She let out a huffing breath and leaned her head against the wall.
"You're not being followed right now, are you? I mean, they don't have some way of tracking you?"
Lucy made a show of looking around at the bright ocean all around them. "How would they?"
"Just checking." He could think of ways. The seagulls overhead could be shifters spying on them.
But it was possible to get too paranoid. And he had a very important errand to run. He wasn't planning to go all the way back to Westerly Cove with all these groceries.
"Look, Lucy, I have to go somewhere before I go home, all right? And I need to swear you to absolute secrecy. No one else knows about this. You can't tell anyone. It's a huge secret."
"You'd trust me with your secrets?" she asked, puzzled. "We've only just met. And, I mean, you found me stowed away on your boat."
"I know. But yes, I trust you. And also," he added, "I don't have a choice. I mean, I could put you off on the shore—"
"No!"
"So you have to come along. Just don't tell anyone what you're about to see. It's important."
"Okay," she said after a moment, looking at him. "I promise."
Eren turned back to the boat's controls before he could fall into her eyes. He had a feeling that he was likely to keep falling forever.
LUCY
It seemedto Lucy that they had been traveling for hours across the bright waves. She ate two of Eren's sandwiches and drank a bottle of water, and was starting to feel better, although she was still very nervous.
It wasn't Eren she was nervous of. Not exactly. She kept darting sideways glances at him. From this angle, she couldn't see his face clearly, but she had an impressive view of his muscular shoulders and his strong hands on the controls of the boat. They were mostly sheltered from the wind inside the little cabin thing—Eren called it a pilothouse—but there was enough breeze coming in through a half-open window to whip his short blond hair around.
Big white fisherman guy. Big incrediblyhotfisherman guy. She felt as if she ought to be scared of him, by all rights, but instead she hadn't felt this safe in a very long time.
She worried about having given him her name, but reminded herself that Lucy, by itself, was a very common name. In the unlikely chance that he had seen any news stories about her, surely he wouldn't connect the two. And she could only hope, also, that if he had ever seen her in the news, he would remember glamorous shots of Lucy Copeland with her hair gorgeously styled and jewels at her throat. Surely he couldn't associatethatLucy with the one he had found on his boat.
She touched her hair anxiously. She knew she was a mess. She wished she could have met Eren as her real self, made-up and beautiful.
Except ... she was no longer sure that itwasher real self. The farther she got from her old life of private tutors and fancy house and jewelry, the less connected to it she felt. The old Lucy would never have stowed away on a boat, outrun a tiger, or considered stealing because she was just that desperate.
For a long time, Lucy had known exactly what her life was going to be like. She would live a life of idle luxury and eventually take over running her parents' company, or pay someone to do it for her. It had always seemed desperately boring, but she hadn't been able to imagine doing anything else.
Now she was on a boat headed into the unknown, with a man she had just met, and she realized that she had no idea what the new Lucy was capable of.
She was very much looking forward to finding out.
Now there was just the matter of where in the world they were going.
She couldn't imagine what could be worth that much secrecy. A mysterious smuggler's island, maybe? She glanced across the grocery bags and boxes stacked on the floor and poked a cooler with her toe. Maybe he was taking supplies to his smuggling buddies.
"Don't touch anything, please," Eren said over his shoulder.
"I wasn't," Lucy said hastily, jerking her foot back.
She pulled his too-big flannel shirt tighter around her shoulders, glad of its warmth. There was a warm, comforting, spicy smell that she thought might behissmell. She just wanted to wrap it around her.
"We're getting close," Eren said. "Remember your promise. You can't tell anyone what you see here."
"I promised, didn't I? If you trust me enough to take me to whatever this is, you're going to have to trust me all the way."
Eren gave a brief nod, acknowledging her point, and looked ahead.