Butterfly Garden by Annette Blair Page B

for his touch.
    Too bossy to bed. Those words, along with her memory of their time in the upper room, haunted her as she slipped into her cold bed. Alone. Lonely.
    Spinster Sara Lapp, a spinster no more, yet Sara Zuckerman, wife, mother, virgin still, curled into a ball, hugged herself tight and let her tears fall. Too bossy to bed.
    When the cock crowed, Sara snuggled deeper into her dream man’s arms, in the upper room, on the big bed where Adam had touched her in the way only a husband could.
    She slipped back into unbuttoning his broadfalls, his union suit. Adam opened her dress, until they were both free of their clothes and ... and….
    Katie tried to raise one of Sara’s eyelids with tiny probing fingers. Down the hall, Baby Hannah wailed, likely hungry and wet, and near her ear, Pris whined.
    Sara caught Katie’s wayward finger and managed to open her eyes. “Does this mean it’s morning?”
    “Ya,” Adam said from her doorway, sitting Sara straight up. “Short night, I know.” He pointed his chin at the children as he raised a suspender over his shoulder and shrugged. “They don’t seem to care. Come downstairs, Pris, Katie. Give Sara a chance to wake up. Lizzie, go get the baby and bring her down.
    “After you’re ready,” he said to Sara. “I’ll go milk. While you dress, I’ll start the stove.”
    “And this,” Sara said as she stepped on an icy floor a minute later, seeking her robe against the chill. “This must be wedded bliss.”
    * * * * *
    Married life turned out to be both better and worse than Sara expected.
    She supposed she should deny her yearning, even to herself, but she wanted Adam’s arms around her again. Who would have thought it?  Certainly not her. She wanted his hands on her in more places than she’d known them—wicked, wicked thought.
    Did a decent woman feel such things?
    Not for the first time, Sara wished her mother had lived. She needed a woman’s advice more now than when her first suitor had turned from her, more even than with her second and last.
    A surprising part of her new life was her relationship with Adam, which had altered to one almost of friendship. The small changes that brought this about had begun on the morning of their first full day of marriage. Adam had been there when she awakened, a surprise she wasn’t certain she liked then. But now….
    Just this morning, two married weeks later, she realized as she awakened, before even opening her eyes, that she awoke now with a feeling of hope ... of anticipation.
    As he had been that first morning, Adam was there, pulling up his suspenders and herding the children off her bed to give her a few minutes to compose herself and dress.
    The first morning he’d been his sober self, but these days, especially mornings, there seemed almost a tilt to his mouth, though on one side only, which gave her heart a bit of a skip every time she saw it. And though his near-smile was a weak one, it was an improvement, nonetheless. A ‘good-morning’ to treasure.
    Adam had begun to take on his own farm chores that last week before their hearing and wedding, not stopping for the noon meal, preferring to eat breakfast, skip dinner, and eat a large supper. That too had changed the first day of their marriage.
    That noon he came in, sat at the table with them and said the prayer. He discussed all manner of topics, from the sheep he hated for a month after shearing to Roman’s gossipy ways.
    If one of the children spoke, he listened politely, though he rarely responded. But there had been a change in that too. Sara knew instinctively that for perhaps the first time in his life, Adam Zuckerman saw his children, was aware they existed, though he was not always pleased about it, which annoyed Sara no end. To complicate matters between the two of them, he seemed now to see her, the wife he’d been forced to marry, as most times a nuisance, and at others, a wonder. His contradictory reactions, the unexpected shift from one to