Come Spring

by Jill Marie Landis

  And as long as she held the child, she felt close to Buck.

  Rose was staring hungrily at the little girl. Annika smiled up at the dark-eyed Italian. “Would you like to hold her when she wakes up?”

  Rose nodded. “Che bella chicca.” She reached out to pat Baby’s back. “Beautiful little girl. Whose baby is this?”

  Annika took a deep breath and tried to smile. “She belongs to the man who took me off the train. Her name is Baby, but she likes to be called Buttons now.”

  Knowing how much Rose and Kase wanted children, and how many infants they had already lost, Annika knew without a doubt that her sister-in-law would keep Buttons without hesitation. Kase, however, was another matter.

  She immediately put the thought out of her mind. After all, Buck would arrive soon, maybe even this afternoon, looking for them. He would come for Baby and he would come for her, and when he did she would have to decide what she was going to do.

  Before she could tell Rose any more, the back door swung open. Annika watched Kase walk in, followed by Zach. As she stared up at her beloved older brother, she raised her chin defiantly and met his questioning blue gaze. The sky blue eyes and the height they had inherited from their mother were the only features they shared. Kase was dark, his shoulder-length hair was jet black, his skin a rich bronze that accentuated the lightness of his eyes. Their parents both agreed that they were equally stubborn, although Annika had always thought the term was too mild a description where Kase was concerned. She hoped his marriage had mellowed him, but as he stood just inside the doorway, slowly taking in her tattered clothing and her bedraggled appearance, she saw him stiffen with rage.

  He was already thinking the worst had happened to her. And if he thought the worst, then she knew he wouldn’t stop until he found Buck and settled the score.

  She wanted to clarify the situation before he had worked himself up to a full head of steam. She stood, abruptly handed the sleeping child to Rose, and crossed the room. She wrapped her arms about his neck.

  When Kase immediately stiffened, she held her breath, The tense moment passed, and she felt him relax as relief overwhelmed him. Kase pulled her close in a bone-crushing hug that said more than mere words could say. Then, just as suddenly, he held her at arm’s length and searched her face.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded and smiled, but was unable to hide the tears that quickly welled in her eyes. He was her brother and she loved him. She wished that she could have spared him his worry and anger. “I’m fine, really,” she said softly.

  “You look like hell.”

  “Well, you always said I worried too much about appearances. I guess I’m over that now.” She glanced down at her filthy skirt with its scorched hem. “No one gave me time to buy new clothes or to clean up before I got here.”

  “Exactly how did you get here?”

  “Zach brought me.” When he gave her his no-nonsense glare, she hastily added, “It’s a long story.”

  He barely glanced at Buttons. “And that child?”

  “She’s part of it.”

  Kase pulled her back to the table, sat her down in the chair, bussed his wife on the cheek, and for the first time really looked at Baby Buttons. “I’ve got time. I think I’d better hear it all. Rose, that child is too heavy for you to stand there holding her like that. Give her back to Annika.”

  “No.”

  Annika watched the exchange and bit back a smile. Good for you, Rose, she thought. It was good to see that her brother had met his match. Zach sauntered to the stove, took a mug off the shelf nearby, and poured himself a cup of black coffee.

  “Anybody else want one?” he offered.

  No one answered. Rose ignored Kase, who glared down at the child in her arms. Finally, he reached out and took Buttons himself, held her for the briefest moment, then gently handed her over to Annika. “Sit down, Rose.”

  His wife didn’t budge.

  “Please,” Kase added.

  She sat. Then Kase did, too. Zach pulled up a fourth chair and settled in to listen. Annika hid another smile by pressing her lips to the crown of Buttons’s head.

  “Start talking,” Kase demanded.

  “It’s good to see you still have your charming demeanor, big brother.”

  Rose laughed and Kase glowered. “This is no time to be charming. What the hell happened while you were out there and how did you get back?” If the look on his face was any indication, Annika knew she hadn’t faced any real interrogation yet.

