Butterfly Garden (16 page)

Adam growled, agitated all over again thinking about it. “Damn it, Sara, I was worried sick when I saw you had not been home all night.”

“You never said you were worried.” Sara was thoughtful as she washed the wound. “You acted as though Jordan and I were ... carrying on or—”

“Which is what I found!” Adam shouted, memory and pain combining to make him cross.

“What you were looking for, you mean. Do you honestly think that a wife who ... who ... wants ... a man other than her husband, would carry on while—  Adam, honestly, you can be so dumb; David Jakeman was right there.”

Adam felt dumb. Sara had her faults—many of them—but he supposed she had a point. “I guess it’s because you and The
English
have been friends for a long time.” He shrugged. “I guess I don’t understand such a friendship.”

Sara touched his cheek with the back of her fingers. “I’d like for us to be friends, too.”

“Well that’s just plain foolish,” he snapped. “And dumb too. You can’t be my friend; you’re my wife. Talk about a typical Sara-notion.”

“Well, here is another Sara-notion,” Sara said, bending to touch her lips to her surprised husband’s. “There is not a man I’d rather befriend, no, nor one I’d rather kiss, or sleep beside, either, than you, Adam Zuckerman, husband or no.” She gazed into his eyes for a long moment wishing he would pull her down and make her his in every way, but he sat as if turned to stone.

“While you think about that,” she said, “I’ll get some medicine to clean the wound and a healing tea for you to drink.”

Sara mixed valerian and golden seal in the peppermint tea she gave him to drink. And before she finished binding his thigh, he stopped answering her questions, because the herbs had done their work and he had fallen sound asleep.

It was near dawn, and almost time for milking, when she finished and made to lower the hem of his nightshirt, but to her surprise, she began to raise it, instead.

She hesitated for no more than a minute, shocked at her own boldness, but that did not stop her from wanting to look her fill.

Chapter 10

All those weeks after his fall, Sara had tended her husband wondering exactly what a man looked like … there. Oh she knew, strictly speaking, because Jordan had taught her everything a midwife should know. He’d even showed her pictures in his medical books that gave her the knowledge of how a man and woman created a child together. She knew that when a man hardened, he wanted to mate with a woman.

But her curiosity, now, was more specific, more personal. She could admit to herself, in the privacy of her own bedroom, she supposed, that she’d wanted to know about Adam, almost from the first, though she’d dared not even
consider
looking back then.

Now he was her husband, and a woman should know about her husband. Ever since the upper room, she had wanted to see him in the bright light of day, and though dawn was naught but a distant glow on the horizon, the room was lit well enough by the lamp.

Gazing at Adam—at as fine a set of man parts as she might have imagined—Sara covered her fast-beating heart, afraid he would catch her, wishing he would, so he might know how much she wanted to be his.

He was beautiful, as large and sturdy, strong and pleasing a man, here, as everywhere else. Their Maker had done some fine creating with Adam, she thought, not for the first time. Everything fit together so well, so neatly. In repose, he appeared imposing, aroused he must look grand as a stallion. When she stroked the sleeping length of him, Sara was surprised at its soft silkiness, even folded against itself as it was.

She cupped his testicles feeling them contract at her touch, and stroked his length again, watching mesmerized as those folds seemed to disappear and he grew before her eyes.

Warmth stirred within her. She stroked him again, feeling wicked, sinful, though she knew that touching was not wrong between a wife and her husband. Could it be wrong, however, in the event the husband did not know?  Because the wife surely felt as if she were stealing ... something.

“Sara,” her husband whispered on a ragged breath, warming her with his fevered gaze, and she wondered if he could hear the quickening beat of her heart. Even as she pulled her hand away, his denial reached her and he stopped her withdrawal.

“Do it again,” he begged raggedly.

She did, and watched the way his eyes closed, almost in ecstasy. Then he opened them again and tightened her fingers around his length, watching her face, guiding her hand with his own.

“Sara,” he whispered again, but his hand fell away, and he slept.

