Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

And I turned on my heel and almost sprinted to my desk, hoping Abagail wouldn’t follow me.

She didn’t.

But her words did.

I had been expecting the pounding on the door.

That didn’t mean I didn’t jump when it started. When my whole apartment seemed to rattle at the force of it. It had sparked a small slice of fear inside of me. Until I remembered Abagail’s words and anger chased it away.

So I stomped down my stairs and flung my door open.

And I was presented with an angry biker.

No, a furious biker.

His gaze scanned over my body.

It hit me physically. The silence around it, around him. The fury inside of that silence was enough to make me shrink back into myself.

Almost.

Instead I jutted my chin up, folded my arms and met his stare with one of my own. It wouldn’t have measured up to the menace in his, of course, but I also guessed it might be an anomaly considering he probably didn’t get people staring back at him in such a way.

“Waited outside your work,” he clipped, eyes stormy. But something had flickered in them when I’d refused to cower underneath his gaze.

I pursed my lips but didn’t reply. What did someone even say to that as a barked greeting?

His entire being seemed to twitch as his eyes darkened. “Don’t like to be kept waiting,” he growled.

“Well I don’t like being ordered around,” I snapped. “Especially by a man who all but hurled me onto the sidewalk the night I was in an accident, stole my wrecked car, and then, without any proper conversation, without even knowing my fricking last name, spouts utter crap about how I belong to him!” I yelled, surprising myself with the volume of my voice. It was addicting, that fury, and nearly impossible to control now that I’d let it out of me.

“And then that man turns up on my doorstep two days later—two days of silence after saying I’m his, mind you—and orders me around some more,” I continued, my voice slightly shrill. “Shakes up the life I’ve been very happy with up until now.” I narrowed my eyes. “I know you’re in a club that doesn’t play by the rules, but I’m not. And that piece of leather on your back does not give you permission to break my rules.”

I sucked in a rough breath at the end of my tirade, anger and arousal mixing together in a brutal marriage.

I’d never been attracted to a man like him before. All the men I’d been slightly interested in were all cookie-cutter versions of each other. The male version of vanilla ice cream.

There was only one version of Gage, and he was standing right in front of me.

And he was definitely not vanilla. In any sense of the word.

So my heart was slamming into my chest with the fear, expectation, and excitement swirling through me, waiting for a reaction.

But he didn’t do anything. Didn’t yell. Didn’t growl. Didn’t curse at me. His body had relaxed somehow during my little screeching session. That didn’t make sense at all, since when I was silent he’d been as taut as a wire.

People were comfortable in silence.

They were irate when they were being yelled at.

But Gage was not people.

A small grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“And what, pray tell, Will, are your rules?” he asked, voice light. Teasing almost.

I hadn’t been expecting it, so it took me by surprise. I digested his words, blinking rapidly. “I-I, um,” I stuttered, nothing else coming out.

Didn’t all those women in the movies have witty banter with the man looking at them in such a way?

Wasn’t witty repertoire one of the building blocks of a relationship?

And yet I stumbled over my words like a fool.

“I suspect they’re not too dissimilar to the rules of decency,” I muttered, scrambling for something, anything, to say.

The grin remained but darkened in a way that made me very glad I had my arms crossed against my chest. Because I’d changed into my yoga gear after escaping work before five, intending on chasing some calm in the wake of the chaos that came with anticipating that very moment. My sheer white tee and flimsy sports bra were not enough to hide the way my nipples hardened at his grin. At the darkness in his eyes that once again roused that part of me I’d been pretending didn’t exist.

“Oh, baby, I suspect they’re not at all similar to the rules of decency,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “I’m fuckin’ certain that the rules you have, the rules I’ll fuckin’ break—and you’ll love it when I do—have nothing to do with decency.” He stepped forward, stealing all the oxygen from my lungs. But then I didn’t need oxygen when he was that close, when he had that look in his eyes. “I can see it in you, Will. You might hide it from the world, but an immoral man like me can see the depravity that hides behind this.” His hand went to the frames of my glasses, trailing along the frames in a motion that should not have been sexy at all. But it was.