Butterfly Garden (14 page)

After an uncomfortable minute, he sighed. “Your choice, Sara?  If so, you had the right, under the circumstances.”

Her choice. She looked at the floor. Yes, Jordan was like a brother, and they had been through many embarrassing lessons together, but to reveal that her husband did not want her, even to a friend as close as him, seemed….

Jordan touched her cheek. “Not your choice, I think, and you do not know how to change the situation, do you?”

Sara shook her head. “How do I?”

Her friend’s chuckle was low, soothing. “I may have needed to teach you to deliver babies, and even, academically, how they get to where they have to be delivered, but I do not think you need me to teach you how to make a man want you in his bed.”

Adam’s grip on Jordan’s collar cut his words and the air through his windpipe.

Sara tried to pull them apart. “Adam,” she whispered furiously. “Adam, let him go!”

“Where is your kapp?” her husband shouted, waking Emma, making her scream.

Adam cussed again—another new word, he used—and let the doctor go.

Jordan cussed him back, with a string of words that brought a glimmer of respect to her husband’s look. Then Adam regarded Emma, ordering her, above her screams, to calm down, but his sister only scooted farther up the headboard, sobbing.

Jordan grabbed Adam by his shirt, stopping him, cutting a little of his air, and glad of it, Sara thought. “Jordan. Adam. Stop,” she ordered. “Go away, both of you. You’re acting like children, and scaring Emma to death.”

Jordan released his grip. “She’s right. We
are
scaring her. But, Adam, you scare her worse than anybody. I can see that, even if you’re too stubborn to admit it. Step aside now.”

Adam did, taking Sara with him as far as the doorway. At first he clutched her arm firmly, but his grip eased, then he slipped his arm around her waist.

Deciding that was a fine place for it to be, Sara did not move away.

Jordan rubbed his throat, threw a piercing look at Adam, and turned back to Emma. Before their eyes, almost unaware that Sara and Adam were watching, Jordan became the gentle doctor who dealt so well with a woman in labor. With flowery English words, he coaxed Emma to stop crying, to take a deep breath.

For a while, he spoke nonsense, about the valley, her pretty hair and yellow buggy, baby Hannah and her sisters. Speaking the same soft, coaxing way he calmed a wailing newborn, Jordan showed Emma everything in his black doctor’s bag. He even explained what most of it was for.

After a while, Emma was so interested, she leaned closer. Jordan handed her the device he used to listen to his patient’s hearts and had her listen to his. She was awestruck and refused to give the device back when he asked for it.

“Let me listen to yours, now,” Jordan said, but Emma only shook her head. He coaxed her to sit on the edge of the bed. “Emma, sweet, give that to me and let me hear your heart the way you heard mine.”

When Emma handed over the stethoscope, Sara felt Adam’s arm around her stiffen.

Jordan listened to Emma’s heart and gave her a delighted smile, like the one she’d given him, making her giggle.

“Sara,” Jordan said, his voice still calm. “There is blood on her hem. “I think her leg is bleeding. I want you to come and raise her nightgown.”

When Sara knelt by Jordan, he kissed her cheek, which pulled Adam sharply back into the room, and stiffened Emma’s demeanor.

Jordan smiled, though Sara could tell he was annoyed. “Emma needs to see that Sara is not afraid of me,” he told Adam, obviously working to keep his voice calm.

“She is not,” Adam said, more in accusation than answer.

Sara hugged Jordan, making him grin. “Laying it on thick,” he whispered close to her cheek before he kissed her again. “For whose benefit?”

Sara winked in reply.

Jordan chuckled. “Raise her gown.”

Jordan applied an ointment to Emma’s bloody knees while he talked to her about stitching a quilt. “For now, I’ll just put this salve on that gash on your forehead. But I might need to stitch it like a quilt tomorrow. We will watch and see.”

Adam snorted.

Emma swallowed the drink Jordan fixed her, then he and Sara tucked her in. She drifted right off.

“That’s it for now,” Jordan said, turning to Adam. “She should not travel anytime soon.”

“They are staying,” Adam said. “For now.” He went further into the room and took Sara’s dresses off the pegs. “Get the rest of your things,” he told her as he left.

