Chasing the Sun (6 page)

Lucy’s voice cut into her thoughts. “If you stay, they might throw you in jail. What would happen to Kate then? You got no choice but to go to his family.”

Daisy stared at her, hearing the words but not daring to believe she had no other option. Leave? Travel all the way to New Mexico Territory? Throw herself on the mercy of people she didn’t even know? How could she do that?

She tried to remember what Jack had told her about his family. It wasn’t much. Two older brothers. A ranch somewhere in New Mexico Territory not far from a town named after a flower—a rose. Val Rosa. Yes, that was it. Ranchers had money, didn’t they? And even if Jack was still off somewhere trying to get over his lost love, wouldn’t his brothers want to help his daughter?

“Kate is their kin, too, you know,” Lucy reminded her.

Daisy nodded, thoughts racing through her head. “Yes. She is.”

RosaRoja Rancho

“AS YOU CAN SEE,” ELENA MOTIONED TO HER HIP, “THE operation was not a success.”

They were gathered in the main room. Dinner was long past, and the children had gone upstairs an hour ago with the Ortega sisters—their keepers, as Brady thought of them. Other than Elena, only the two brothers and their wives sat before the fire crackling in the huge stone fireplace.

“Dr. Sheedy did the surgery?” Molly asked.

Elena smiled her surprise. “How did you know? Have you met him?”

“Brady asked about him. I’d heard he was a fine surgeon.” Molly explained that in her travels as nurse to her surgeon-father, even though most of her training during the War of the Rebellion had been below the Mason-Dixon, she had heard of Dr. Sheedy, a gifted medical officer in the Irish Brigade of the Union Army.

As Molly spoke, Brady studied her, noting the lines of strain around her mouth and the sadness in her hazel eyes. He knew she was fretting. The other day when he’d gone into Hank’s wing of the sprawling house he’d heard her crying. He wondered why.

“I read some of his early articles in my father’s old medical journals,” Molly went on. “Papa thought highly of his innovative ideas about antiseptic procedures in the surgical room.”

Elena 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, he stopped trying to see me. That was close to three years ago. I have heard nothing from him since. I pray he is still alive. I pray that God will help him understand and forgive me.” She turned her head and looked directly at Brady. “I pray the same for you.”

Brady forced a smile. “It’s not you I have to forgive, Elena. Never was.”

A sad look came into her eyes. “My brother. Sancho.”

“And myself.” Brady felt Jessica’s hand slip into his. As always, her touch calmed him, anchored him until the flood of terrible memories receded.

Elena sank back into the upholstered leather cushions of her chair. “My brother was an evil man who did terrible things. He broke every law of God and died because of it.” Her gaze shifted to Jessica, whose grip on Brady’s hand tightened until her nails bit into his fingers. “Do not blame yourself,
hermana de mi corazón—
sister of my heart,” Elena said to her. “You were God’s instrument. Nothing more.”

Before Jessica could respond, Elena turned back to Brady. “And you,
querido
, what you did for your little brother was an act of love, not evil intent. How can you blame yourself for that?”

Brady didn’t answer. He didn’t want to talk about Sam’s death, or the agony his little brother had suffered at Sancho’s hands, or the soul-shattering act of mercy Brady had been compelled to perform to release him from the pain. All of that was thirteen years in the past. Today he had another brother to worry about.

“Could Jack still be in San Francisco?” he asked, changing the subject.

Elena gave a weary shrug. “He spoke of Australia. Perhaps he went there.”

“I can see you’re tired, Elena.” Jessica stood, pulling Brady up with her and glaring Hank to his feet as well. She was a stickler for proper behavior. Probably her English upbringing. “We’ve kept you up too late after such a long journey. Perhaps we can talk more tomorrow after you’re rested.”

“Gracias, amiga
.
”

Molly stood, offering assistance as Elena pushed awkwardly to her feet, trying to keep her weight off her damaged hip. Once upright, she paused to pass around a wide smile. “I am so happy to see all of you again. Thank you for your kind welcome.” After giving her goodnights to the brothers, she went with Jessica and Molly upstairs.

When their footfalls faded, Brady turned to Hank. “My office or yours?”

“Mine. Bob stinks too much.”

The house had a rectangular design with a three-story center and two-story wings on either side. The entry, which also held the stairwell, was bisected by open hallways leading to the east and west wings. Across from the double-entry doors was the huge main room, the back wall of which held a twenty-foot-tall rock fireplace and bank of windows overlooking the hilltop cemetery and mountains beyond. At one end of the room was a reading area—Jessica called it a library—and at the other end was a dining area that led into a large kitchen in the west wing. Brady had stocked the kitchen well with the biggest cookstove he could buy and an abundance of cabinets and countertops. There was also a long family dining table in the middle of the room and access to a cool-room that held the boiler Hank had built to pipe hot water throughout the house. So far, it hadn’t exploded.

