Promises Reveal (46 page)

She caught his gaze, held it. She meant to yell a warning. “I love you” was all that came out. Taking another breath she tried again. “He’s going to—”

Bart clapped his hand over her mouth, cutting off the warning she was going to give. She struggled, biting and kicking. A door banged shut below and Casey shouted, “Reverend!”

No!
Eyes wide, Evie braced her feet against the wall and heaved, sending Bart stumbling backward. Tangling her feet with his, tripping him in a last-ditch effort to delay the inevitable, she accepted the reality. They were out of time.

 
SHE LOVED HIM. She went and fucking told him again that she loved him while some bastard had a gun to her head. As soon as Brad got done paddling her ass for not staying safely where he’d put her, he was going to talk to her about the importance of timing.

He turned. Casey stood just outside the saloon door, staring at him, an amused smile on his lips.

“I confess, I was a little disappointed to find you alive.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

Brad smiled. “I’m not, but I am curious. Why didn’t you tell anyone who I am?”

“Why do you think?”

Brad grunted. “Didn’t figure it had much to do with goodwill.”

“I rather like the thought of you dying as a nobody.” He motioned to Brad’s attire as he stepped off the walkway. “Seems fitting, since you went back to religion after all.”

“A man can’t outrun his past.”

“No.” Casey smiled. “He can’t.”

Brad bared his teeth and smiled as well. “You’re not my past, Casey. You’re just an annoying pest that I didn’t have the sense to squash when I should have.”

“Because you let Brenda talk you out of it. It’s always a mistake to listen to a woman.”

As he shrugged, Brad noticed the flash of a rifle barrel on the roof to the left, two doors down. “I’m a slow learner.”

“Yes, you are.” Casey glanced at the flutter of the curtains at Millie’s. “Where’s my family?”

“Safe.”

He laughed and smiled that smile that made him popular with the ladies in any town they’d ridden into. “From me?”

“Yes.”

“You risked everything for nothing, Reverend. We both know Brenda will come back to me. She always does.”

“Not this time. You hurt her daughter.”

Anger flashed across Casey’s handsome face, erasing the charmingly friendly facade no one seemed inclined to look beyond. “
My
daughter.”

“Not anymore.”

“How do you figure that?” Casey moved to the center of the street. Brad didn’t follow. Any farther out and the snipers on the right would have a shot at him, too. His odds were bad enough as it was.

He had to keep Casey talking until such time as Jackson and Elijah got their shots. Then, his fingers flexed, then he’d end it.

“The McKinnelys have some interesting customs.”

“So?” Casey kept edging out. Brad turned with him, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling as he put his back to the buildings.

“There’s one of which I’m particularly fond. They hold kinship by claim as strong as kinship by blood.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means I’ve taken that custom as my own. It means I’ve claimed Brenna.”

Casey actually snarled. He pushed his coat away from his gun, fingers twitching. “I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

Brad remembered Evie’s scared face smashed against the window, her brave signal that she was okay, her desperate declaration of love. The cold fury that swept over him only centered his focus. He wasn’t taking his last breath until Casey was dead. “Funny, I had the same thought about you.”

Casey raised his hand. As if that were a signal, everything happened at once. A woman screamed. Eight rifle shots exploded almost simultaneously. Bullets peppered the dirt around him. Brad dove for cover, rolling across the ground to the minimal shelter of the saloon steps.

A shot rang out from above. “Evie!”

The only answer came in a hail of bullets that kept him pinned. Son of a bitch! “Evie!”

Jackson and Elijah had better not have missed. The men in the room with Evie had better be dead.

He barely got his gun clear of his holster before he was pinned down by fire again.

Casey stood in the middle of the street, that charming grin on his face spreading as a bullet kicked up dirt between Brad’s thighs.

“That was a close one, Reverend.”

Too damn close. A scream came from inside the saloon. The front door burst open. “Brad!”

In the split second Casey smiled and turned, Brad knew what he’d planned.

“No.” He sprang to his feet, throwing himself into Casey’s line of fire as he lunged for Evie.

“Get out of the way,” Evie screamed, whipping up her hand and pointing the gun over his shoulder.

Bullets hit the ground around him, creased his side, punched into his shoulder. He couldn’t see anything except Evie standing there on the porch, blood spattered across her face and clothes, all hell breaking loose around her, pistol in her hand, ready to take on all comers.

“You damn fool.” Grabbing her arm, he hauled her down, throwing his body over hers as a shotgun exploded nearby, tucking as much of her as he could under him, expecting to feel Casey’s bullet in his back any second.

For the first time in twenty-five years, he asked rather than demanded.

The sound of battle changed. Intensifying rather than dying off. The reports changed in nature; there were revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and . . . derringers?

Brad lifted his head, putting his hand over Evie’s skull, keeping her as protected as he could. What greeted his eyes made him blink. Townsmen lined the street, armed to the teeth with whatever they had. And from the bodies lying in the dirt, damn successfully. Across the way, he saw Casey lying dead, a bloody hole in his chest. Only one thing made a wound like that. Shotgun at close range. Patrick, Homer, and Cyrus stepped off the walk and stood in front of him, using their bodies as shields and their guns as protection.

“You just keep yourself down there with your pretty wife, Reverend,” Patrick instructed in his rolling brogue. “Soon enough we’ll be having the riffraff moved along.”

Brad blinked at the novelty of being seen as helpless and in need of protection.

