Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

And the men I’d been with didn’t want all of me. They wanted the me I portrayed on the surface. The nice, plain woman who would make a good wife, a mother, and who would never speak up for herself. Who didn’t have her own opinion.

I would never be that woman.

But to the naked eye, I looked a heck of a lot like her.

It was my own design, of course. To keep myself safe from pain.

And what those men couldn’t even see in broad daylight, Gage saw completely and utterly in the darkness that night on the highway.

And I was no longer safe.

So before, I might not have been one of those women who spiraled when the guy didn’t call, but I sure as heck was now. And my circumstances were kind of extenuating, considering what happened the last time I saw Gage.

Considering all the things he said.

I still felt his grip on me, even a week later. I still had the faint marks of how tightly he’d pressed the pads of his fingers into my soft skin.

And I was upset about that. Not about the marks being there in the first place, but that they were disappearing.

Because if the marks were disappearing, then he’d only become a ghost of a rupture in my smooth and utterly simple life. Something that might’ve cracked it slightly but then left me with the knowledge of how hollow I was.

Logically, it was a good thing, because everything about Gage was wrong for me. He was a biker who lived hard and wild. So hard that violence seeped out of his very pores. I wore cardigans and my life was all about order. Safety.

A man who lived for danger and excitement didn’t end up with the woman who actively structured her life so meticulously that every second was designed to repel excitement. Danger.

So I should’ve been relieved, should’ve been settling back into the calm that came after a storm.

Though it didn’t feel like the storm was over.

I didn’t want it to be over.

But I had some distractions. One being Amy, who took it upon herself to show up at eight in the morning with two coffees for herself and a peppermint tea for me. She and her son, usually quiet in his stroller, would walk me to work every morning.

First I’d been a ball of nerves, thinking she was going to grill me about Gage and I’d have to say my greatest fears out loud—that he’d realized how wrong I was for him, how I was little more than a cardboard cutout of a human and I’d never see him again.

But she didn’t so much as utter his name. Though she uttered pretty much everything else under the sun. By the end of the week, I could’ve written a book—heck, I could’ve written five and a half books—on the Sons of Templar, the men and their respective women.

It sure sounded like fantasy. Too crazy to be real. But I’d been in Amber when it went down. On the fringes, where I thought I’d always be.

Never did I imagine I’d be right in the middle.

Or maybe still on the fringes, with just a taste of what it was like to be part of a family like that. To be touched and looked at the way Gage touched and looked at me.

“Lauren?” a voice jerked me out of my melancholy.

I looked up from my computer, having stared at the screen for the better part of an hour. I’d managed to get the bare minimum done that day, and the whole week. Which was my version of spiraling. I was never happy with the bare minimum. I made sure I excelled at everything I did, put all of myself into it so there were no parts of my brain that could go wandering.

And yet it seemed that almost my whole brain had been wandering that week.

“Jen,” I said, focusing on the woman leaning on my desk, smiling warmly at me.

Though I had no reason to think such a thing, the smile unnerved me. It was open, friendly, at home on her tanned and pretty faced, but there was something… off about it. About her entire presence.

Her presence that had been seemingly everywhere in the office for the entire week. I’d arrived at work on Monday after no sleep and my first walking session with Amy and I was not on my game.

Which was of course when Niles informed me of Jen joining the team as a new lifestyle columnist, and just a general reporter. Which in itself was strange, considering the current state of the paper and the journalism industry in general. We were laying people off, not hiring them.

But Jen was charming. Charismatic. And of course, beautiful, which I was sure helped with her hiring process. It was a catty thought, but it had merit. Niles was old-school in all the ways that were good, believing in journalistic integrity, like the muckrakers back in the day who were willing to sacrifice everything for the truth. Who believed journalism was the fifth estate, holding the powers that were to account. He worked independently and would never be bought. He rewarded talent.