Chasing the Sun by Kaki Warner Read Free Book Online

laughed. “I am not sure what that means, but he was the cleanest man I ever saw. He made the nurses loco with his demands that they wash their hands.”
    “What went wrong with the operation?” Molly had a deep interest in the mechanics of surgery even if the practice of it often made her sick.
    After the derailment that had almost cost Hank his life, Brady had witnessed her affliction when she’d worked so hard to save Hank’s crushed arm, then vomited like a muleskinner on a three-day drunk as soon as it was over. A woman of extremes, Molly was, and not above killing to protect those she loved. A good match for Hank. But lately, Brady had sensed something had started to unravel between them. He didn’t know the cause, but he recognized discontent in a woman’s eyes and figured it was something Hank had done—or not done. He resolved to talk to him about it later.
    “Dr. Sheedy did his best,” Elena said. “But even though he removed most of the scar tissue, the bones broken where my brother kicked me had healed crookedly and could not be straightened. The infection it had caused also did damage to other organs.” A blush crept over her olive cheeks. She lowered her eyes to the cross she gripped tightly in her fisted hands. “Such damage would have prevented me from being a true wife or bearing children.”
    Brady frowned, trying to piece together what Elena wasn’t saying. Was she barren? Was that why she chose God over his brother, to spare them both the disappointment of a childless marriage? If so, considering the way she had felt about Jack when she’d left, she should be heartbroken. Yet she seemed content. Happy, even.
    Jessica must have wondered the same thing. “Is that why you and Jack didn’t marry?”
    Elena looked up. Her eyes shimmered like dark, glistening pools in her pale heart-shaped face, so black they seemed to swallow the faint light from the kerosene lamps scattered throughout the room. “It is the reason I opened my heart to such a possibility. When I did, I saw another way of life waiting for me.”
    “A reclusive life,” Brady said, still not convinced it was a true vocation.
    “A life devoted to God,” she corrected gently. “Which I would have chosen whether the church accepted me or not. In the end, it had nothing to do with Jack.”
    They sat in silence except for the snap of burning wood and the soft whisper of wind around the balcony supports off the back of the house. Brady looked beyond the glass doors flanking the fireplace to the hilltop where the rising moon highlighted the angular shapes of the tombstones under the mesquite tree. Most of his family was buried up there. With Jack still missing and Elena lost to them forever, it would be like burying two more.
    Hank rose, added more logs to the fire, then returned to his seat beside Molly.
    Brady wondered what he was thinking. His brother was such a closemouthed sonofabitch, Brady never really knew what went on in that prodigious brain of his. Did he feel it too? That sense of change coming?
    Brady didn’t like change. Being head of the family since he was twenty-one, he had spent most of his adult life struggling to protect the ranch and the two brothers he had left. Change was a threat to the precarious balance he worked so hard to maintain. Jessica was teaching him to ease up a bit—to be less controlling, she called it. But even now, with new perils rising against them, his first impulse was to gather his family close and bar the doors.
    “So you don’t know where Jack is now?” Jessica asked. “We’re quite worried about him.” She was almost as protective of the family as Brady was, but somehow that didn’t count as controlling. He didn’t even try to make sense of it.
    Elena shook her head. “He was muy enojado —very angry—when I told him of my decision. He said many things, tried many times to talk me out of it. But once I entered the abbey as a postulant and was no longer able to speak to him,