Prickles raced up Sara’s spine, her legs, everywhere. She stopped but did not let him go. This was the closest she felt to Adam, the most intimacy they had shared. She loved the power; she feared it. She could lose something of herself in this way, if she allowed it—and oh Lord, she wanted to allow it. She wanted to be consumed.

Inside her hand, Adam shrank, softened, Sara was disappointed to realize. With a heady rush of affection, she bent to kiss him just there, but her own shock stopped her. Good, Lord, she thought, as she lowered his nightshirt and covered him. What had she been about to do?

Red-faced, Sara dressed, and by the time she was on her way upstairs to speak to Adam’s mother, she had thrust the embarrassing episode from her mind and turned her thoughts to the tasks of running a farm. She knew that rest alone would allow Adam to heal, and with Lena to dress and feed the girls, Sara would be free to do the milking in Adam’s place.

Sara had barely begun when Emma came tentatively into the barn, silent and wary, and sat beside her to milk the next cow in line.

Barn sounds—milk splashing and echoing in hollow wooden buckets, lowing cows, and clucking, scurrying chickens—lulled Sara, as did the presence of the silent woman beside her.

“Do you remember Adam?” Sara asked. “From when you were small, before you went away?”

Emma turned her forehead against the cow’s side, her cheek still against it, and regarded Sara with a world of happiness in her eyes. She nodded.

“You love him?”

Again the joyful look.

“Then why are you afraid of him?”

Indignation, confusion, flitted across Emma’s features. She shook her head, denying the question and asking for an explanation at the same time.

“Then you are not afraid of him?”

Emma sighed and seemed pleased Sara understood.

“I am glad,” Sara said. “Because he could use a sister, I think.” Sara moved to the cow on the other side of her sister-in-law then, causing the girl to pivot in the opposite direction. “Emma….” Sara began.

“Emma’s expectant look, her open and trusting countenance, all said, “What?  I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

That emboldened Sara. “I have no family … of my own, that is, and I … I always wanted a sister.”

Still Emma waited, as if she did not understand the direction of Sara’s thoughts, which discomfited Sara, though she forged on. “Will you be
my
sister, too?”

An array of emotions flitted across Emma’s face. Surprise, definitely, but not loathing, and yet no real answer lit her eyes, leaving Sara embarrassed by her request. She gazed away from her sister-in-law and toward the filling bucket. Why?  Why had she dared such a question?  Lord she hoped Emma would not be annoyed by her foolishness.

In her head, Sara went over the words that led to this uncomfortable turn. She wished she had remained silent on the subject. Then she wondered if she might have phrased it differently … until a milk-stream pierced her cheek and dripped down her face.

With a gasp, she reared back … and fell off the milking stool, regarding her sister-in-law with amazement … only to receive another face-squirt.

Sara shrieked.

Emma emitted a gurgle, and an all-out chuckle, as Sara wiped her face, then she demonstrated her ability to direct the milk in any direction she chose, sending the barn cats another treat, shooting her milking partner once more.

Sara tried getting Emma back, but her misfire into her own face had the girl doubled over with laughter.

As frustrated as she was charmed, Sara retaliated in the only way she could think of; she emptied her bucket over Emma’s head.

With a screech, Emma stood.

Sara laughed so hard, she could barely breathe.

Then Emma was kneeling beside her, kapp soaked, ribbons dripping, and hugged her. Laughter fled as they gazed at each other, Sara in surprise and inquiry, Emma silent with purpose.

She touched Sara’s heart with the tip of her fingers, then she touched her own. She placed Sara’s fingers on her heart and then hers on Sara’s. All the while she did that, she looked into Sara’s eyes begging her to understand.

“Sisters,” Sara whispered, almost in awe, afraid if she said it too loud, it would not be so, and she wanted this sister very badly.

Emma nodded, eyes glistening, and hugged her.

Adam opened his bedroom door appalled that he’d awakened late for milking, only to find Sara and his sister laughing as they came in from outside, arm-in-arm and soaking wet.

He stepped back into his room, so as not to frighten Emma, and observed them from the shadows. How happy and excited Emma could be if he were not present. While it pleased him that she was not all sadness and fear, it bothered him a great deal that he was no longer her protector but—to her mind—a threat to her safety.

