Their Conquered Bride. Grace Goodwin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to start over.

      When our regiment arrived in Mohamir, he’d been the first one of us to see the wisdom of their ways. Two husbands meant safety and comfort for a widow and her children. That was something Logan admired and respected about their society and I agreed.

      The drunken sot sitting across from me, Harry, seemed to accept my excuse and my strange accent. He turned away from me and nodded his head at his father, seemingly content with my response. Bloody idiot.

      Tad called for another card, stuck it into his hand, then said, “We didn’t use no agency. A newspaper advertisement was all it took.”

      “And it’s not three brides,” Jenkins clarified, then pointed to himself and his sons. “Only one. Why the hell do we want three noisy women in the house when we only need one?”

      I saw Logan’s eyebrows go up. He leaned forward, placed his forearms on the table. “You’re telling me you placed an advertisement for a bride to share? And you received a reply?”

      I shifted in my seat, eager to hear the answer. If a simple advertisement would bring a willing woman to us, a woman content to marry two men instead of one, our bride problem could be easily solved. Apparently, Logan also saw the possibilities. Was this how it was done in America? I was used to arranged marriages among the upper class in England, but those matches were meant to preserve genetic lineage and station. This country broke from king and country a century before to avoid such legacies.

      “She must be a hundred-year-old hag,” Evan said, rolling his eyes.

      Logan chuckled, but Jenkins held his hand in a fist, shaking it in Evan’s face as if my friend were an idiot. “Now hold on. Of course not! She’s a nice young virgin. Twenty and five. And I got her likeness right here.” Jenkins dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a thick photograph with ripped edges for Logan to see. Both Evan and I leaned forward for a glimpse of the woman, but Tad had other ideas. He ripped the photograph from his father’s hand before any of us could take a look.

      “Damn it, Pa. They’ll try to steal her away.”

      Jenkins looked to Logan, who shook his head in disgust and lied through his teeth, his thick American accent as fake as the smile on his face. “I already got a wife. Why would I want yours?”

      Jenkins raised an eyebrow and Tad spit a wad of black slime onto the floor near my feet as his father preened like a peacock. “She thinks she’s marrying a forty-year-old widower with wee sons to take care of. And that part’s true.” He grinned and his eyes narrowed. “She’ll be takin’ care of my boys, just not in the way she thinks.”

      Tad chuckled and looked to his younger brother. “She’ll be taking very special care of us with that pussy of hers.”

      It was a good thing I only had one shot of that rotgut whiskey, for my stomach heaved at the plan these men had devised. The father was going to marry a woman and, without her knowing, planned to share her with his two grown sons. The poor woman thought she would be getting a younger man with small children. The elder Jenkins had to be fifty if he were a day.

      My own mother had been married to an old man, a man in his sixties and she just eighteen. She was the second wife of my father, the marquess of Barton. It had been a loveless marriage, a marriage solely to link two families. My mother had been a pawn, just like this Jenkins’ bride. Where my mother had no power to deny her fate, this woman was choosing to become Jenkins’ bride. But why? What drove a woman to marry a man sight unseen? Desperation, if I had to venture a guess.

      That didn’t make the situation any better.

      “Taking care of you two with her pussy?” Evan pointed from Tad to Harry, his back stiff as a giant oak, but none of the Jenkins men noticed.

      “It’s all in the family. We’ll all fuck her. Little Harry here has an itch that needs to be scratched. A virgin itch. Well, not quite virgin, since I’ll break her in first.” Jenkins winked at his youngest, Little Harry, who was well over six feet of solid muscle, his massive size no doubt acquired over weeks and months of moving rock in the mines.

      “I doubt this woman will be too keen on the idea,” I said, keeping my voice neutral despite the gut-churning desire I had to pound Jenkins’ face into dust. My mother hadn’t been forced to bed other men. In fact, once I was born, the heir, I doubted she bedded any man ever again.

      Logan and I would share a bride someday, but it would be for our wife’s benefit, not ours. When we claimed her, she’d be the center of our universe. We’d cherish her, love her, protect her, never do anything to defile her or betray her trust. We would be nothing like these men. If something happened to me, I was comforted to know that my future bride, and any children we might have, would be safe and cared for by Logan. I knew he felt the same.

      I was the marquess of Barton, had been for the past five years when my father had died at the ripe age of eighty-eight. A bride didn’t stay safe and warm because of a title. It was the man who’d inherited it that she needed.

      Bloody fucking hell. I’d left England to avoid these kinds of shenanigans and we were in the thick of it now. None of us could walk away with the information these men were imparting. The west was a rough place. Wild. A man’s world. It was hard enough for a woman to survive and no woman deserved to be preyed upon by the likes of the Jenkins men.

      I didn’t even need to look at Logan to know he agreed with me. Evan was having a harder time keeping his feelings in check. He tossed his cards on the table. “I fold. I need a drink.”

      He stood, his chair scraping across the scarred wood floor. Glancing at me first, then at Logan, Evan shook his head. “I’ll see you later.”

      I lifted my chin in response and the Jenkins men watched him leave.

      “What’s his problem?” old man Jenkins asked. He didn’t wait for me to respond, only leaned forward, then looked left and right. “We’re keeping it in the family. It’s not like we’ll let anyone fuck her. Any seed that fills that pussy will belong to a Jenkins.”

      “And her ass. You said an ass fuck is even tighter than a virgin pussy,” Little Harry countered. The eagerness I saw on his face made me sick.

      Tad grinned and made a crude gesture with his hands. “You two can have her pussy. I’m taking that virgin ass.”

      I was ready to reach across the table and punch Tad in the nose, but that wouldn’t help the woman who was unaware of their intentions. While I had to agree that ass fucking was the tightest fuck ever, Logan and I would only do it after much preparation and only when the woman was so damn hot she begged us to take her completely. I doubted Tad could arouse a woman, let alone prepare her properly.

      “You think the people in this town will like knowing what you’re doing?” I asked.

      Little Harry grinned. “We’re not tellin’ people. It’s our secret. Ain’t like she’ll talk neither. Since talking would ruin her reputation and all.”

      Clearly, none of them could hold their whiskey for their secret was now ours. While we wouldn’t go off and tell the sheriff of their perverted plans, we could certainly intervene on behalf of the woman. Once the vows were said, these men could do whatever they wanted with the bride. Beat her, share her, fuck her. She belonged to her husband in the eyes of the law and there was nothing that said he couldn’t share with his sons.

      “When СКАЧАТЬ