Jordan smiled at Sara’s wistful sigh. “Want to come home with me?”

“Sara?” Adam called, from not too far distant, a note of warning in his voice. “Come.”

Sara collected her few personal items and found her husband waiting for her in the hall. She expected to move in with Lizzie and Katie, and squeeze into their tiny bed, like three sausages in one skin, but Adam made for the stairs.

“Where are you going with my dresses?” she asked, following.

Sara was shocked to see him step into his own room and hang her dresses on the pegs beside his Sunday suit. Sara swallowed the lump in her throat. Tears came to her eyes. If marriage had a picture, this would be it.

For the first time since the upper room, her marriage seemed real.

Adam examined her expression but said nothing. He took her things from her hands and made room for them beside his. “This,” he said, still furious, slapping his mattress. “This will be your bed from now on. Our bed.” He stepped forward, grasped her arms and hauled her against him. “It will be me, not that fancy
English
, who will teach you whatever it is you think you need to know about a man’s bed.”

What?  Oh my Lord, he had heard her and Jordan talking, but obviously not everything. Sara might explain, if she were not so delighted with the result. “You will teach me, Adam, what I need to know about the marriage bed?”

Though he paled, he examined her, head to toe, touching her lips in a kiss that began as a test of textures but deepened to passion, wonderful, but when she put her arms up, around his neck, he cursed and stepped back.

Sara was frustrated, though he continued to hold her at arms length, as though he were dizzy and in need of an anchor. After a minute of long, deep breaths, he frowned. “Damn it, Sara, you do not need such a lesson.”

Perhaps she needed no lessons, Sara thought, her mind awash with possibilities as she followed her rigid-backed husband into the kitchen, but one of them certainly did. She smiled, her heart aflutter. Yes, during the long nights ahead, while she and her husband shared a bed, one of them had some lessons coming.

This must be exactly how Eve felt in the Garden of Eden.

Chapter 9

Sara followed Adam into the kitchen, her happiness coming in waves, more certain of her standing as a wife now than she had been since her wedding.

Her place as Adam’s wife was only part of her joy. She had always dreamed of a big family. Spinster Sara, a wife, a mother, a daughter-in-law, a sister. However had she come to deserve such happiness?

In the kitchen, Adam’s mother was telling her wide-eyed granddaughters a story while they ate, though it was Lena they gave their attention to, not their food. The story was about a rabbit who had begun it’s tiny life in a hole in Lena’s garden.

Sunnybunny had refused to go out and discover the rest of the world, like his sisters and brothers had done. She had stayed, instead, to live off Lena’s summer vegetables, for longer than Lena cared to admit. So Sunnybunny ended up becoming Emma’s pet, because Lena could not find it in her heart to chase the small rabbit away.

Katie asked Adam to help her catch a rabbit of her own, taking his answering growl in stride and shrugging her shoulders. Then she charmed her
grossmommie
into giving her another slice of vanilla-peach kuchen.

Adam decided against sitting and went to the window. He watched the snow, hating the way he had responded to Katie. His mother would think he was like his father, which of course he was, but not for the same reason, damn it. And he refused to explain himself, especially when it was her story set Katie off in the first place. He scrubbed his face with his hands, granting that she had likely not intended to put such foolishness into Katie’s head.

When he turned to make amends, whatever he tripped over squealed like a piglet.

“Sunnybunny!” Lena said, making for the lop-ear trembling behind the broom and picking it up to soothe it, Katie at her heels.

Adam bit down on a growl. He wanted to snarl or roar, the Lord above knew he did. Instead he looked at Sara and saw from her look that he was supposed to shrug his shoulders and live with a rodent sprinkling pebbles about the house.

“He is trained to go outdoors,” his mother said, as if, like Sara, she could read him, which was not good. Not at all.

Sara gave his mother the kind of smile Adam would like turned on him once in a while. “Sunnybunny is as welcome in our home as you and Emma. And thank you for making supper and feeding the girls,” she added.

Adam crossed his arms and kept his uncharitable thoughts to himself, relieved, he supposed, that everyone ignored him.

“
Kum, esse
,” said the woman who’d given him life, then left him with his father and took it away again. There she stood, offering beets and chow chow to tempt him. “Come, eat, my son. Good dinner.”