Even their mother’s scolding, because Emma was drenched, failed to dim his sister’s smile.

He would have to ask Sara later how they both got so wet.

Emma did a funny thing then. She touched Sara’s and his mother’s hands to each other’s hearts, making Sara laugh as she regarded his mother. “She is telling you that we’ve become sisters,” Sara explained.

No, no, no, Emma was saying with her hands and her expression, despite the fact that she was saying nothing at all.

“Oh,” Sara said, clearly embarrassed as she turned back to his mother. “I hope you do not mind, Mrs. Zuckerman, but I think ... I think Emma is trying to say that—in the same way she and I are sisters—you and I ... might be ... mother and daughter.”

Something lodged in Adam’s throat—at Sara’s words, at the need in her eyes—because he knew, he
knew
, how much having a mother would mean to her. And he made a promise right then, that if his mother gave Sara that one gift, the gift of a mother, he would bury his anger and resentment against her, no matter how difficult it would be.

But he needn’t have worried. “A new daughter,” his mother said with a joyful smile, opening her arms to Sara. “Welcome,
mein
lieb
.”

There and then, Adam Zuckerman discovered that forgiveness held the same power to speed a heart and knot a stomach as did hate, though the one uplifted and the other did not.

* * * * *

Life fell into a reasonably comfortable routine after that. Adam was able to be polite to his mother, if not loving. To his sorrow, he could be neither to his sister, because she remained distressingly fearful of him, even though Sara had tried to tell him she was not. Eventually, even Sara had to admit she was wrong about that. As to where Sara’s notion that Emma ‘said’ she wasn’t afraid of him had come from, Adam did not know.

His girls got so much attention from their grandmother, their aunt, and Sara, that they rarely sought him out now. Adam found that when they did, he didn’t mind it as much as he used to. He wondered if his mother had taken upon herself the role of protecting his girls; she, of all people, would realize the necessity. If so, the unspoken arrangement contented him.

Sara had become a somewhat sought-after midwife, and Adam could hardly complain about her going off on a delivery, even though he wanted to, when his mother and sister were so good about caring for the girls. Still, he wished Sara would just stay home, where she was safe. With him.

Was she safe with him?  Even he did not know the answer to that.

In the days that followed, he turned his attention to hard work—ignoring his aching thigh—and to making his farm thrive again. And if Sara sleeping beside him at night disturbed his rest, he decided that not having her there would disturb him more.

If only she would not keep crowding him in bed. If she would stay on her own side. But inevitably in the morning, he would find her tucked against his eager body. Most often, her nightgown had ridden up and her bare bottom nestled against him, like now, flesh to flesh, a torture of the most incredible sort.

Randy goat that he was, he throbbed eagerly. If he did not know better, he would think Sara was deliberately testing his ability to resist her. But that could not be. Leave it to him to blame her for his own weakness. If Sara was anything, she was innocent.

No, the fault was his. Even now as she slept blissfully on, unaware of danger, he had awakened to find a lush breast filling his hand, it’s nipple peaked and eager. As if reading his mind, Sara turned in his arms and thrust that rosy, ripe morsel of temptation into his face.

Well, damn; what else was a man to do?

Adam fit his lips there, lightly for a moment, and then more firmly, his body taking instant and hard notice. Even through her gown, suckling Sara felt incredible. Then he received a jolt. He could forget the gown coming between them, even here. The blessed thing fell open, practically to her waist, her other breast exposed and eager as well.

Adam fingered its pouting nipple, budded it, traced its dusky ring. Unable to wait, he tongued the bud to a perfect peak and suckled it, until Sara’s moan shot lightening-bright and sharp to every fiber of his body.

His focus and their positions changed, to Adam’s surprise, and before he knew what happened, Sara began to move against him, in the world’s oldest and most perfect rhythm. Hard and needy parts of him now nestled perfectly against warm, moist parts of her.

Adam closed his eyes to savor the torture for a second, then a minute, a few more….

Sara moved one of her legs, unconsciously opening to him, and Adam slid into her before he realized what he was about, a cry of exultation on his lips ... until he reached her barrier.