Above the entry was a U-shaped mezzanine that overlooked the main room, with hallways leading off the arms of the U into his brothers’ bedroom wings. Brady’s section was over the entry in the center of the U. Hank had the east wing over the library and offices, while Jack’s rooms were over the dining room and kitchen—if he ever got his ass home to use them. After Abigail was born, Jessica converted the third-floor attic into a nursery for the kids and their keepers. The rambling house might seem a bit crowded sometimes, with six children and double that number of adults moving in and out of it, but Brady liked having his family close by so he could watch over them.

Spanning the front of the house was a covered porch with a steep roof. The back porch was uncovered, with hanging balconies off his brothers’ bedrooms. Twelve bedrooms and six water closets, not counting the nursery. A strong, masculine house made of two-foot-diameter logs and weathered rock taken from their own land. Brady was proud of it.

Of course, Jessica had tried to soften it by removing most of the taxidermy and adding ruffled pillows and lace doilies and tiny claw-footed tables that could barely hold a coffee mug. That English upbringing again. But it was still a fine house, and Brady figured if Hank didn’t blow it up with one of his innovations, it would last a century at least.

His and Hank’s offices were on the main floor behind the library, which was where Brady was headed now. After gathering up the cut-glass decanter of Scotch whiskey and two crystal tumblers, he went next door to Hank’s office.

The offices were mirror images of one another, each with its own fireplace flanked by bookcases, windows, and a door onto the back porch, and each furnished with two oversized leather chairs set before a broad desk. But Brady’s had the added touches of crystal and cut glass, Spanish leather desk accessories, and oil paintings depicting that ridiculous English sport of chasing after foxes—a waste of time if there ever was one. Jessica again, bless her heart.

He had subtly countered those feminine touches by installing Bob, a ten-foot-tall stuffed grizzly with a ferocious demeanor that Jessica had banished from the main room for various reasons. Mostly the smell. Admittedly it was rank, reminding Brady of a Mexican saddle that had been cured with manure and piss then left in the rain too long. But he put up with it because in addition to serving as a fine coatrack, Bob was an excellent kid repellant.

In contrast, Hank’s office was a disordered mess of parts, tools, projects-in-progress, and the dismantled remains of items his brother had liberated from other rooms in the house when Jessica wasn’t looking. A tinkerer’s idea of heaven.

When Brady entered, he was hard at work on something that looked a lot like a smaller version of the boiler in the basement, God help them.

“What’s that?” Brady asked as he searched out a clear space on the cluttered desk for the decanter and glasses.

Hank didn’t look up. “A pop valve for a steam-powered windmill.”

“I thought windmills were powered by wind. Hence, the name.”

“They are, except when there’s no wind.”

“So why isn’t it called a steam mill?”

Hank muttered something under his breath.

Undaunted, Brady pressed on. “And if the purpose of a wind—or steam—mill is to pump water out of the ground, where does the water come from to make the steam in the first place?”

“Just shut up and pour the whiskey.”

Brady poured, picked up his crystal tumbler, and settled into one of the chairs across from the desk. “It’s a righteous question.”

Hank continued working on his whatever. Brady stared idly out the window and wondered how to ask about Molly. He didn’t like it when his family was suffering, since as head of the family, it was his job to see that they didn’t.

He decided to jump right in. “Glad to see Molly’s feeling better.”

That brought Hank’s head up. “What’re you talking about? Molly’s fine.”

Brady shrugged. “Seemed upset a few days ago. Heard her crying.”

“It happens.” Hank bent to his task again.

“It does,” Brady agreed. “Fairly frequently, it seems.” When his brother didn’t respond, he pressed harder. “Is she mad at you?”

“You’re nosier than a preacher’s wife, aren’t you?”

“Jessica’s worried,” Brady defended. “We both are. We care about her.”

With a sigh, Hank put down his tools and reached for his glass. He took a deep swallow, coughed a bit, then said, “She’s upset there’s no baby. That’s all. Now tend your own knitting and leave us alone.”

Brady was taken aback. It wasn’t the answer he had expected. He’d thought it might be something he could fix. Like money or ... something. But this, well, this was personal. “Oh,” he said lamely. “Keep at it, then. It’ll all work out.”

“Keep at it.” Hank shot him a look of disgust. “Hell, why didn’t I think of that?” Leaning back in his chair, he propped his heels on a clean corner of his desk. “You go through the mail?”