Incognito

16

Zac was here?! Did Darcy see him? Mia glanced over her shoulder but no trance of her brother remained. When she turned back to Zac he was staring at the boot prints Darcy had left behind. What had Zac seen? She wasn't in league with Richard's gang although her brother was helping support her. Now she sat staring at evidence that she was indeed in contact with his father's enemy.

Zac did nothing but dump Prosper on the mia. In bewilderment, the mia did by habit the motherly instincts that the little treasure yearned for, standing she set a hand on the young man's shoulder.

"Are you alright?"

He met her eyes and blinked. His dark green eyes swirling into a hypnotic blue the longer she was enthralled by them. His whole being sighed. "Yes." His chest rumbled with the guttural sound. She hesitatingly removed her fingers.

Mia sent Prosper on the ground and picked up the sack. In the mix of loot was all she asked for and food galore. She let a small smile quirk up her lips. He must pity me in my privation, she thought.

She ran a finger through her oily hair when her eyes flit over the soap bar.

"We are going to take a trip." She declared. Mia settled the baby on her hip and grabbed Zac's hand. She had been dreaming of a proper bath since she first settled into the woods. She knew the perfect place near her new cottage.

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Zac wanted to complain. As the youngest child, he was his family's resident whiner. The mia had been roughly pulling him through the bitter cold forest for about a mile now. He moves completely frozen, his feet hurt even though the mia's careful wrapping and his arm felt like a dead weight. If the mia dare whip his red with cold face with her cape again Zac would punch her with his good hand. Onward Mia excitedly trudged dragging him along. Just when he was going to make the mia pull him on his behind because he would rather sit, the leaves thinned and the trees began to dwindle in number. Suddenly the water appeared. Not only the end of the river but a...

'Waterfall," Zac breathed.

"Hot springs," the mia sighed. She sat down Prosper and dropped the brown sack that she had magically received that morning. Possibly a gift from her lover. A disgusting jealous green warmed over his body. He needed to heal son. He needed to go back home and get away from this gorgeous female who was lifting her filthy cape and dress off over her head. He tried not to stare, but it was useless. He was impossibly mesmerized with her body. Though she still had on many layers the outermost were ripped men's jocaphers and a boy's tunic that showed too much of the figure he shouldn't be noticing. She removed her soiled stockings to her purple frozen toes showed and then set to caring for her baby. Without any hesitation, she splashed into the frigid waters, seconds later with a naked babe at the hip. Turning she glared pointedly at Zac.

"You look like a trout," she remarked. He closed his mouth as she began to wrap Prosper to her body with a rag while shivering uncontrollably in the waist-deep river. "You are coming." Not a question nor a command as she was so privy to, it was simply a statement. One she said with a gentry's noble dialect.

She was in the throng with the rest of her noble status. He must have met her somewhere before. He had to have met the filch that watched him, waiting for him to undress. And he, Zacary Holden, was terrified to unbutton his shirt or even remove his heavy splint. But he did it.

Wading, in eyes never straying from Mia's endless amber-chestnut eyes. Daunted by the fear of this girl seeing him without proper clothing, he unbuttoned his far-too-small shirt and cast it on the shore. His wooden splint and the dressing that wrapped around his abdomen soon followed. It never once did occur to him that the mia in fact had changed his bandages and dressed him as he slumbered through day and night. He approached the mia, getting close enough that she had to crane her neck to see him yet far enough to be proper. Because although the mia had thrown her reputation away long ago, he was a gentleman and was not going to besmirch the name he longed to know.