A Winter Heart, Sexy Amish Historical Novella

by Annette Blair

  “I have read other Amish romances, but none left me feeling the way Annette Blair's BUTTERFLY GARDEN did. Blair demonstrates she holds a solid grasp of human emotions in telling the story of Adam Zuckerman and his denial of his feelings for his daughters. I loved the descriptive way Blair led me through all the emotions that both Adam and Sara felt during their time together. It made me feel as if I was actually in the story myself. Read Butterfly Garden and learn how love blooms for two special people and four beautiful daughters.”—Paula R, Risque Reviews TOP PICK

  This story is classified as a sensual Amish romance. Who knew there was such a thing? Actually, it works really well and makes a of lot sense. Sara and Adam's relationship is complex and fraught with problems from within and without. I loved Sara and her determination. She is the driving force in this story. Filled with sorrow, fear, love and passion, Butterfly Garden tells the story of man held hostage by his past and the woman who tries to free him. The passion within their marriage is real and clearly part of the healing process. Their journey is heartbreaking and uplifting. I loved this story and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be inspired. Keep the tissues near you for this one. It will truly touch your heart.” —Susan B, The Romance Studio

  Excerpt

  BUTTERFLY GARDEN

  Chapter One

  Walnut Creek, Ohio, 1883

  Amish Midwife Sara Lapp stopped at the base of the farmhouse steps and tilted her head, as much to keep the autumn wind from slipping beneath her black wool crown-bonnet as to meet the eyes of the man towering above her on his porch.

  Adam Zuckerman stood taller and more forbidding than usual in the eerie pitch of night, even barefoot and unflinching on a cold porch floor. One suspender crossed his open-throated union suit, the other hung in a loop at his side—an oversight that should make a man seem vulnerable. But Adam Zuckerman was as about as defenseless as a grizzly.

  Sara swallowed and raised her chin, determined to say what no one else dared. “Abby should not be having another. You're killing her with so many babies so close.”

  Adam Zuckerman reared back as if struck, raising the hair at the nape of Sara's neck, skittering her heart.

  Even the wind howled a wild lament.

  A moment of fury claimed the taciturn man, another of rigid control, before he raised his lantern high, and examined her, inch by slow insulting inch. “What know you, Spinster Sara,” said he, “of such things as should or should not happen between a man and his wife?”

  A hit, dead center. Mortal—or so it seemed. Spinster Sara. And if she called him mad, like the rest of the world did, how would he respond?

  Mad Adam Zuckerman, whose scowl could stop a man cold, whose presence could turn children to stone, even his own . . . especially his own. Why had this self-chosen outcast, of all people, called her to tend his laboring wife, despite the community's stand against her?

  No one could figure him out.

  No one tried anymore.

  Sara climbed to the porch, despite his defiant stance. “Time I looked in on Abby.”

  But Abby's husband stepped in her path. “Get out.” That flash of emotion appeared again and vanished again.

  She was the lesser of evils, Sara knew. None of her people—man or woman—wanted a man around during labor and birth, doctor or no, but without care, childbirth in their Ohio Amish Community was too-often deadly. “If you have no need for my skill as a midwife, why did you send for me?”

  “Skill or no, the right to judge is not yours.”

  Given the accuracy of his statement, the catch in Adam's voice disturbed Sara. “But the right to save lives is,” she said. “Leave Abby alone for a while after this.”

  His eyes went dark and hard as flint, making Sara look away, and pull her cape closed against a sudden chill.

  A newborn cry rent the air, forcing their gazes to collide, Sara's born of shock, Adam's of regret. “Move aside and let me in,” Sara said, but Adam turned, entered, and let the door shut in her face.

  Raising an angry hand, Sara shoved it hard and smacked him good, taking no solace from the hit. Stepping into the farmhouse kitchen, she was assaulted by the lingering scents of smoked ham and cabbage. A kerosene lamp on the scarred oak table flickered and hissed, hazing the perimeter of the room, but Sara knew her way and made straight for the stairs.

