Butterfly Garden (6 page)

“Let the new papa in as far as the kitchen, May.”  Sara took the baby, wiped her tiny face and wrapped her in a blanket. “Let Datt hold his new daughter in that rocker near the stove, until we have a chance to wash her proper. Mercy is going to be busy while we deliver the afterbirth.”

When all was said and done, after more tears and hugs, Mercy said Sara had their gratitude for life. But Sara was the grateful one. Little Saramay was her first delivery without Jordan and she would always be grateful that Mercy had given her the chance.

Saying goodbye, finally, made Sara think of losing Abby. In one afternoon, Mercy had become a special friend, but they would never see each other again.

In the end, Mercy promised to keep in touch.

It had taken less than three hours.

Sara returned to the Zuckerman house, still shaking inside, despite her elation, to find a collection of soiled towels frozen in a heap by the back door.

In the bed where she’d left them, Adam was sitting up, head thrown back, snoring fit to wake the dead, baby Hannah asleep in his arms. Katie was curled against him, and behind her, Lizzie and then Pris, like spoons in a kitchen drawer.

As Sara began to back from the room, Adam raised his head and looked straight at her. And Sara didn’t think she could have imagined the bite of his silent fury.

Foolish her. She had imagined that an afternoon with his children would soften him. But it didn’t take her long to realize that now Mad Adam Zuckerman would be harder, madder, and more disagreeable than ever.

Chapter 4

Tomorrow for the first time in a dozen years, Sara would not be alone for Christmas. She would be with the children she loved and the man she wanted to beat black and blue ... except that Adam was twice her size and most of him was already that color.

The children had been asleep for an hour when Sara set Christmas treats in their plates for morning. Along with some sweetmeats, nuts and an orange, the three oldest would each get a faceless Amish rag doll. Sara had discovered them at the bottom of Abby’s sewing basket, a slip of paper pinned to each naming the child for whom the doll was intended, almost as if she knew….

Sara had denied the possibility and cut out three small quilts and pillows to go with the dolls. Stitching them became particularly relaxing on those evenings when the mystery of how to make Adam love his girls kept her awake.

Mad Adam Zuckerman. Brooding. Angry. Puzzling. Perhaps he didn’t like children. Perhaps he’d never wanted any. Perhaps ... he already loved them.

Sara frowned. Perhaps she was as mad as him.

She’d been in his house five long, frustrating days. Days of arguments, silences, growls and curses — though never within hearing of his girls, she noticed. Days when she and Adam dare not look at each other for some unseen force crackling between them, a kind of two-sided ... aversion, more hot than cold. Invisible lightning was the only way she could think to describe it, and heaven help either of them if it actually struck.

Long days with long evenings, during which Adam’s glances — of warning or anxiety — seemed almost a plea, but for what?  Evenings like this.

Sara filled a pitcher with hot water and gathered soap and a razor, and mentally braced herself for the battle she intended to win. She raised her chin to display the kind of mock-bravery she always needed around men — except for Jordan, who did not count among the males who knocked her knees and tied her tongue.

But Adam Zuckerman was something different and everything Doctor Jordan Marks was not. Male to his marrow, Adam stood too tall, too wide, too hard, and too imposing — body and spirit — for Sara’s peace. He was, in fact, the most disquieting man it had ever been her misfortune to stumble upon.

For a year, she had tried, with little success, to conquer her mind-tripping confusion around Abby’s husband. In the attempt, she had served him and joked with him. But now she had no choice but to conquer her uneasiness, for if she failed in this task she set herself — to teach Adam to know and love his children — he would best her in their nameless battle, the loss of which four little girls would suffer.

Wits sharp, Sara hoped, bravery in place, she approached her quarry, and saw the exact moment stubbornness transformed him. Though not by so much as a blink did he move, he mentally folded his arms in defiance. When the snarl came, Sara was so prepared, she surprised them both with a laugh, lessening the tightness in her chest as well as the certainty in his look. Good.

To bolster her swelling confidence, she took a breath and squared her shoulders. “I am going to shave you and give you a bath,” she declared, trembling inside at the thought of touching his warm skin with all that hard muscle beneath.

