Come Spring (48 page)

“Of course not, and I’m sorry now that I even confided in Kase.”

“If he knew what went on, I’m surprised he didn’t kill me this morning when he had the chance.”

She shrugged. “It looks like you got in one or two good punches yourself. He’s really not as bad as he seems.”

“You could have fooled me.” He licked his cracked lower lip.

While the men on the porch cast suspicious glances their way, Annika stood up and twined her fingers together in front of her striped skirt. “If you come upstairs while I check on Buttons, I’ll help you get cleaned up.”

He almost declined and denied himself the pleasure of being completely alone with her, but as always where she was concerned, his will gave out and he followed the delicious sway of her skirt as she led the way up the stairs.

She didn’t need to warn him to be quiet; he’d heard Buttons protesting her bedtime all the way down the hall when he’d been finishing up with Rose. When they reached the room that Annika shared with Buttons, she opened the door and stood aside so that he could enter first. The child was sleeping on a featherbed amid a mound of bleached and starched embroidered pillows. He tried to read the saying across the closest and wondered if the sewing was her handiwork. As if she guessed what he’d been thinking, she said, “Rose bought them from a woman in town. She can’t sew very well either.”

“Oh.” The frilly atmosphere was so foreign to him, he felt lost. It made Buck want to run for cover.

He stood uncomfortably in the center of the room, afraid to move and wake up Buttons, unwilling to even perch on the edge of the bed or the chaise near the window and smear dirt on the clean upholstery or eyelet bedding. He wanted to touch Buttons, smooth back the riot of curls that kissed her pink cheeks and feel the satin ribbon that adorned the neck of her stark white nightgown, but she was sleeping so blissfully with her old wooden doll clutched in her arms that he dared not.

Instead, he looked away and took in the abundance of toys scattered about the hooked rug on the floor. A well-dressed doll with bisque head and arms was seated on a child-sized rocker in the corner surrounded by small wooden animals around a toy Noah’s ark. He reached down and picked up a book that lay on the table beside the bed.
The Brownies, Their Book,
he read before he flipped it open and stared down at the peanut-shaped little men that adorned the pages.

“She loves those stories,” Annika said, startling him. He snapped the book closed and carefully set it down. While he waited, she poured water from a pitcher into a washbowl and then dipped a clean towel into the tepid water.

“Sit down.” She indicated the chaise.

“I don’t think—” His response was a whisper accompanied by a shake of his head.

“Please. Let me help you.”

He did as she asked, hoping she would touch him. As she moved close to stand beside him, his senses ran riot. The rustle of her silk petticoat jangled his nerves. She smelled like rose water while the warmth of a spring day emanated from her like captive sunshine. He held his breath as she reached out and pressed the wet towel to his battered face, touching it here and there as lightly as the wings of a dove might brush against the sky.

He felt her hesitate before she pressed the cloth against his lips, and when she did, he closed his eyes and imagined that the soothing moisture was from her kiss.

When he opened his eyes, he discovered hers were but inches from his own. Blue on blue, they were gazing back at him as if she were seeking out the secrets hidden in the very depths of his soul. He longed to hold her, but found her as untouchable as a priceless museum piece. An unbearable ache made him long to get away.

When he pulled away from her touch, she immediately stepped back.

Annika wadded up the towel in her hands to hide their trembling. She had nearly kissed him while his eyes were closed. What would he have done if she had? Buck still had not explained the reason behind his sudden appearance. Had he come for her? She could see him poised and ready to get away. Annika didn’t think she could bear the thought of seeing him walk out the door.

“Did you find the buttons I left?” The moment the words were out, his face darkened, the expression behind his eyes shuttered until it grew cold and hard. It was the wrong thing to ask.

“I did. But I don’t need your charity.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I thought you left them behind as payment.”

She wrinkled her brow. Her trembling had subsided, but she still didn’t trust herself to free her hands. She twisted the towel and then began to fold it. “Payment? For what? I left them so you’d know I didn’t leave of my own free will. Clemmens and his men didn’t give me time to write a note. They made me pack up Baby and our things and go. I thought when you saw the button tin that you’d know I would never willingly leave it behind.”