  She sighed and began to relate her experience, carefully editing the way her relationship with Buck had flowered into full bloom. She told them about Virge, Cliff, and Denton, her experience with the men who were little more than bounty hunters, how they made her leave the cabin, how she couldn’t leave Buttons there alone, and then about her ride through Cheyenne.

  “I got out of the house and took Clemmens’s horse. Thank God it was dark.” She laughed, trying for a bit of levity as she watched Kase carefully. He was fighting to hold back his rage; his hands clenched and unclenched as he stared across the table at her. If she didn’t know better, she could almost believe he was angry at her for being kidnapped. But she knew he was trying not to show any emotion whatsoever. He’d been that way ever since he had gone away to boarding school at thirteen. Since then he had kept his feelings so carefully locked inside that at times it seemed the only emotion he ever allowed to surface was anger.

  She watched him carefully as she continued. “I must have looked quite a sight as I rode through town. Oh, and by the way, I’m doing quite well riding astride, I’ll have you know, but I must say galloping over hill and dale out here is nothing like riding through the Commons sidesaddle.”

  “Annika,” Kase warned with impatience, “stick to the story.”

  “The streets of Cheyenne were deserted, but I kept riding toward the taller buildings in the center of town until I came upon the Opera House. The show was just letting out, so I asked some people waiting for a carriage where the police station was and they started asking questions and when they found out who I was, both couples agreed to take me there personally. Just exactly how notorious am I?”

  When Kase said nothing, Zach told her, “Been in the paper three times, that and with the reward, well, there ain’t too many folks that haven’t heard tell of you.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. What about Mama and Papa?”

  Rose reached out and patted her hand. “They want to come as soon as Kase send to them the telegram, but he says that it is no use to sit, to wait.”

  “I told them not to come out until spring,” Kase clarified.

  Annika tried to finish her story. “After I reached the police, they wired Zach in Busted Heel and got me a room at the Interocean Hotel for the night. Baby was so upset and tired she was past the point of sleep. We were up most of the night. The sheriff put me on the first train out and Zach was there to meet me.”

  Zach interjected, “Didn’t think I’d need to send a man out with the news since she was comin’ in on the six o’clock train. Just brought her on out.”

  “So, here I am, a little dirty, but none the worse for wear.” She hoped she sounded more convincing than she felt at the moment.

  Kase didn’t move a muscle. He watched her intently. Rose laid her hand on his arm as if to soothe him. He was alternately studying Annika, then the child she held so protectively and the way she kept smoothing the curly blond head so lovingly. He leaned back in the chair, leisurely crossed one booted foot over the opposite knee as if he had all the time in the world, and said, “Now why don’t you tell me what really happened?”

  He knew as surely as he knew the sun would set that night that his sister was lying. If not outright lying, that she was evading the truth. She’d been alone with the man who had kidnapped her for over two long months, a man with a streak of insanity running rampant in his family. In the telling of it she made the experience sound like nothing more than a stage
coach stop at a way station. Something had definitely happened beyond what she let on. The woman she was now was not the little sister he’d last seen in Boston during the Christmas holiday two years ago.

  The old Annika Storm had been preoccupied with her social calendar, her education, her clothes, her books, and little else. This Annika Storm hadn’t once apologized for the way she looked, hadn’t whined or complained that she needed a bath and a change of clothing, hadn’t demanded he avenge her. Nor had she mentioned her fiancé in Boston.

  Somehow the outraged, spoiled little sister he had expected to be returned to him had been replaced by another woman—and that was the thought that plagued him most. She seemed more of a woman now than before, and he prayed that literally it wasn’t true.

  If Buck Scott had raped her and taken her virginity, she wasn’t admitting it. Was she trying to hide her shame behind a brave facade? The thought made him sick to his stomach.

  “Your sister is tired. I take her up to the room, all right?” Rose stood up, as if asking his opinion was just a formality.

  He reached out for his wife’s hand and pulled her down onto the chair beside his again. “You sure Scott will come after the girl?” Kase asked Annika.