Adam’s eyes narrowed even as his pupils grew larger.

Feeling alarmed, as if she should not be close enough to notice, Sara trembled to her kneecaps but stood her ground.

His caught breath hitched her own. “Don’t need a bath,” he said.

“Tell my nose that!”

For a blink, the set of his mouth softened, a rare smile hovering, but Adam masked the slip with a curse. “Damn it, Sara, I’m clean enough. I’ll wash when I can wash myself.”

“Tomorrow is Christmas. You’ll wash today.”

“Give me the cloth, then.”  He tore it from her hand, splashing water in his lap, sending the bar of lye soap skittering across the floor. He cursed again.

Sara sighed and fetched the soap. She was going to give the ornery bear a bath if it killed them both, which it just might do.

She brought the washstand closer and filled the basin with hot water from the pitcher, then she lathered the cloth until she was ready to face him.

When she did, she nearly gave up. Stubborn mouth, firm lips. Male. Thick brows shadowing hard eyes gone soft but wary still. Pain she had read in them the night Abby died, though she’d not been able to read much more than fury there since.

Hands huge and callused. Male. Hands capable of controlling a team of six Belgian horses with a flick of the wrist ... of washing and dressing his wife for her final journey.

“It makes you cry, this chore?” Adam’s words wrenched Sara from the image of him sponging blood from Ab’s legs, the grief in his eyes so plain, she had gasped. He’d hated her for walking in on him then, for catching him at a weak moment. When he’d handed her the baby clothes she had gone to fetch, he looked as if she saw his soul, read its secrets ... as if he would never forgive her for it.

“It’s the stink makes my eyes water,” she said, wiping them with the back of her hand. “You smell worse than usual.”

When indignation narrowed his own eyes, and she could tell from the spark in them that he was about to argue, Sara slapped him in his big mouth with the soapy cloth. And while he spit suds and cursed a blue streak, she gave his face and neck a vigorous and thorough wash.

Adam had never felt anything as blessedly wonderful as that warm cloth against his sweaty skin. He needed a bath so bad, he itched in places he couldn’t reach to scratch, and it was driving him crazy. “Long as you’re gonna keep up that fool scrubbing, might as well wash my hair.”

Sara stilled like a doe in lantern-light, Adam thought, then she nodded as if she’d given herself a talking to, and lathered his hair.

Heaven. He had gone to heaven. And when Sara reached over to lather the length in the back, and her breasts filled his face, so close he might touch a pouting nubbin with his lips, his body agreed. In fact it made its wholehearted delight known in a blatant and uncomfortable fashion.

Adam could not cross his leg for the splint, never mind the pain, so he bunched the blankets in his lap, as if by accident, which was not easy, since they were wet from the spill, and he had only one good hand after all.

Fortunately his embarrassment tempered his body’s betrayal and he was able to relax a bit. After Sara rinsed and combed his hair, he was grateful for a shift in position as she washed his back and unbroken arm. She spent a long time washing where God’s good earth had etched his callused palms and lined his knuckles, and she was gentle, almost soothing in her ministrations, where his nails were misshapen and scarred.

Adam wondered how a hand-washing could make him want so much. Then she started on his chest and he came face to face with a hunger that made all needs previous seem weak, an urgency bordering on pain.

Sara must be as aware as him of the shift, because for once, she did not scold or lecture. And when their eyes met, where moments before hers had seemed just plain green, they were now more like a forest at dusk, flecked in brightening gold. Adam read need there, the likes of which he had not thought any woman capable.

For the life of him, he could make no sound. He could barely breathe. He did not like seeing Spinster Sara’s need, despite the odd sense of satisfaction it brought. But his aversion did not last, because as Sara worked her way from his chest to his belly, with those slow, warm strokes of hers, she washed everything but the physical from awareness, his eager body pulsing in blatant expectation.

“I’ll take it from here,” Adam croaked. But it was too late, for Sara had stopped to gaze in fascination at where he stood the sheet erect. “I said, ‘I’ll take care of that!’”