“I thought you left on your own,” he admitted.

Annika was stunned. “How could I?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t in much shape to ask myself that question.”

At first she took his statement to mean that he was upset about her leaving. “What do you mean, not in any shape?”

“Nothing.”

“Buck...”

“I didn’t get home until late that night. I met up with that mountain lion I had told you about.”

She twisted the carefully folded cloth again. “Were you hurt? How badly?” He didn’t seem scarred in any way that she could see, aside from the cuts and bruises he’d sustained in the fisticuffs with Kase.

“Got me in the leg. I took fever and probably would have died if Old Ted hadn’t come along.”

It was true she hadn’t really studied his walk, for he’d followed her up the stairs. Earlier, in Rose’s room, her mind had been elsewhere. Speechless, she slowly lowered herself to the chaise beside him. The minute she sat, he stood up.

“You could have died and I would never have known.” Her voice was so soft it was barely audible above the sound of the rain.

He limped across the room and stood with his back to the window. Even the soft glow from the lamp on the side table couldn’t dispel the evening gloom. “Would you have cared?”

Realizing that he could be wounded frightened her more than she would have guessed. He was mortal, after all. Annika was on her feet in an instant. “Buck Scott, what are you talking about?” Thankful Buttons was not a light sleeper, she lowered her voice again anyway. “I told you the last time I saw you that I loved you. My feelings haven’t changed.” Taking a deep breath, she steeled herself and delivered the questions that had plagued her since she’d laid eyes on him. “Have yours?”

He couldn’t lie. But he couldn’t tell her the truth, either. It would complicate things, so he said, “No. I still want what’s best for you and Buttons. I came to see her. To see if she was happy.”

Annika weighed his words. “So you didn’t come for me?” Framed by the weak light from outdoors, his blond hair shone where the lamplight caught the highlights. His eyes narrowed in thought as he stared back at her. She was desperately afraid of what he would say next.

“Look around you, Annika. Wake up to the way life really is. I can’t give you half of what you already have. You and I are from two different worlds and any idea I might have had to the contrary was a damn crazy one.” He ran his hand through his hair and then shook the long blond curls against his shoulders. Placing his hands wide apart on the window-sill, he leaned back and rested his hips against it. “Coming here has only reconfirmed what I’ve known from the beginning. Seeing the proof for myself, I know you’d never adjust to living with me in the mountains. But now I do know that Buttons can adjust to another way of life. She’ll have everything she deserves.”

“Buck, it looks like that now, but she cried herself to sleep asking for you for the first two weeks we were here.”

“But she’s forgotten that now.” He paused, as if afraid to say what he thought, then added, “I’d rather she not live with you and Thexton, though.”

“That’s over now. Besides, how can you think I’d even consider marrying him?”

“He’d be a fool not to want you.”

She crossed the room and stood directly in front of him. “Tell me you don’t love me.”

“Don’t do this, Annika. Let it go.”

She was tempted to tell him about the baby now that she was almost certain she was pregnant. For a moment she was tempted—it would be a way to keep him by her side—but she didn’t want Buck that way, not trapped like one of the animals he hunted. He had to want to come to her of his own free will, had to want her without the flimsy excuse that he wasn’t good enough, that their worlds were too far apart to bridge even by love.

Turning aside before he could see her tears, she walked to the washbasin and set the towel down beside it. “I think you had better go before I make a fool of myself.”

“Annika...”

She heard his footsteps, could feel him standing behind her, hovering there, waiting for her to turn around. She gripped the towel rack on the washstand so hard she thought it might snap.

He said, “I’ll spend the night in the bunkhouse.”

Barely able to choke out a reply, she straightened, but did not turn around. “Will you say good-bye to Buttons tomorrow?”
Will you say good-bye to me?

He paused in the doorway and glanced once at the child asleep on the bed. “I can’t.”

Annika watched his reflection in the window, saw him lean down and kiss Baby Buttons tenderly on the cheek. She closed her eyes against the sight and the intense pain that accompanied it.

