The Redhead and the Preacher: A Loveswept Historical Romance

H
e woke to the smell of smoke and the sound of his sister’s terrified screams.

With his teeth chattering in fear, he pulled on his ragged trousers and crept down the stairs, his small body hugging the shadows.

Three threatening, mean men—river pirates, he judged from their clothes—were circling his mother and his sister. His father lay crumpled and still on the floor by the door, his head split open by an Indian tomahawk. A fourth man waited in the shadows.

“Papa,” the boy whispered. “Get up, Papa.”

“We gave you our money,” his mother was saying. “Why’d you have to kill him?”

His sister’s screams turned into painful whimpers, her arms crossed across her chest as she tried to cover her bare breasts. One of the men reached out and touched her,
laughing as she cringed. “Leave her alone,” his mother pleaded. “Take me instead.”

Helplessness, anger, and some kind of animal instinct reached inside John Brandon Lee and told him that these men were the spawn of the devil his mother had warned him about. Bile rose bitter from his stomach, almost choking him as he searched for something that could be used as a weapon by an eight-year-old boy.

The woodpile by the fireplace.

The man in the shadows laughed. “Come here, girl.”

Brandon forced himself to look away. Slowly he began to inch his way around the room.

“I said get your butt over here, or by God, I’ll kill this old woman.”

“You touch my daughter and God will smite you where you stand, you devil!”

“Get away from me, you old crow!” the leader said.

There was a cry and a thud. Then silence.

Hot, wet tears rolled down Brandon’s cheek. He didn’t know what to do. They’d killed his father and hurt his mother. Then his sister screamed again.

And the man laughed.

Instead of a limb from the woodpile, Brandon spied his mother’s fire poker, the end of it still resting in the hot coals. He jerked it out and lunged toward the man who was fumbling at his britches.

“Stop it! Stop hurting my sister!” Brandon cried, striking out with as much force as he could manage. Someone grabbed him from behind and pulled him back, but not before he drew a cry of pain from the man holding his sister.

“God’s blood, the whelp scorched me!” the man swore and slapped Brandon’s face, slinging him across the room.

The next few minutes were burned forever into his mind. His sister continued to scream while the men used her. Then she hushed and Brandon knew she was dead. Sheer hate filled him as he committed to memory what he saw.

“Let’s make it look like an Indian attack, mates,” the young leader said as he lifted a bow and a quill of arrows from where he’d dropped them by the door. “I’ll spray a few arrows around. You take their scalps and—kill that boy. No point in leaving any witnesses.”

Brandon stood, stiff and unmoving, determined not to show fear. One of the thieves drew his knife and turned to Brandon’s mother. A second man leaned over his sister. It didn’t matter, they were both dead.

Then, knowing that he too was doomed, Brandon made one last attempt to charge the devil who laughed and raised his bow. The arrow caught Brandon in his eye, the force of it and the searing pain knocking him backward. The last conscious thing he knew was sheer agony, the man’s cynical laugh, and his own vow of revenge.

M
ckenzie Kathryn Calhoun consoled herself afterward by saying that she hadn’t intended to commit a crime the day she took part in robbing the Bank of Promise in Promise, Kansas.

But the morning it happened, it wouldn’t have done her any good to claim innocence. It was far too late. The people in Promise had long ago given up on the rangy, red-haired girl who wore men’s clothes, quoted from the classics, and called herself Macky. She was considered as peculiar as her father and as wild and out of control as her shiftless brother had been.

Had Macky been anybody else, the town might have shown some consideration over her having buried her peace-loving father one day and learning the next that her brother, Todd, hadn’t shown up for the funeral because he’d dealt himself four aces in a crooked poker game. There was
nothing unusual about that, except this time he’d been shot to death by another gambler who caught him cheating.

Macky could have told them that she had to sell her father’s horse to pay for his funeral and her own horse to pay for her brother’s, but nobody asked. All she had left the day of the holdup was a mule named Solomon, her mother’s cameo, and a worthless farm with the mortgage due. All she wanted to do was buy a stone for Papa’s grave and find a place where she could belong. Her plan to get even with the banker who’d cheated her father might fail, but that morning it was the only hope she had.