  “Wait!”

  She stopped and rounded on him. “For the love of God, Abby could be bleeding to death!”

  Adam paled, defeat etching his features with an unforgiving blade until emotion dimmed and none was left. “She's not.” He hooked that forgotten suspender over his shoulder with slow, even precision.

  Not his words, but his misplaced action and calm voice gone brittle held her. Sara shivered. “Did you deliver the baby, then? Before I came?”

  Adam did not move so much as a muscle, yet Sara watched, mesmerized, as he struggled to tear himself from some agonizing place. “She delivered it.”

  Despite the blaze in the hearth, cold assaulted Sara with knife pricks to her skin. “Then how do you—”

  “She's gone.”

  Her denial as involuntary as her sob, Sara grasped a chair-back for support, but none was to be found. Her pounding heart took over her being.

  The babe's cry came again. Louder. Angrier.

  The old walnut regulator clock grated in the silence—the commencement of eternity marked in counterpoint to the commencement of life.

  As if from nowhere, and without acknowledgment, a grudging if temporary amnesty flowered between Mad Adam Zuckerman and Spinster Sara Lapp. She read it in his eyes as clearly as she knew it in her soul, and she was shaken, because deep in a place she tried to keep sealed, Sara feared she had been altered.

  But panic was not to be tolerated. There was death to deal with, and life. She took the stairs at a slow pace, no more prepared for one than the other.

  As she approached Abby's room, Sara saw inside where a row of pegs lined the wall. One of Abby's dresses hung beside Adam's Sunday suit. If marriage had a picture, this would be it. On the floor below, an aged walnut bride's box sat open, baby clothes spilling out.

  The babe in its cradle had fallen into a fitful sleep. Sara covered it with a second blanket and it sighed and slept on. When she stepped to the big bed, a second unfettered sob rocked her.

  Tired. Even with her pain-etched features relaxed in death, Abby Zuckerman looked too tired to go on. Sara smoothed hair the color, scent and texture, of stale straw off her only friend's cool brow. “Time to rest, Ab.”

  Abby's bony arms above the quilt contrasted sharply with her swollen, empty belly beneath. Even as a child, Abby had been thin, but her skeletal form looked so much in keeping with death, of a sudden, that Sara wondered why she had never noticed it before.

  Swallowing hard, whispering a silent prayer, Sara squeezed her friend's work-rough hand for the last time.

  Just like Mom, Sara thought, ignoring the pull on her heart.

  If only there'd been a midwife for Mom.

  If only she'd been sent for earlier tonight. If only...

  Sara looked up, far beyond yellowed ceiling plaster and slap-patched roof, farther even than dark, scudding clouds gravid with snow. “Miss you, Mom. Meet Abby Zuckerman. Be friends.”

  A sound from behind caught Sara's attention. Adam must think her daft as him. Everybody knew her mother died with her brother at his birth fifteen years before. She raised her chin and turned to face her nemesis.

  “A man needs sons to help on the farm,” he said, and waited, seeking understanding, Sara knew, but she did not have it to give. And after too long a time to be comfortable, he grunted and turned away. “Got to go milk. See to the babe.”

  From the top of the loft ladder, Adam Zuckerman gazed down at the little midwife whose passion for things beyond her control was greater than was good for her. Sometimes life cost dearly, he thought, too dearly to be borne. Spinster Sara had not yet learned this. He almost hoped she would never have t
o. His girls could use some of that passion.

  He, however, had learned, for good or ill and at a very early age, that in life there were no choices, no control, none. It was the hardest lesson his father had ever taught him, and the most painful.

  Adam descended the ladder at a plodding pace, postponing the inevitable for as long as possible. He'd plotted his course before sending for Sara, yet to give his plan voice, set it in motion, was infinitely more difficult than he expected. This was another of life's non-choices, however, and he must move forward with his intentions.

  He'd heard once that a man raises his children the way he was raised, and once was enough.

