Bran (Prairie Grooms, Book Six) Read Online Free PDF Page B

After all, any man who courted one of the Sayer women met with some sort of accident, even death. So what did that make her? If someone not even courting her almost met the Grim Reaper, then what would happen to a man who was?
    Apple sat up as realization dawned. Look at what happened to Mr. Jamieson, her intended… He was dead soon after she arrived!
    Apple stifled a gasp and quickly looked over her shoulder at Levi and Fina, who were now chatting in front of their bright red table. Apple put a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out.
    She was cursed! There was no other explanation!
    But if that were true, then why had Deputy O'Hare almost been killed? Did it mean he was her next intended? After all, she was still unattached, and Sadie was going to put the call out to the men in the area to “apply” for her hand. What if whoever courted her wound up dead at the hands of the Sayer curse?
    “It's true,” she whispered. “There really is a curse… and it knows I’m going to marry!” She gasped again.
    “Something wrong Apple?” asked Fina.
    Apple spun on the sofa to look at her, and shook her head a wild no. She then quickly turned back to the fire and covered her mouth to keep from crying out at the horrible realization that she could never marry! How many dead men would she leave in her wake if she tried?
    She sniffed back a tear. “I’ll be alone the rest of my life! I'll have to be, or men will die!”
    “What are you muttering over there?” asked Levi with a laugh. “I thought your sister was the only one that talked to herself.”
    “I do not talk to myself,” stated Fina. “I merely think aloud.”
    Levi crossed his arms. “That's talking to yourself, darling.”
    “Well… then… I have lively conversations with no one else around.”
    Levi shook his head. “That's still talking to yourself, sweetheart.”
    “Well… I… Oh never mind. Slice the pie, will you?”
    Apple ignored them and hugged herself. She was cursed, and if any man tried to marry her, they’d croak for sure! But why didn't the curse fall on Fina or Lena? Why only her? Maybe it was because she was the youngest and the last in line of the Sayer women.
    Apple's lower lip trembled as she fought the tears threatening to spill. She was just going to have to face it. In order to save men's lives, she would have to commit herself to spinster hood.

 
     
    Four
     
    Bran sat outside the sheriff's office, his chair leaned against the wall. He twirled his gun in his hand, and stared at the spinning weapon only to stop and twirl it the other way, stop, and spin it back. He'd been doing so for the last half hour. The Sayer girl hadn’t uttered a word to him—or any of them—the entire wagon ride back to town. In fact, she didn't so much as look at him when Levi helped her down and set her on her feet. Her sister, on the other hand, came around the wagon and thanked him for finding her and bringing her back to town safe. One would think Apple Sayer would have also thanked him, but no, she was mad as a rattler and let him know it. What was with her? he thought as he stopped and spun his gun in the opposite direction for the umpteenth-hundredth time. She was the one that locked him in the safe, and he was the one almost killed, not her. “Pah!” he huffed, tipped the chair forward, and stood. “Women, why do they have to be such silly creatures?”
    “Something troubling you, son?” Sheriff Hughes asked as he came to stand in the doorway of the sheriff's office.
    Bran forgot the door was open. “It's nothing,” he told him. Yet he began to get the hint that it was.
    “Is there something you need to tell me?” the sheriff asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Nothing happened out there, did it?”
    Bran took a step back and stared at him. “What are you implying?”
    Sheriff Hughes shrugged. “Nothing, I just want to make sure everything's on the up and up as far as Miss Sayer is concerned. You were out there for quite a while