Eyes big and round, she looked at him, and as quickly looked away. Face red as the setting sun, and probably as hot, she turned her attention to washing his big clumsy feet, another pleasure as keen as the hand-washing, though infinitely more humbling. When she washed his broken leg, he felt as if she were piercing it with a pitchfork, though her touch was light as butterfly wings.

But her gentleness did not last, and Adam about died when she turned him to wash his backside. And when she lost the cloth and grazed him with her hand, he nearly jumped from his skin. But she was as quick and silent as she was rough, and before long, she handed him the lathered cloth and fled the room.

Hard as a pikestaff, he thought in disgust, when he began his task and it did not get any better for imagining Sara performing it for him. Despite his trying to ignore it, when he was so aroused he was in pain, worse than he ever remembered being, even as a randy boy, Adam knew he was in big trouble.

If Spinster Sara kept giving him baths, she was gonna be a whole lot wiser than most spinsters, because he was gonna spill his seed every time she picked up a wash cloth.

His father was right. He was a stupid, worthless piece of farm dung. He could not stay on a ladder without breaking half the bones in his body, when he should have broken his pizzle instead. His wife dead four months, and here he sat, aching for another woman.

“Sara,” he called, noting the thread of forbidden yearning in the word, almost as disgusted over his physical reaction to her as over the rest of his sorry life.

She was paler and calmer when she returned, but as she cleared the washstand, he touched her hand and she jumped like a scared cat. “You have to take them away again.”  He hated begging, but if it would get her the blazes out... He looked straight into her eyes, hoping she could see his desperation. Yes, for once, he hoped she could read him. “For their good. And yours,” he added.

Sara stiffened and shook her head. “If you’re talking about your children, I can’t. I can’t go until you’re better. They belong with you, Adam. I’m leaving them here when I go. So it’s best that I stay till you’re better.”

“Get somebody else to take care of me.”

“Idiot.”  Sara’s expression revealed a struggle Adam did not understand. “You’ve scared everybody else off,” she said. “And don’t tell me you did not know you were doing it. Sometimes I think you’re ornery on purpose.”

Adam chose not to reply to such a clever remark. Damn the sassy scrapper, anyway. “All right, blast it. If getting better will get you out of here, I’ll be walking again so fast, The
English
will think he performed a miracle.”

“Call him Doc Marks or just Doc, but don’t call him The
English
like the others do. You may be more surly than the rest, but I don’t think you’re as ignorant for all you pretend to be.”

That bit of wisdom surprised him as much as it worried him. Scrapper Sara was a whole lot smarter than anybody gave her credit for, him included, though he would not make that mistake again. “And you’re bossier.”  He cleared his throat to keep himself from revealing his admiration for her strength, noticing that his comment seemed to cause her pain, which frustrated him further. “You have to take them ... as soon as I can walk.”

“If not for that leg, I’d be returning them to your care the day after tomorrow. I said I’d keep them until Christmas, and you’ll have them returned to you as soon as you’re up and about, so you had best learn to care for them while I’m here to help you. I’ll not be taking them away again.”

“Sara—”

“If you want to discuss this, Adam, then behave tomorrow.”  She regarded him for too long. “I want to see joy on those babies’ faces tomorrow, not sadness. Just one day, Adam. Christmas Day. Be nice. And later, I’ll listen to what you have to say.”

Sara had never bent the truth in her life, not until lately. She’d told Adam she did not want to come and care for him, when she knew very well, she considered it a God-given opportunity to teach him to love his children. She’d tried to give him the impression she wanted to leave the girls with him, when what she wanted was to raise them herself. She told him they’d discuss her decision, when there was nothing to discuss. She would not change her mind.

The next morning, Sara dragged furniture around, so she and the girls could eat their Christmas dinner in Adam’s room with him.

She hoped that since today was the most holy day of the year, that He whose birth they celebrated would help her find the strength she would need to give Abby’s girls the father they deserved.

During dinner, Katie was too taken with her doll to eat. She even ignored her favorite cinnamon pears, so Sara suggested her doll be put down for a nap. Katie slid off her chair and trotted over to her father, where she lay the doll beside him, covering it with her new little quilt. Then she kissed the doll, and to her father’s shock, she kissed his hand.