  No choice. None.

  Adam led his silent way to the house, the would-be midwife's disapproval stabbing between his shoulder blades.

  In the dawn-lit kitchen, somehow emptier for the loss of its mistress, Adam turned to face the woman who would never be a midwife if he had his way.

  “The children will be awake soon,” he said. “When they are, you take them.” His voice cracked with the words—words that would both save and damn him. Impatient with himself, he cleared his throat. “Keep them.”

  Spinster Sara, never at a loss, stilled.

  Time stood as if suspended.

  “The children?” she asked. “Your children? Keep them?”

  A lump, scratchy, choking, and big as a hay bale, caught in Adam's throat. It swelled and tightened his chest. He could barely draw breath. For the sake of his children, he could not turn back. The nod he gave her was weak, but strong enough, because for the first time in his memory, the rebellious spinster looked as if she did not have all of life's answers.

  “What are you talking about?” Even her voice trembled.

  Sending his children away was the only way to protect them; his father had taught him that at least. And it had not taken half the punishment the devil doled out for him to learn it.

  Just remembering brought a measure of sanity. Adam shifted and squared his shoulders. “Take them home with you. Raise them.”

  Sara's flash of almost childlike wonder turned so quickly to shock, Adam doubted seeing it, but even the possibility gave him hope. “I'll pay you.”

  “Mein Gott, you are mad.”

  “So they say.” Madness, he believed, ran in his family.

  “You can't mean till they're grown.”

  Forever, he prayed. “For a while . . . until I can make other arrangements.” Until you cannot bear to let them go, he thought. It would happen. He knew it would. He only hoped Sara's strength and determination—misplaced though it was with midwifing—worked in his children's favor, rather than in her ability to part with them.

  “If this is grief,” she said. “You have an odd way of showing it. Those children are yours. You're their father.”

  “Abby wanted you to have them.” Adam hated the heat of embarrassment that consumed him—for the simple lie, yes, but more for the canker that created the need for lies. He wasn't getting away with it, though. Sara's expression demanded more. He sighed. “They need you,” which was truer than she would ever know. “They don't need me and I don't need them.” Not wholly true, but close enough so it didn't matter.

  “Right. They're just babes, not good for much. They can't help on the farm.”

  “That's so.” Adam turned to hide the agony clawing at his belly and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He was aware that Sara followed, because that knife slid deeper between his shoulders.

  He watched her wrap the babe tighter and lift it from the cradle, the mighty hand of fate squeezing his chest, forcing the breath again from his lungs.

  Abby would have been pleased to die giving him a son, but she would have thought she failed otherwise. He had not had the heart—beyond ascertaining that the swaddled babe in his dead wife's arms lived—to discover whether Abby had died fulfilled.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  The woman touching a tiny hand to her lips, the one who thought she could save the world, looked sharply up and all but hissed. “A babe. An innocent.”

  Another, he could not love. “A girl,” he said, covering defect with indifference. “I guessed as much.” He was almost glad. A boy would have made Sara stab him with the question of whether a son was worth the cost of his mother's life.

  It was not.

  Adam knelt by his wife's bed, lifted her thin, work-rough hand and turned it to stroke her callused palm with his thumb. When emotion threatened to swamp him, he reminded himself that grief and punishment must wait. Urgent matters needed settling.

  Abby had promised to protect the children. Now he needed someone else to do it. Someone willful and single-minded to the point of stubbornness, someone strong—stronger than Abby. Someone who would fill their lives with butterflies and sunshine.

  Spinster Sara.

  Adam whispered a prayer for the dead and was surprised to hear Sara recite it with him, surprised she was still there. When he finished, he allowed his gratitude to show, but he could see she didn't understand that he was grateful for so much more than her prayer.

  Sara watched Adam stroke Abby's cheek and turned from a sight too intimate to witness, her anger tempered by bafflement, her embarrassment by yearning. She had sometimes secretly longed for a husband's touch, though never from such a husband as this.

