Page 12 of The Marriage Negotiation

"I'd want a pre-nup."

Maybe that would throw him off.

"I'm okay with that," Patrick replied.

"With a fidelity clause."

"I'm okay with that, too." Patrick smiled. "I'm actually in favor of it."

Considering what I told him about my parents' marriage, that made sense.

"Are you really serious about this?" I had to be sure. Apparently, I'd been fooled before.

"I am," Patrick admitted. "Besides, we have a perfectly good wedding already set up." He reached up and tugged at his bowtie. "And I'm already dressed for it, so..."

"You don't think it'll be a little weird for me to be engaged to one brother and marry the other one? I mean, what will the guests think?"

"We'll tell them that there was a mess-up at the printers and they printed the wrong name on the wedding invitations. No one has to know that you weren't supposed to marry me."

People would know. I was sure of it.

"What about Peter's friends? I'm sure they'd know."

"Do you really think Peter's friends are going to show up for a wedding where he isn't the groom?"

Well, now that he mentioned it...

"I'm sure Peter has already contacted his friends—if he has any—and told them the wedding was cancelled. They are probably sitting somewhere with that woman he's fooling around with laughing their asses off."

I grimaced at that thought. While I hadn't been in love with Peter, I had liked him and had accepted that I would be spending my life with him. It smarted a little that he had left me for someone else, and a woman at that. If he had been so disgusted that I was gay, he shouldn't have even started dating me.

"How do we get a pre-nup set up?" I asked.

"I need a computer and then I can call a friend of mine who is a lawyer. He can write something up and we can sign it electronically."

"Is that legal?"

"It is," Patrick replied. "The one thing I'm worried about is the marriage license. It's in Peter's name, not mine."

"Couldn't we have the ceremony now and then turn in the marriage papers later?" I wasn't sure how else to get around that.

"Yeah, that might work," Patrick agreed. "We can go to the courthouse as soon as the reception is over. No one has to know except us that we don't have the papers yet."

I took a couple of deep breaths before asking, "Are we really going to do this?"

"I think we can," Patrick answered.

I wasn't so sure.

"Are you going to have an issue about me being engaged to your brother in the future?" I could just imagine what a battlefield that would make our married life.

"Do you love him?"

My eyebrows snapped together. "I already told you that I didn't."

"Do you think, once you get to know me, we might be able to establish a real relationship between us?"

I stared at Patrick in bewilderment. "You mean like a real marriage?"

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