It was late April, the time of year when spring crops should be planted, but not on Calhoun land in Promise, Kansas. It was fitting, Macky thought, that a light snow had fallen the night before, scalloping the prairie with white ruffles like the fading memory of frothy waves back home in Boston’s harbor. Like everything else in her life, even the earth seemed to be moving away from her.

She closed her eyes for a moment to stop the spinning in her mind while she considered what to take with her. Deciding that it would be warmer to wear her clothes than carry them, she donned two of her brother Todd’s shirts, his trousers and his work boots, stuffed with rags so that she could keep them on.

Instead of the braid she normally wore to restrain her unruly mass of red hair, she tucked it beneath her papa’s felt hat. Finally, she rolled her only dress in her bedroll, along with the last of the cheese and bread.

Macky never had cared much about looking like a woman, but today even Papa wouldn’t have recognized the washed-out shell of a person she’d become. With her mother’s brooch tucked into the pocket of Papa’s coat, she mounted the mule and started into town.

As she rode away, she looked back. There was nothing else of value left; there were no more livestock, no food
supplies, only a rundown house ready to collapse in the wake of the next windstorm. If her father hadn’t died of heart problems, he’d have died of starvation for there was no money left for seed that wouldn’t grow.

The only thing that gave her pause was leaving her father’s books. Carrying them would have been only a sentimental gesture for she’d memorized them long ago. Of all the things she’d lost, her conversations with her father would be the things she’d miss most.

Pulling her gaze away from the dismal scene, she gave the mule a slap on the rear. Today was Friday and payday for the banker’s cowhands. She had better hurry if she was going to catch the man before he left for his ranch. As she rode, she rehearsed her plea to the smart-talking money-man who’d sold her gentle, scholarly father a worthless piece of land where nothing would grow but rattlesnakes and sagebrush.

If the banker-turned-land-dealer refused to buy back the land, Macky would sell her mother’s cameo for enough money to buy a ticket on the noon stage heading for Denver. The brooch was the last thing she owned of any value, that and Solomon, a mule so ornery no one would buy him.

Macky gave little thought about where she would go now. Her family had been outcasts every place they’d ever been; Papa with his fine education and inability to earn a living and Mama and Todd who always refused to try.

She didn’t expect to find a place where she fit in. God only knew where she’d ever find something she was good at. No man would want her as a wife; she was too outspoken, too plain, and she couldn’t cook. She might have been a schoolmarm, if she’d had the temperament and had been submissive enough to satisfy those who paid her salary. She might have been a governess if she’d paid more attention to her mother’s lessons of deportment.

But Macky was taught to think, to express herself and to do it openly as an equal. Macky sighed. The only thing she
had to offer was something nobody would want—a quick mind.

About a mile outside of town, a hawk swooped down, clasped a frightened jackrabbit in his talons, and flew away. The sound of his wings spooked the mule, who stepped into a gopher hole and bolted. He deposited Macky in the middle of the trail and, braying at the top of his lungs, took off with her bedroll.

Macky let out an oath as she watched him race away. She was still fuming when four hard-riding men crested the hill and came to a stop where she’d fallen. One man was leading a horse with an empty saddle.

“Looks like you got trouble, boy!” The stranger who seemed to be the leader glanced at the disappearing mule, then moved closer. He had a scruffy gray beard and a bloody bandana tied around his forehead. He was riding a black horse with a fancy silver-trimmed saddle.

Boy?
One look at the cold expression in his eyes made Macky decide that being a boy at this point was much safer than being a girl. She nodded and came to her feet.

“What’s your name, son?”

“McKenzie,” she answered in the deepest voice she could manage.

“Heading to Promise?” another asked.

“Yep.”

“Folks there know you?” the leader asked.

Again, she nodded. They knew her, but that wasn’t likely to do these men any good if they were looking for someone to put in a word for them.

“How’d you like a ride the rest of the way to town, pick up a dollar or two? We got an extra horse.” The leader nodded at the black horse trailing behind them. “One of my men had a little accident a ways back and—stayed behind.”

Macky would have said no, but if she walked, she’d miss the noon stage. Once she made her decision to leave, catching that stage had become the most important thing she’d ever do.