Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

I was at the bar getting another round. The women had protested heavily, since I wasn’t drinking, but I’d insisted and then Amy had shouted above everyone else, “If she wants to buy us drinks, let the bitch. It’s free cocktails—who says no to that?”

And the matter had been settled.

It wasn’t hard, considering most of the women, save Lily and Bex, were well on their way to being blotto. I sensed that they rarely all got together at the same time, considering they all had small children and really, really attractive husbands to keep them busy.

The man’s breath was off my neck and his presence out of my space before I even had a moment to breathe, or more likely to panic and figure out what the fricking heck to do.

I whirled to see Gage yanking the man by the lapels of his jacket, eyes wild.

Brock, Amy’s attractive husband, folded his muscled arms and grinned behind Gage.

I was wide-eyed and blinking rapidly as he shoved the sandy-haired man against the bar. I didn’t know what I expected from Gage—a lot of profanities, of course, a warning, some shouting. Because he was Gage and protective, and he was bound to do one or all of those things.

But I got none of that. Well, the sandy-haired man got none of that. Instead, Gage pressed the man’s palm flat on the bar and, in one fluid motion, embedded a knife into the top of it, spearing him to the wooden surface.

His screams echoed through my ringing head.

“You come near her again, you won’t be walking home with a hole in your hand. You won’t fucking have one,” Gage said, voice hard yet somehow businesslike, calm.

And then, in another smooth movement, he yanked his knife from the bar, wiped the blood on his jeans and turned to me, snatching me by the arm and dragging me toward the bathrooms.

I let him drag me, because when Gage wanted someone to be somewhere—especially when the someone was me, who was five-foot-nothing and weighed the same as one of his thighs—they were somewhere Gage wanted them to be.

The screams followed us through the now eerily silent bar. I craned my head over my shoulder to see Brock, still grinning, but now doing it with his wife in his arms. She was grinning too.

Mia lifted her drink to me in a ‘cheers’ motion.

Gwen gave me a thumbs-up.

The rest of the women were doing variations of the same thing, none of them looking at all alarmed that my boyfriend had just stabbed someone in the middle of our girls’ night.

And then I lost sight of them as Gage locked us in a bathroom and slammed me into a wall.

“You just stabbed someone in the hand, in public,” I breathed, my voice much lower and calmer than I’d expected it to be.

He didn’t say anything, merely continued to stare at me.

“He could press charges,” I continued, not knowing why I didn’t focus on the stabbing part of the equation and instead worried about Gage getting in trouble.

“He won’t. He knows what’s good for him,” Gage growled, pelvis pressing into mine. “And if he does, I don’t give a fuck. He was touching what was mine. Needed a lesson.”

I swallowed roughly around the desire that snatched hold of me with Gage’s body against mine, his eyes devouring me, his breath hot and minty on my face. It no longer smelled of smoke considering he’d quit, for me.

I tried to hold onto my constant logic, but it was hard with the adrenaline and desire pulsating through my system. Even if I never drank a drop of alcohol in my life, I’d always be fully drunk on this man in front of me.

“You couldn’t have given him, I don’t know, a verbal warning?” I asked when I finally had a somewhat tenuous control over my logical brain.

“Don’t do warnings,” he grunted. “And I’m not going to give any fucker a second chance to touch my woman.”

“But no one even knows I’m yours!” I exclaimed, though it was kind of a lie, because all the women watching the exchange knew I was Gage’s—and more importantly, Laura Maye knew, which meant the whole town likely did by now.

His callused hand brushed my cheek in a tenderness I didn’t think was possible from a man who’d just stabbed someone. “Well, they know now.”

I swallowed again, trying to remind my knees that they had to hold me up. “You could’ve communicated that without stabbing someone,” I rasped, a snip in my voice.

“Could’ve,” he agreed blandly, eyes flaring at the bite in my tone. “But I’m not fuckin’ going to. You’re mine. Someone touches what’s mine, I don’t fuck around. I take blood.”

As if he sensed that I was about to go into a tirade about how I was my own woman and didn’t need bikers stabbing men for me, his mouth covered mine, stealing the words from me.