Until the Day Breaks (California Rising Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

own land. Does he keep slaves too?”
    “I don’t think so. Indians care for his cattle and crops.”
    “Indians?” Molly’s eyes filled with fear. “Do they scalp white folks in California?”
    “Of course not. Your pretty red hair is safe and sound on your head.” Rachel stroked the girl’s tangled tresses, hoping it was true. California Indians certainly didn’t scalp folks, did they?
    She considered the two fine-boned, ivory-handled brushes that had belonged to her mother. They were her greatest treasure. Every night before bed, she brushed her hair a hundred strokes while saying her prayers. She should give one of her brushes to this deprived little girl, but her heart recoiled at the idea. “Do you brush your own hair?” Rachel inquired.
    “We don’t own a brush. Ma says luxuries like that are for women who don’t work their fingers to the bone. Ma’s fingers are strong as cedars from scrubbin’ folks’ wash. When she combs my hair, it feels like tree limbs scrapin’ my scalp off. Finola cried when Ma brushed her hair.”
    “Finola is your sister?”
    “She was five and small for her age. Measles took her a month ago,” Molly said in an adult-like fashion, as if it hardly mattered at all. “Mine weren’t so bad. Only got me one pox on my face.” Molly showed Rachel the small pinkish-white scar on her temple.
    Rachel glanced over at Molly’s mother. She could see the woman still grieved for her lost child. She had that hollow-eyed expression of having suffered a great loss. Helping Molly and her mother survive this ocean passage became Rachel’s utmost priority at that very moment.
    Rachel had nearly died on that voyage, growing weak and unwell as the journey progressed. Cocooned in a comfortable farmhouse with her grandparents outside of Boston, she’d never in her life faced trials such as on board the Rainbow .
    She’d parted ways with Molly and her mother in Monterey, leaving one of her cherished brushes with Molly, and now here she was alive and well in California about to be bartered away as a bride to a man she didn’t know and didn’t love. Perhaps death on the ship and a swift journey to heaven would have been better.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Roman awoke with Texas on his mind. The territory had been annexed to the United States and was now flooded with U.S. Army soldiers. Surveying his bandaged leg, he contemplated how long it would take the war to reach California. After two years fighting on the Texas front, getting home before American ships sailed into Monterey Bay was all he could think about. He had forgotten what it was like to wake up in California. Another day of feasting and celebrating did not appeal to him. Especially considering he rose from a bed of hay in Joshua Tyler’s stables. He’d rejected the long, low adobe building that quartered the vaqueros. Some of Tyler’s male visitors were bunking there . Families that didn’t fit in the hacienda were housed in tents inside Tyler’s high adobe walls.
    Years ago, the wily foreigner had settled in these mountains with the mighty redwoods, sealing his fortune selling lumber, a precious commodity in California. Then he bought all the cattle he could get his hands on. With the missions secularized twelve years ago, men such as Tyler found their footing in earnest in California. The Catholic Church’s plan had been to civilize the converted Indians—neophytes, as they were known—to allow the Indians to take over the mission lands themselves. This never happened. The mission resources—vast assets of cattle, sheep, and horses, orchards and vineyards, fertile fields of wheat and vegetables, and greatest of all, the neophyte workforce—fell into the hands of the gente de razón and those foreigners who took Mexican citizenship and became Catholic, “leaving their conscience at Cape Horn,” as the Americans in California liked to say.
    Roman had no respect for men who bartered away their citizenship and their religion so