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“Piper,” Knox said. “We just told you as much.”
“Not Patricia?” Spur asked.
“Are you deaf?” Knox yelled.
“No,” Jed added. “Her name is not Patricia.”
“What the fuck is going on? We’ve been trailing her all the way from Wichita and we want answers,” Knox commanded.
“And our sister,” Jed added. “Where the hell is she?”
Piper, our wife, was not really Patricia Strong, but Piper Dare. She’d lied to us and her brothers were irate. She’d said they never hurt her, that they were just overprotective, therefore the name change was not to avoid them. I’d known many an abused woman and Piper never behaved a
s one.
“There seems to have been a little deception,” Spur said, also knowing we were caught in the middle of something. I turned and looked at him, then down at the ground before meeting the angry looks of Piper’s brothers.
They waited impatiently.
“Your sister introduced herself to us as a Miss Patricia Strong, a woman I married as a mail order bride. We met her in Pueblo as planned.”
“And you? Why the hell did the man at the mercantile direct me to see you, Haskins, instead of this guy? Her husband?” Knox tilted his bearded chin toward Spur.
“Because under the law of Slate Springs, where we will live with her, I am also her husband.” I knew my words were like striking a match to dry tinder.
The men stared at us dumbly for a minute.
“It’s a town law that allows for two men to marry the same woman,” Spur clarified.
Jed pointed at Spur, then at me. “You’re telling me our sister is married to you… and you?”
“She has two men fucking her and you still go to a brothel? What kind of husbands are you?” Knox shouted.
That was a good question and now I saw why Piper had been so upset.
Shit. I was a complete asshole and she’d spent the past two weeks stewing over it.
But I realized in that moment that having Piper think she was married to two philanderers wasn’t the worst of it.
“It appears, gentlemen, that we actually aren’t her husbands at all,” I added, looking to Spur. The truth was a bit hard to swallow. “We married Patricia Strong, not Piper Dare.”
While I’d been protective of her, possessive too, I hadn’t thought through what a husband really meant. It meant baring more than my body and expecting her to do the same. It meant sharing everything. Even my past, no matter how bad it was. And now, knowing Piper hadn’t been ours all along only made me think we’d never have a chance with her. She’d had her reasons for impersonating Patricia Strong, and two of them probably were standing right in front of us.
If she thought we didn’t want her, then how could we ever get her to agree to really marry us? She didn’t have to do so. Even though we’d bedded her, she could still refuse any attempts we made. I wanted her and I knew Spur did, too. We’d do anything to have her. Anything.
Jed stepped right up to me, his face inches from mine. I could see the dark flecks in his blue eyes. “You’re telling me you both fucked our sister when you’re not actually married?”
Jed’s fist connected with my face and the world went dark before I could even come up with a response.
CHAPTER TEN
Piper
“You cheated,” the man snarled, spit flying onto the table in front of him.
I wanted to roll my eyes, but knew the man wouldn’t appreciate it. He was already angry that he’d lost his hard-earned money to a woman, so I didn’t need to make it worse. Why did men have to be such jackasses?
Every single one of them were like that. My brothers were bossy and overbearing. Lane and Spur had been two-timing liars. These drunk gamblers were terrible losers and they were all women haters.
