Page 17 of Claimed By the Cowboys

“Just because you want the help with marketing? Because I definitely would do that still if you didn’t want?—”

“We want to, Piper,” Brent says. The gravel in his voice makes her look up, and it sends a chill down my spine, too. Brent’s eyes darken. “Whatever you want. However you want to swing it. We’re more than happy to do whatever you need to have a baby.”

Piper gulps. “Oh. Yeah. I guess that I did kind of ask generally, didn’t I?”

“If you want one of us, babe, you’re gonna have all of us,” I say. I’m not even trying to hide the fact that it’s a pretty sexual statement.

I was dead serious when I told Brent that this was our future. This is the way to finally show Piper that we work as a unit. That we can be more than friends and be there for her.

We need to take this chance. We can’t fuck it up. It almost seems like a dream.

Piper sucks in a huge breath. “Um. Okay. I need to think. But it’s like… really nice that you said yes. I know that you think of me as just a friend. And if you’re not attracted to me like, um… like that… then we can work out a little more clinical way to?—”

“Fuck that,” Dalton growls. We all look at him. “Clinical? No.”

Jesus. The manners of these two. “What Dalton is saying, Piper, is that I don’t think any of us is, uh… interested in something clinical.”

She blinks at me. “What are you saying?”

Careful, Tate.Piper has the look of a startled deer, and I don’t think this is the time or place. Instead, I opt to wrap it up. I lean in and take her hand. It’s so soft in mine, and I shiver,thinking of all the ways that I want her soft skin on me. I lift her fingers to my lips and place a gentle kiss there before returning them to the table.

“Let’s talk logistics in the morning. For now, I think it’s probably best to just celebrate.”

“Celebrate?” Piper echoes.

My grin broadens. Piper loves a party, and I can’t wait to celebrate all the events with her. “Yup. And I baked the perfect cake to do it.”

CHAPTER 5

Piper

“Earth to Piper,” I hear Blaire distantly over the phone. “Are you there?”

“Hi,” I breathe.

I’m here. Well. Kind of.

Mentally, I’m still sitting at the dinner table with the guys, right after they told me that they’d help me have a baby. Which, I realize now, is probably a little more than I’d bargained for.

“Did you get like sloshed at the guys’ house last night?”

I prop her up against a stack of pottery in the greenhouse. She’s on a video chat today, which is fun because I never get to see my sister via video.

It is also, however, a bad idea because she can see my face right now, and Blaire is pretty darn good at reading my emotions. And I don’t want her to read this right now. Mostly because I don’t really know how I feel, and I donotwant to figure it out.

I mean, I can just sit here and relish the fact that they told me they’d help me have a baby. Right?

“Piper!” Blaire yells. “Seriously. What the fuck is going on with you?”

“Nothing!” I respond. “I’m fine!”

I make the mistake of looking at her. Shit.

Her eyes are narrow, and she absolutely knows that I am not, in fact, fine.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

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