Adam stiffened at her use of the rusty title, but he remained silent as he rubbed his thigh. Damn the leg. He wished it would just heal. He’d worked it badly today. Chores always aggravated it, but between chasing after Emma and going up and down the stairs so often, he could almost feel it festering.

Actually, his chest felt a lot like his leg right now. This new ache had begun earlier when he’d found his mother ... back from the dead, so to speak. It was sharp then, keen enough to fell him. Adam shook his head. Now the pain in his chest was more general, but spreading, which made him rub below his ribcage.

He wished … he wished he were alone with Sara, so she could rub it for him. If only she would. He knew, from his experience with her tending him after his fall, that where Sara touched, comfort flowed … even when the new ache her touch set off had nothing to do with wounds and everything to do with—

Bad time to remember that, with Sara about to share his bed. Adam went to the table and sat, examining the food his mother was piling on his plate. How could a man be hungry, yet not hungry at all?

Adam picked up his fork, moved the food around on his plate and watched Sara delight over the company at table. Beautiful, his Sara, when she was happy.

Sara. His wife. He was going to be forced to share his bed with his wife. He almost laughed—a horrible feeling, that need to laugh, and unnecessary too. As if he would suffer for having his wife in his bed. His.

Sara, not Abby.

Everything changed so fast. Abby, his rock, his stable, practical, duty-bound Abby was gone. And in her place was Scrapper Sara, happy, generous, passionate, a rock of another sort—stubborn, determined, steadfast ... immovable.

While he carried a picture in his mind of Abby composed in gray and black, his image of Sara fairly bubbled with energy and bright color. While he supposed there was need for both in life, bright did seem more alive than drab, more light than dark.

Adam scrubbed his face again, more tired than he realized, for letting such foolish fancies into his head, and gave his attention to his ... family.

His mother kissed Katie’s offered lips. His dead mother. That was it, Adam gave over to the inevitable. Foolish or fancy, real or imagined, this was a night for the unbelievable.

His mother and his sister were alive, and here. He shook his head. Little Emma, asleep upstairs. Asleep and quiet, thanks be. Lord, but that girl could scream.

His mother’s easy laugh flared Adam’s anger. Odd for him to be so angry, when for years he had prayed for her return, picturing her as his young and beautiful mother, that tiny and treasured little girl by her side. The woman had aged badly beyond her years, perhaps. Lines marred her perfect features, shadows darkened eyes that smiled, rather easily, considering everything, though they remained troubled and sad, deep down. She had smiled more tonight than during the first five years of his life.

Emma, the child, had simply disappeared, that was all. The overwhelming sadness Adam had known at losing her returned. The knowledge that he could weep grabbed him by the throat. He hated that, almost as much as his new and recurring ability to laugh.

Adam slammed his hands on the table. “How long has she been afraid like that?” he shouted, furious all over again, especially with the woman who dared call herself mother.

“She has always been,” his mother said, frightened, confused, as if he should know that.

“But of me?  To be afraid of me, of all people.” The faces of those in the room said that if he acted that way, they were not surprised Emma was afraid of him. He sighed, calmed. “She did not even speak to me.”

“Speak?” The woman who claimed motherhood laughed, making him feel stupid, as if he should be used to that. The sudden knowledge that his mother had been directing her anger and frustration toward herself hit him hard; he knew self-contempt when he saw it.

“Why would your sister speak to you now, when she never did before?”

“Of course she did.”

His mother’s laugh proved his point. She was hurting. That above everything could soften him toward her, but he hardened himself against her.

“She never spoke to me,” his mother said. “And I cannot remember her speaking to you, either.” Her words were clipped, matter of fact. No sorrow there seemed to be in her over such a—  The meaning of her words hit hard. Adam wasn’t certain he understood. He stood and walked away. Better to leave than strike out. He turned back. “Are you saying that Emma never spoke?  Ever?”

“Not to me.”

“That’s impossible,” The
English
said, whipping Adam around, freeing him from the ugly place he’d been.

The doctor stood at the bottom of the stairs frowning, looking somewhere deep into that book-filled head of his. Interfering, annoying man. “You should be an Elder,” Adam snapped. “Shoving your nose where it doesn’t belong all the time.”