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.
"Happy now," he rumbled.
Mia blinked, completely unfazed at his masculine charm. She shrugged. "I am satisfied." Her skin was blue everywhere that it was no wind-chapped red and Zac now noticed how cold the icy water truly was. Was the mia crazy? He, and she and the baby, would catch pneumonia and die before-
Heat! He had followed the young thief to a bed of rocks that threateningly stood high above the rushing water. A geyser had bubbled up below the mother and the baby giggled like this was a game she had played before. Zac stood aghast. As Mia waded away and settled the little girl in calm, shallow waters atop an enclosed rock structure resembling a large cradle, Zac slipped his frozen body beneath the warm churning water with a sigh of relief. When he came up, he shook his hair out and swam toward the mia.
"How is your arm?" she quietly asked as she unbraided her short hair and dipped it underwater.
"Heavenly in this water," he replied watching as she slipped her back down the side of a wide rock. "How do you know about this place?"
She mysteriously gazed at him, eyes pleading for him to leave her be. But aside from her hearty reunion with her lover, she seemed to be in a better mood than she had previously. Finally, she replied, "I wish some privacy so I might bathe. Are you gentlemen enough to grant me that?"
Slightly ashamed that he had his pride bruised by a little girl, he swam to the other side of the rock. Defining silence was followed by a trail of bubbles floating down with the current. When he had given up conversation the mia said, "I got lost all the time for the first eight or nine months. Trees all look the same and my hut and lean-to collapsed so often I changed them around frequently. I stumbled here last fall."
She was opening up to him. They had been sleeping in the same cold hut for a month and now she trusted him enough for a non-argumentative conversation. He couldn't believe it.
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She shouldn't be telling him any of this. The mia sighed, rubbing the soap over her body. But she longed for companionship. She couldn't see Rita without endangering her family's safety and she didn't want to see Darcy after their latest argument. So she was bathing while conversing with the duke's son.
"How long have you been out here?"
She pondered this. "A year, two; time blends together with no one around."
"Amazing." She could hear him breathing he was so close. She closed her eyes and listened for his voice. "You had been living on stolen goods with a baby for that long."
Instinctively Mia glanced at Prosper, happily playing in the fresh morning wind. She didn't feel like correcting Zac. He would accuse her of cohorting with the other brigands, accuse her again that she had laid with a man. Her cheeks flamed as she washed her hair. Her name was so trampled and besmirched all because she followed her heart and did what was right. But where was God now?
"I know she is not yours." His voice was soft. "She doesn't look like you."
Mia swallowed fear and began to rinse her hair. "Maybe she takes after her father."
Zac snickered. "I don't understand you, Miss Mia. You scream innocence at me one day and now you are coyly filling my mind with the unfathomable picture that you have with Sir Martin!"
The cold air hit Mia from all around; she gasped.
"You think that I could not guess. He is the only man with that skin shade in Leeland. That is where you and she are from, do not deny it. No other town or village has had you pillage from the road."
"Stop, please," she pleaded. She began pulling on her soggy garments.
"Mia, I am an injured man. I won't be strong enough to walk to Leeland for another week at the least. I am dependable on your grace and mercy. The only way I live is to believe that you didn't attack me, nor did you your beau, and your baby is legally yours and that no madman is after her."
Mia's mind swarmed with fear. Oh Lord, why hadn't she just left him in a hut-like she told Rita she would do. Instead, she had another mouth to feed, a mouth that was spitting out words she didn't wish to hear that was connected to a heart filled with hate for her. She couldn't take it. She waded around the rock and thrust the soap at him. "Wash yourself." As an afterthought, she insulted him. "You smell despicable."
He caught her hand before she could swim away. She refused to look at him and struggled to getaway. She was glad that the water droplets on her face were indistinguishable in their wet surroundings. She reached up to wipe a tear and stopped fighting. Gently the water engulfed her before Zac drew her closer. She tucked her hair behind her ear.
"Kindly remove your hand, sir," she barked.