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

and murderers of every kind. But the man he sought was still out there.
    Always, he watched for a rangy man of authority with an odd laugh, to no avail. Now Bran was on his way to a little mining town called Heaven, just outside Denver in the Kansas Territory. He’d been hired to find out who was causing accidents and holding up the gold shipments from a mine called the Sylvia.
    Assuming the identity of the minister had seemed a ready-made cover for his mission. Now, in the coach, he amused himself by listening, feeling, allowing his mind’s eye to discover the identity of his traveling companion.
    Female, he confirmed. The driver had called her ma’am.
    A good build and firm step because the carriage had tilted as she stepped inside, and she’d settled herself without a lot of swishing around.
    Probably no-nonsense, for he could see the tips of her boots beneath the brim of his hat. The boots were worn, though the clothing looked new. The only scent in the air was that of the dye in the cloth.
    Practical, for she’d planted both feet firmly on the floor of the coach and hadn’t moved them; no fidgeting or fussing with herself.
    Deciding that she seemed safe enough, he flicked the brim of his hat back and took a look at her.
    Wrong, on all four counts. Dead wrong. She was sitting quietly, yes, but that stillness was born of sheer determination—no,more like desperation. She was looking down at rough red hands and holding on to her portmanteau as if she dared anybody to touch it. Her eyes weren’t closed, but they might as well have been.
    The stage moved away in a lumbering motion as it picked up speed.
    The woman didn’t move.
    Finally, after an hour of steady galloping by the horses pulling the stagecoach, she let out a deep breath and appeared to relax.
    “Looks like you got away,” he said.
    “What?” She raised a veil of sooty lashes to reveal huge eyes as green as the moss along the banks of the Mississippi River where he’d played as a child. Something about her was all wrong. The set of her lips was meant to challenge. But beneath that bravado he sensed an appealing uncertainty that softened the lines in her forehead.
    “Back there you looked as if you were running away from home and were afraid you wouldn’t escape,” he said.
    “I was,” she said.
    “Pretty risky, a woman alone. No traveling companion, no family?”
    “Don’t have any, buried my—the last companion back in Promise.”
    Macky risked taking a look at the man across from her. He was big, six feet of black, beginning with his boots and ending with the patch over his eye and a hat that cast a shadow over a face etched by a two-day growth of beard. There was an impression of quiet danger in the casual way he seemed to look straight through her as if he knew that she was an impostor and was waiting for her to confess. “What’s wrong with your eye?”
    She hadn’t meant to ask. Asking questions would be considered bad manners. In the past, manners were something in which she’d never taken much stock. Now everything had changed. The memory of the dressmaker’s frostyglare made her acutely aware of her ill-fitting lady’s garments and bonnet.
    Skirts and petticoats didn’t make a lady and she’d already reverted back to her old way of saying what she thought without regard for the consequences.
    “I’m sorry. ‘A fool utterth all his mind.’ ”
    Bran couldn’t help responding in kind. “ ‘Answer a fool according to his folly.’ ”
    She looked at him in surprise. “Plato?”
    “No, Proverbs.” He let a few seconds pass before he went on. “I lost the eye a lot of years ago.”
    “Forgive me. Your eye is none of my concern.”
    The man wearing the eye patch wouldn’t normally have continued the conversation, but he’d never come across a woman who not only read books, but quoted from them. His interest sharpened. He couldn’t resist the impulse to learn more about her. “You have a name?”
    “Yes. Do