning, they did it because they had something to say.

But he didn’t speak.

Not one word.

Neither did I.

I just stood there.

Like an idiot.

Staring at him.

To be fair, he was doing the same. Hence the reason I was having trouble staying upright, let alone forming words. Because his stare was like everything else about him: unyielding, destructive, unforgiving.

In these two days, I’d convinced myself that I’d imagined it. The power he had over me. What he’d roused in me. Because safe in my ordered apartment, in my ordered lifestyle, the memories could only have been a fabrication. When I took them out of the environment, out of Gage’s environment and into mine, where logic ruled, it was impossible for a man to have that effect over me.