Mikhail spun around, and sure enough, there was Bryony, her head barely sticking up out of the raging rapids, her red hair plastered to her face as she tried to tread water despite the weight of the heavy parka threatening to drag her back under.
“Take off your coat!” he shouted, then he dove back into the water, moving against the current and resurfacing near the center of the river. But Bryony had disappeared again.
“Where is she?” he called to the canoes, but the roar of the river tore his words away. He spun back around, ignoring the deadly cold seeping into his body as his eyes searched everywhere for even the smallest sign of Bryony.
There! A flash of red floating on the surface of the water only a few feet away. It was her hair.
He surged forward at the same moment Bryony herself emerged from the water, coughing and sputtering, her eyes panicked. He took one stroke, then two. He kept his head above the water so he didn’t lose her, even when her head started to slip under again.
He gave a third powerful kick, fighting the current trying to tear him sideways. That was all he needed to reach her. He wrapped his arms around her chest and pulled her up, bringing her head fully out of the water.
She coughed and sputtered, clinging wildly to his arms while still trying to tread water on her own.
“Breathe, Bryony. Just breathe.” He tried to keep his voice calm as he tucked her under his arm and swam toward the western shore opposite of where the canoes were. It was closer, and while he hadn’t been able to touch bottom in the center of the river, it quickly grew shallow as they approached the shore. The moment he could place his feet solidly on the bottom while still holding Bryony above the water, he stood and carried her in his arms.
“Th-thank you,” she stuttered, her teeth chattering as he pressed her against his chest. She’d pulled off her parka like he’d instructed, making it easier to stay afloat. But fur could keep a person warm when wet, and now that she was exposed to the air, shivers racked her body.
At least the shallowness of the river allowed him to move easily around the rocks as he carried her out of the canyon.
“I’m a good swimmer. I sw-sw-swear I am,” she stammered. “But my c-coat was so heavy, and b-by the time I got it off the current had pulled me into the middle of the r-river.”
“It’s all right. You’re safe now. No need to explain.”
Her teeth chattered again, then a particularly violent tremor racked her body. “I’m f-f-freezing.”
“I’ll get you warm, I promise.”
Her eyes met his, somber and serious even though they’d reached a sandy patch of beach. She didn’t need to speak for him to know what she was thinking. It was the same thing he couldn’t stop himself from thinking.
The last time he’d carried a woman out of a freezing river, she’d frozen to death afterward.
22
Bryony had never felt so mortified before in her life. She was lying in her bedroll, dressed only in a pair of dry undergarments and pressed tightly against her very warm father, who also wore nothing but a pair of dry undergarments.
On some level she supposed she should be thankful that she had undergarments on, because Mikhail had insisted she strip down to nothing at all before climbing into the bedroll with her father. But both she and her father had been determined to preserve a modicum of privacy.
They’d had that argument right alongside the argument about whether Heath or her father should climb into her bedroll at all. At first they’d both refused, seeing how Mikhail had insisted she wear so little. So then Mikhail had said he would lie with her if neither of them were willing.
That had gotten her father to agree, and Mikhail insisted Heath take off his wet clothes, put on dry undergarments, and climb into a bedroll with Dr. Ottingford, who also stripped down to his underwear, since neither he nor her father had gotten wet.
Even now, as she lay beside her father, bundled in blankets, her mind kept circling back to the morning’s chaos—the cold shock of the river, the roar of the rapids, the feeling of the water closing over her head as the current pulled her under. Once Mikhail had carried her ashore, she’d spotted Heath on the other side of the river, soaked to the bone, wading in the river to drag the canoes past the worst of the current.
He’d dragged their canoe to shore first, beaching it on the opposite bank of the river before going back for Mikhail’s canoe, which had still been wedged between two rocks, thanks to her father.
Heath had needed to brace himself against the rocks to pry the hull loose. Once he freed it, he guided it to the calmer waters outside the canyon, and then they paddled the canoes across the river, where Mikhail was already building a roaring fire. The moment their supplies arrived, he’d dug her bedroll and pack out of the canoe, then ordered her to strip down while he prepared her bedroll.
The ordeal had left her father and Dr. Ottingford as the only two dry people in their group, but Bryony had to admit, as mortifying as it was to lie beside her father in her underwear, she’d woken up from her nap warm. No more shivering, no more chattering teeth, no more sluggish thoughts that she could barely form while her brain had turned into frozen mush.
She was quite simply warm. Her hair was still wet, but even that was drying beside the blazing fire.
She blinked at the large flames, then at the pile of wood beside it. She didn’t know how long she’d slept, only that when she drifted off, Mikhail was wandering around the beach, trying to find more wood for them to burn despite the shivers racking his body.
She’d intended to stay awake until he climbed into his own bedroll, but in the end, she hadn’t been able to keep her eyes open.
Now he lay on the opposite side of the fire, near where Heath and Dr. Ottingford were snuggled together in Heath’s bedroll. But was Mikhail warm enough? His face looked rather pale.
She started to shimmy out of the bedroll.