  “Of course.” She nodded, but his question caused a niggling doubt to creep into her thoughts. What if Buck didn’t come after them? What if he came to his original conclusion that what Baby needed was a real home and decided not to come after them at all? Annika had no idea how to find the cabin, even if she could convince Kase to take them there.

  “And you say she’s his sister’s kid? Not his?”

  “That’s right. She’s Patsy’s.”

  Kase leaned forward, elbows on the table. “What do you know about this Patsy?”

  Annika colored. “I know she’s... well... she’s not quite right.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” he said softly.

  Instantly, she was alert. “What do you know about Buck’s sister? And how?”

  He didn’t like the way she said the man’s name or the fact that a defensive tone had crept into her voice. “This country’s not that big. I know she’s crazy as a loon. Thinks she’s Cleopatra.”

  Annika laughed outright. “Cleopatra? Really, Kase if you can believe that—”

  “It’s true. My neighbor knows the woman who’s caring for her. Furthermore, Scott’s whole family was insane.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but knew she didn’t know enough about Buck’s family to defend her argument. Instead of falling willingly into a trap, she closed her mouth again.

  “Would you mind if Rose did show me to my room? I’m exhausted and I think I’d like to get some sleep before Buttons wakes up.”

  “Buttons?” He looked at her with an I-told-you-so expression on his face.

  “I’ll explain the name later.”

  “Your trunks are unpacked upstairs. Rose never doubted your safe return.” He hoped to see relief overwhelm her. Instead, all she did was nod, then said quietly, “That’s good.”

  Kase frowned. It wasn’t the response he expected from a woman who used to change dresses up to four times a day.

  Something was definitely up, and he intended to find out what it was.

  “GET up, Buck. Papa wants you.”

  Buck pulled himself up to a sitting position on the bed and wondered what Sissy was doing there. “Sissy?” He forced his lips to move again. “Sissy?”

  His little sister moved closer, just out of reach, and swayed toward him. He thought he felt her hand brush his cheek, but wasn’t sure. Her touch was cold. It sent a chill through him. She stood over him for a moment more, smiling her vacant smile, watching him with eyes that showed no spark of inner life.

  “I never wanted to do bad, Buck.”

  “I know you didn’t, Sissy. I know you didn’t.”

  “They wanted to give me things, pretty things. That’s why I always let ‘em touch me.”

  Buck shook his head, trying to convince her he didn’t blame her for what the buffalo men always managed to do to her when he wasn’t around to keep an eye on her. She’d done whatever they had asked—done it for trinkets, cheap jewelry, a hair ribbon, a shiny new mirror. Hell, she’d lie with them for a smile. He never blamed her—Sissy didn’t know any better—but he blamed the men who should have seen that she had the mind of a child.

  He tried to sit up, to see her clearly, but he couldn’t move his limbs. His body wouldn’t obey. He wondered why he’d built up the fire so high. He was burning up.

  “Sissy?”

  Where had she gone? He squinted and tried to bring her back into focus, but the vision left him and he fell back against the pillow.

  “Here, Buck, here’s some rabbit. I fixed it just the way you like.”

  It was Annika’s voice, he’d know it anywhere, for it dripped smooth and sweet as honey from a honeycomb. He wanted to ask her why she’d left him, but he already knew it was because he had been a buffalo man. Now he was nothing but a trapper and she was city born and bred. But she even took Baby with her. Had he asked her to near the end? He couldn’t remember.

  He rolled his head toward the sound of her voice and saw Annika standing there with a pair of bloody rabbits hanging from a piece of rope. “Isn’t this the way you like them?” She lifted her hand and the rabbits dangled near his face.

  “Don’t go again.” The words sounded like a plea, even to his own ears, and he was ashamed—but even his shame couldn’t keep him from calling out to her once more. “Don’t leave me again, Annika. Stay with me.” He closed his eyes against the pain. When he opened them, she was gone.

  The throbbing pain in his leg brought him out of himself. He looked down and tried to focus on the dried blood caked on his torn pant leg. He wondered who had tied his leg up with pieces of his shirt. Had Annika? Had she cared for him before she left?