“Moved along, hell,” Cyrus grunted. “I thought we were putting their sorry asses in the ground.”

Homer spat toward Casey’s corpse, hitching his shotgun up. “Told ’em it ain’t right to think they can come into our town and pick on a God-fearin’ preacher man.”

As Brad absorbed the reality that the town had risen to his defense, the battle died down to sporadic shots. Beneath him Evie shifted.

He leaned aside. She took a breath, shuddered.

“Shit!” Was she hurt? “Are you hurt, darling?” Damn it, she’d better not be hurt.

He turned her over and ran his hands along her torso, checking for wounds. She caught his hand, moving it away from her side, bringing it to her face. His gaze naturally followed. The blood staining her skin was an assault to his senses. He wiped at it with his sleeve. She had the shell-shocked expression of someone in their first gun battle, but, ah God, she was alive. Blessedly alive.

Around them he could hear the shouts of the townspeople as they checked on each other, checked on him. They blended into a cacophony that echoed outside the beauty of this moment. A blur in the periphery of his awareness. All he cared about, all he wanted to see, was before him. Evie, alive and well.

“The Rev and his missus are just fine,” Cyrus called.

“I’d say the good Lord was working hard to keep all those bullets from finding their mark,” Herschel called from across the way, holding his derringer high.

Yes, he had. As Brad knelt there in the dirt, his wounds burning, looking at everything right in his world, he felt something that had been broken for too long gently click back into place. Subtly without the fanfare with which it had shattered. Maybe because it hadn’t been broken at all. The years he’d spent waiting on an answer to his demands—no, challenges—had been for nothing. The answer had been in front of him all along. He’d just been too angry to listen.

This time when Brad glanced heavenward, it felt right, natural, the way it should, the way it had before he let his father convince him God wasn’t for him. The prayer he offered was simple, straightforward. From his heart.

Evie groaned, drawing his attention. Pale and shaken. He remembered her bursting out of the building, gun drawn, risking everything, intent on saving his ass. She was a hell of a woman and he’d deceived her, used her, enjoyed her. The last of the blood came off. Loved her. She deserved better.

“Ah, Evie, I’ve been a very stubborn man, but I’ll do right by you.”

Still dazed, she stared at him uncomprehendingly. Brad stopped wiping and started kissing, reaching for her in the most elemental way he could. Still needing to pretend a little longer. Evie’s lips stirred under his, opened, invited. Her other hand came around his neck. The revolver bumped the back of his head. Through the whole tumble, she hadn’t let it go. He removed it from her hand. She blinked, glanced at him, then at the gun, and then back at him.

“I didn’t even get off a shot.”

Well, hell. Neither had he.

“THE MAN HAS the devil’s own luck,” Doc said, snapping his medical satchel closed. “All he got was creased.”

“What does that mean?” Evie asked, gripping her arms in a desperate hold. Ever since they had gotten back to the house the reality of the situation had been sinking in. She had almost died. Brad had almost died. All because of a past she couldn’t reconcile with the man she now knew.

Doc gave her a grin. “Well, if you were worried you were going to have to hold back celebrating that you’re alive tonight? Don’t. He’s healthy enough for relations.”

She couldn’t find a smile to give back to him. When he left, she was going to have to deal with all that had been revealed today, and she wasn’t sure how to do that. Or even if she could. “Thank you.”

He made it to the front door before he stopped, his hand on the knob. He didn’t look back as he said, “It’s not so important, Evie, what a man’s been, so much as what it is he’s become.”

“And what has Brad become?”

Letting go of the knob he turned to face her, his bushy brows snapping down over his eyes. “A damn decent human being.”

Was he? How could
she
know that? She didn’t even know his real name. But Doc had. And he’d kept it from her. “How long have you known who Brad was?”

“From the beginning.”

That hurt. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

His expression softened. “For multiple reasons. The first being that Brad’s reputation as an outlaw was as much for the good deeds he did as the bad.”

That was true. Along with being legendary for pulling off the most impossible robberies, Shadow Svensen had been seen by many as a Robin Hood of hope, often distributing money to those who needed it, interrupting robberies, stopping rapes, beatings.

“What he didn’t have the reputation for, was untoward violence,” Doc continued.

That was true also. But it wasn’t enough. She needed more. She needed to know why everyone had believed in Brad to the point they had been willing to fool her. “What was another reason?”

He glared at her as if those he’d given her should be enough. It wasn’t. Her world could be ending. She needed to know the details of the destruction.

“For the same reason I didn’t tell your folks you were following him around like he was your private party.”

“And why was that?”

“Sometimes people who are lost need time to find themselves.”

“And Brad was lost?” She wanted to believe he’d been lost. It was so much better than believing he’d used her, and she’d been fool enough to allow it.

“Not wholly. He knew what he wanted. He’d just been taught it wasn’t for him.”

“Because of his father?”

“You know about his father?”

“Some.”

“Now is not the time to clam up.”

“It’s not my business to tell.”

“You kept it from me. You owe me. I want to know.”

Doc settled his hat on his head and headed for the door, and for an instant she thought she’d lost, then he paused.

As if he heard, he stopped just before the door. His right hand clenched in a fist. “I met the Elder Swanson once, and Brad, too, though he doesn’t remember.”

“You did?”

“About twenty years ago.”

Brad would have been about ten. “And?”

Doc shook his head. “And if you’d seen him then, you’d wonder how the boy survived to be the man he is today.”