“Oh, hush,” she grumbled, suddenly realizing that he had been teasing her.
It was difficult not to run to the river as fast as she could. The sun had felt so nice at the start of the day but had quickly grown to be a torment as the day grew warmer. Her feet hurt so much inside her boots she was surprised she could still walk. Shedding her boots and stockings as quickly as she could, she waded into the water and sighed with relief.
Bliss, she thought. The cooling effect of the water quickly spread through her body. Since she had no intention of putting the same pair of stockings back on, Primrose grabbed one, soaked it in the water, and, as discreetly as possible, began to wash up.
For a minute, she thought seriously about shedding all her clothes and sinking her whole body into the water. Then good sense prevailed. She was out in the open, at a river she had little knowledge of, and in an area that could be a lot more traveled than she knew. It would be beyond reckless to sit in the water naked as the day she was born. Anyone could come along. The fact that she would have even considered such a shocking action told her that she may have been traveling around by herself for far too long.
Just as she was buttoning the front of her gown again, she saw a young maid holding a basket hurry down the hill to stand at the river’s edge. Thinking the girl had come to eat her lunch by the river, Primrose wondered if there was a chance she could buy whatever the maid had in the basket. Patting the skirts of her gown to see if she had any coins in her pocket, Primrose watched the maid open the basket, pull out something white and wriggling, draw her arm back, and hurl it into the river.
It yelped as it hit the water and Primrose leapt to her feet. She did not think twice but plunged into the river and walked as quickly as she was able to in the water toward the animal that struggled to paddle back to shore. Then she felt the current. It was tugging hard at her feet. Keeping her eyes on the little animal fighting so valiantly to stay alive, she reached beneath the water to tie up her skirts and free her legs before pushing farther into the river. Primrose was afraid she was going to have to swim into the swift current and was bracing herself for plunging all the way into the water when she heard a bellow from the shore followed by a lot of splashing. A heartbeat later Bened stood beside her, glaring down at her.
Bened finished washing the travel dust off and had to admit that it felt good. He also understood why Primrose had wanted to put her feet in the water. It had been a while since he had enjoyed anything so simply pleasurable as tugging his boots and hose off his feet and setting them in the cool water.
He frowned in the direction of where she had gone to the river’s edge. She had had long enough, he decided. It was not wise for her to be out anywhere alone. No matter how hard he had tried, he had been unable to shake Augusta. He knew she was hunting Primrose’s brother but that would change quickly if the woman got word of her niece’s presence in the area.
Primrose would be almost as big a prize for the woman as Lord Simeon. She could not get hold of all she wanted without putting the girl out of her way as well as the son. Bened did not know what the woman got out of marrying Primrose to a filthy, aging roué but he suspected it was a lot more than Primrose thought it was. The very last thing he wanted was for Primrose to be in the hands of a woman who could do to a child as she had done.
Stepping out of the river, he wiped his feet dry with his hose and then rinsed them out in the water. He looked at his shirt and rinsed that out as well. The question was, did he go back to the horses to get a new shirt, or just go find Primrose. He grinned, tossed his shirt and hose over his shoulder, and set off down the river to where she was cooling her feet. They would be traveling together for quite a while, he told himself, so she should learn to see him in the rough as soon as possible.
The moment he saw her, he tossed his wet clothes onto a rock and ran toward her. She was standing in the river. Then he saw that she was actually moving into deeper water where the current would be more dangerous. He yelled at her but she did not turn back so he went into the water after her, his heart pounding as he feared he would not reach her before the current swept her to her death. When he reached her side, he beat back the urge to just pick her up and take her back to shore. She was close enough to grab now if the need arose.
“What the bloody hell are you doing?” he demanded, the fear that had choked him fading as he saw how she was standing steadily in the water of a river notorious for catching people in its swift currents and drowning them or smashing them against the rocks a little farther downstream.