  A new voice startled him from his thoughts.

  “Let her not say ‘tis I that keep you here.”

  “Patsy?” He put his arm out to shield his face from her. He couldn’t be certain what Patsy would do. Even in his fever and delirium, he could not forget the danger she represented to him, to Baby. She was crazy, like Pa had been at the last. Crazy enough to take her own child up to the roof where, like Abraham, she had said, she intended to sacrifice her.

  She held her hand up in warning, her fingers splayed, clawlike. “Pray you stand farther from me.” Though she faced him, her eyes were focused on another place and time. Her words were the distorted words of a queen as put down by a sixteenth-century bard. Her face was just as distorted, but her regal bearing left no doubt who she thought she was. “See where he is, who is with him, what he does.”

  Buck knew he was at her mercy. “Patsy, forgive me. I had to do it. I had to take you away.”

  Still quoting Shakespeare, she said, “Then turn aside and weep.... Then bid adieu to me, and say the tears belong to Egypt. Good now, play one scene of excellent dissembling, and let it look like perfect honor.”

  Her gown was of diaphanous silk, swirling about her body, clinging to her. Upon her head she wore a disk of gold that shone like the sun, so bright it nearly blinded him. An eagle with wings outspread adorned the luminous disk. Buck started shaking as he stared up at her, unable to control the chills that racked his body. He had no strength to fight her off, no will left to force the vision of his mad sister to leave him in peace.

  She came close to the bed and drew the edge of her silken sleeve across his face. His shivering intensified. Leaning over him, he could feel her chilly breath upon his cheek. Once more the words she uttered were those of the Egyptian queen. “We’ll bury him; and then, what’s brave, what’s noble, Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion and make death proud to take us.”

  In that moment, Buck knew he was about to die.

  LATE afternoon sunlight streamed through the curtains, creating a delicate pattern upon the octagonal tile floor of the bathroom. Annika leaned back in th
e tall, ornate tub and tried to soak the stiffness out of her aching joints. As soon as Rose left her with Buttons in the guest room, Annika had taken her cue from the child and napped for the rest of the afternoon. Now, after she’d bathed Buttons and turned her over to Rose, it was Annika’s turn to pamper herself. She relished every precious moment, pausing to inhale the heady fragrance of the rose bath crystals that scented the water, lathering the soft soap into a thick foam, spreading it over her limbs.

  She scrubbed and scrubbed her hair until she felt as if she had washed away the trying experience of the last two days with the dirt. Finally, when the water had cooled and she began to feel guilty for leaving Rose at the mercy of Baby Buttons for so long, Annika stood up slowly so she wouldn’t slosh the water over the sides of the tub. She reached for the thick Turkish towel Rose had left folded over a towel bar for her.

  As she patted herself dry, she thought back to two nights before when she had lain in Buck’s arms and enjoyed his touch. Frowning, she wondered exactly when he would arrive, for she wanted to be certain she was with Kase when the two men met for the first time. The expression she’d seen in her brother’s eyes warned her that nothing good would come of their first exchange if she was not there to temper it. * Kase would be too furious to listen to reason—Buck too tight-lipped to explain.

  She toweled her hair until it was no longer dripping, then hung up the towel. From the hat tree in the corner of the tiled room she took down her own violet silk robe that Rose had so thoughtfully left there. Rose had been certain she would be rescued.

  Annika wanted to protest that she hadn’t, in the end, needed rescuing, but she didn’t yet trust her sister-in-law to keep such news from Kase. She needed to talk to Rose, to speak honestly and share her experiences with another woman, but she didn’t know her brother’s wife well enough to know whether or not to open up to her. Wondering if she might eventually share her secrets with Rose, she padded down the hall barefooted to the guest room.

  Compared to the cabin in Blue Creek Valley, the small room was a palace. The high four-poster was covered with a buttercup spread. Ruffled pillows were mounded high against the headboard, and matching curtains hung at the windows. Her clothes hung in the tall oak armoire; the perfumes and ribbons she’d packed were all lined up and ready for her on the chest of drawers.