* * *

A
NNIKA
met Kase in the library after she had given the hired hands a supper of cold chicken and fried potatoes. The meal was nothing compared to the ones Rose usually prepared, but it was edible and no one went hungry. Buck hadn’t appeared with the others, although casual questioning revealed he had indeed taken a bed for the night in the bunkhouse. Terrified that he would leave before she could talk to him again, Annika thought about taking him a covered dish later in the evening. When Kase came in and told her he wanted to see her in his library immediately, Jim volunteered to take Buck his dinner and Annika could think of no plausible reason to refuse to let him.

She followed her brother down the hall and stepped into the cool dark room. While he lit the lamp, Annika looked around. Kase’s library was reminiscent of her father’s with its wall-to-wall bookshelves, massive burl wood desk, and stuffed chairs. The shelves were not all lined with books, not yet, but there were family photographs of the Storms beside Rosa’s family in Italy. Annika picked up a small silver frame and stared down at a photograph of Kase and her that had been taken when she was six, the year before he went off to school. The picture reflected their personalities—she sat posed on a small wooden wagon, her head tipped to her shoulder, smiling gaily into the camera, while Kase stood beside her protective, proud, and unsmiling. They were holding hands.

Her anxiety fled as she set the picture down, Kase had always loved her. He would see her through her dilemma. Annika turned to face him, and found him seated on the corner of his desk, one leg up across his knee. He was waiting for her to begin.

“How’s the baby?”

“Fine. Rose fed him for the first time. He’s doing well.”

“Have you definitely decided on the name Joseph?” She was stalling. She knew it. He knew it.

He obliged her. “Joseph Caleb Storm, after Rose’s father and mine.”

It was the opening she needed. “Will you tell me the truth if I ask you some very personal questions?” He tensed; she saw it in the way he shifted and straightened his shoulders.

“Why don’t we start with the reason we’re here?” he countered. “I want to know what Richard Thexton said to you that made Buck Scott tear into him like that. Or is it just Scott’s habit to hit first and ask questions later?”

She ignored his last comment. “Richard said that blood will tell. That he was glad he found out I had such a wild streak before we married.”

Kase stood up but didn’t move away from the desk. Stone faced, he waited for her to go on.

“He said people in Boston have gossiped about our mother for years”—she took a deep breath and forced herself to repeat Thexton’s cruel words—“that everyone speculated over whether she had whored for Indians or not. They think that’s the reason she married a half-breed. He said everyone wonders where you really came from. No one’s ever told me, either. I just want to know the truth.”

His face took on a terrible darkness she had never seen before. With his hands clenched into fists at his side, Kase stared down at her, his exotic features at odds with the state-liness of the library. “Sit down.”

The two words shattered her more than anything he might have said, because she assumed by his tone that it was all true. Just as stubborn as he, she remained standing. “Tell me.

Kase took a deep breath. “Our mother was raped by reservation renegades when she was sixteen. Most of her family was killed. Her younger sister and brother were taken captive and eventually chose the Sioux way of life. She found herself pregnant, but she refused to give me up despite the rejection she faced at the hands of her own Dutch kinsmen. The rest you know. Caleb met her when she was living in a sod house outside Pella, Iowa. They were married a short time later and he adopted me. I was five. You were born the next year.”

Annika tried to picture her mother at sixteen, facing the loss of her family, enduring rape and the birth of a child conceived during the vicious attack. “To think that all these years I’ve thought of the story of her house on the prairie and Papa’s meeting her as a fairy tale. My God. Poor mother.” Then she looked up at her brother, her lifelong protector and friend. Needing a tangible connection between them, she reached out and took his hand. “At least you really are my half brother, Kase. When Mama and Papa would never tell me the truth, I quit asking because I was afraid to find out that they had adopted you.”

He pulled her close and hugged her. “When I learned the truth, I didn’t want them to tell you. We all thought it would upset you too much, because after all, you were only fourteen then. Mother, understandably, can’t and won’t talk about the rape. In fact, they would never even have told me if I hadn’t forced it out of Caleb.”