  “You think I killed her,” he said, surprising her, forcing her to gaze, again, upon the sight of a man grieving for his beloved wife, but Sara was too bewildered to answer.

  “I think you're right,” he said, and Sara knew, not the satisfaction she might have expected, but an astonishing need to offer comfort. Rather than give it, she reminded herself that this was the man who would give away his children.

  Adam threw aside Abby's blanket and cringed at so much blood. “Why? How?” he asked, his gaze locked on the gruesome sight, his question filled with torment.

  Choked of a sudden with remorse over her earlier accusation, which now appeared horribly prophetic, Sara raised her hand toward Adam's back. But she lowered it again without making contact. A man such as he would not welcome solace, not from anyone, but especially not from her.

  She saw no sign of the afterbirth. Abby had bled to death. “It wasn't—” Sara swallowed to soothe her aching throat. “Sometimes—” She shook her head. “I'm not a doctor, just a midwife. It might not . . . I mean it can happen with the first or tenth, close together or not. I am sorry for your loss, sorry for judging. I was wrong.”

  As if he had not heard her feeble attempt at absolution—as if she had a right to give it!—Adam lifted his wife in his arms.

  “What are you doing?”

  Again, he seemed surprised by her presence. “Get out,” he shouted for the second time that night.

  Her involuntary step back seemed to recall him to his surroundings. He shook his head as if to clear it, looked back at his wife, touched the sleeve of her bloody gown and sighed. “I need to wash and dress her for her final journey. Roman went for the casket after he fetched you.”

  Sara stilled. Roman had dropped her at the end of the drive and kept going. Had he received the request for a casket before he fetched her? Had Adam sent for her after Abby died? It made no sense. No, she must be mistaken, as she could very well be about this man. Abby had once implied as much.

  Adam placed Abby back on her bed. “Dress and feed the girls,” he said, sounding suddenly tired. “I hear them stirring.”

  “Let me wash Ab. The girls will need you.”

  “No! By God they won't!” His fury was back with a vengeance, but it was nothing to his aversion. If he disliked his children so much, they would be better off with her. Was it because they were girls? Boys, he had wanted, to help with the farm.

  “Go to them.” This was an order, and Mad Adam Zuckerman issued orders to be obeyed.

  “I cannot take them.” Sara wondered why she refused to accept what she'd wanted forever, children, a family—however temporary—a treasure she had almost given up hopin
g for.

  One of the two suitors in her life had said there would be no children for her. She was as bossy as a man, he said, too bossy to bed. The other had not been as kind.

  Four little girls. Oh, Lord, she wanted them as dreadfully much as she wanted to be a midwife, but she could not take them. She could not.

  They were his. Not hers.

  “It's because you'll have to give up midwifing if you take them, isn't it?” Abby's angry husband asked. “Giving up would be hard for a stubborn one like you.” He looked her up and down in that icy way of his and Sara wondered how a look so cold could make her so hotly aware of her own shortcomings. “Well, what is it to be, Spinster Sara?” he asked. “Children of your own? Or a life of watching others bear fruit while you wither on the vine?”

  Another hit, more direct, more painful. Sara squared her shoulders to hide the hurt. “Even if I could take them—which I cannot—I would not give up delivering babies.” Sometimes she felt as if she could do anything. Most times she knew better. But taking Abby's girls away from their father was wrong. She could not help noticing that a barely-discernible discord existed between Mad Adam Zuckerman's words and his actions, between what could be seen and heard, and what could not. Ab would have told her she wanted her to take the girls in the event something happened. Besides, Sara sensed that deep down Adam Zuckerman did not want to give away his children. So why was he?

  Perhaps this was why they called him mad.

  Adam sighed, in defeat or weariness, Sara could not tell. “Take them till after the funeral then. Please.”

  Adam Zuckerman, pleading? “Why me?”

  He considered for too long, she thought, as if he were choosing and discarding a series of possible answers. “You have no one,” he simply said. “No one.”