The Redhead and the Preacher: A Loveswept Historical Romance Read Free Page A

the coach out. They were due in Denver by the next day, and there was Indian country to get through first. Indians and the Pratt gang who’d broken out of the territory prison and robbed the bank in Promise only minutes earlier. The deputy and one of the outlaws had been killed. But the sheriff had caught one and wounded another. Only Pratt and a young boy who’d been riding with them had escaped and they were likely heading west.
    Jenks had a bad feeling about the trip, even if the Lord was on their side.

Chapter Two
    J ohn Brandon didn’t move as the new passenger boarded the stage. He’d been alone in the coach since he and the previous driver had buried the real preacher just inside the Kansas line.
    That driver had found a bottle of whiskey in the preacher’s things, and by the time they reached the next station, he was roaring drunk. Fortunately, a substitute had been available to take the coach into Promise.
    For Bran, the change in drivers was a stroke of luck.
    His luck improved even more when the stationmaster in Promise took one look at Bran carrying the preacher’s Bible and assumed that he was the Reverend Adams. For Bran, that cover seemed ideal and he didn’t correct him.
    Now there was another passenger, a lone woman, and it had been Bran’s experience that nothing appealed to a woman more than a man of God. If he allowed it to happen, he’d be forced to make conversation all the way to Denver.
    Leaning his head against the back of the seat, his face covered by his hat, he hoped that she’d think he was asleep. He’d learned long ago that his senses could discover much without the aid of his eyes and that good luck was as valuable as good planning.
    Good. He winced over that word. He’d lost any goodness in his life the same time he’d lost the sight in his eye.
    Bran wished he hadn’t been able to see or hear the night the thieves pretending to be Indians had swooped down on his family’s small homestead along the Mississippi.
    What he’d lived through that night had forever robbed Bran of love, a family, and any hope of a normal life. The outlaws had come for the money from a year’s crop of indigo and skins. They’d murdered everyone but the eight-year-old boy, who was saved by an arrow that lodged in his eye, causing a paralyzing pain that convinced the outlaws that he was dead. Then they’d burned the house. The last memory Bran had was of the gang leader, a silhouette of black against the orange flames of the cabin. That vision had been forever burned into his mind.
    The commanding general at the nearby fort found the cabin burned to the ground and the boy half unconscious. He put the blame on the Indians he’d been sent to restrain instead of the river pirates.
    Later, John had tried to explain that the gang of men who murdered his family were white but nobody would dispute the officer’s claim. The general offered John to a local farmer. Alone and filled with anger, he’d run away from the fort authorities, who were no better than the thieves. But the memory of his sister’s screams and the killer’s laugh had driven him ever since.
    Later, the Choctaw Indian tribe who’d taken him in and saved his life called him Eyes That See in Darkness. They thought he had special powers; he could see in the dark. And he’d stayed with them, determined to learn to kill.
    Later, he’d accompanied the tribe west to the lands they were assigned in Oklahoma. Along with his Indian brothers,he’d attended the missionary’s school where he studied the white man’s Bible, the same one his mother had read to him as a boy.
    The wound in his eye healed, but nothing healed the scar in his heart, and as he grew into a man he made a vow that if it took the rest of his life, he’d find the outlaw who’d been responsible.
    For the last fifteen years he’d wandered across the country, looking, searching, hiring himself out as a private avenger of evil. As a gunfighter he found and punished thieves