Free Ten Good Reasons by Lauren Christopher Page A

well throw each other off the boat if they spent too much time together. Good thing she was getting rid of him. As soon as her mind formed the thought, her memory flashed to him that morning, standing there with the gun in his hand, looking like some kind of derelict. And then . . . to his beautiful bare chest, his muscled shoulders . . . She pushed her hair behind her ear and shoved both images out of her mind.
    “Here ya go, Captain,” said Cora, just cresting the steps.
    “Thanks, Cora. Give that to her, would you?” He motioned with his head.
    “Did you hurt yourself, Lia?” Cora asked.
    “I’ll be fine.” Lia snatched the emergency ice away, embarrassed. She didn’t like people fussing over her. “Thank you.”
    Coraline headed back down the steps while Lia calculated her getaway. She just needed a few notes about the whales—what kind they were encountering, which side of the boat they’d be on for sure—then she could use the microphone downstairs. “Are we almost there?”
    Evan glanced at the navigation screen. “Five more minutes. Have a seat.”
    “Are they grays?”
    “Won’t know for sure ’til I get there.”
    White water formed a froth beneath the cat as they skittered over the waves. If she sat down and took her weight off her ankle now, it was going to throb and swell like crazy. It seemed best to stay on it until the tour was over, then she could relax. She shifted to make it more comfortable.
    Evan did a double-take over his shoulder. “You don’t take orders very well, do you?”
    “Not my strong suit.”
    With one quick shake of his head, he yanked the emergency ice stick out of her hand, snapped it in two, then handed it back. It was turning ice-cold immediately.
    “That’s not going to last long, and it’s the only one we have, so sit down and put that on your ankle.”
    His constant string of orders was getting on her nerves. But, with a huff, she sat on the captain’s bench and wrapped the tube around her ankle as best she could.
    “You can give the narration from up here,” he said.
    “I thought you wanted this area cleared.”
    “I did. But you can stay. You’re like bug repellant.”
    Lia blinked and finally closed her mouth.
    The ice did feel good against her ankle. And it did feel good to get off it for a second. Frustrated that he was right about everything, she strove to think of other reasons she needed to go downstairs: “Kyle Stevens wants a tour of the boat,” she remembered aloud.
    “Kyle Stevens can wait.”
    The boat made a slight arc farther out into the ocean, still skating over the waves. Lia turned her head into the wind and pushed her hair over her shoulder, giving up on fighting and just enjoying the momentary feeling of being “off.”
    Up here, with Evan, she had no one to impress. Obviously, she wasn’t impressing
him
—she’d given up a long time ago thinking that would ever happen, even though she generally liked people to like her—but, she had to admit, it was kind of refreshing. He clearly didn’t want to talk. She loved to talk, and probably talked too much even for her friends and family, but it was kind of nice to be silent for a while. He made it feel oddly comfortable.
    “And would you look at that?” He lifted the binoculars, breaking his own silence. Though his voice had sounded angry and curt all day long, right now it sounded strangely reverent.
    His hand brushed her knee again and loosened the microphone, handing it to her. “Get ready, Cinderella. We’re ready to roll.”

CHAPTER
Five
    “F our,” he said, heading northwest in a slow arc. “At one o’clock.”
    Lia clicked on the microphone, wondering why he just called her Cinderella, but replacing the question quickly in her mind with whale factoids.
    “If you’ll all look at about the one o’clock point from the boat, you’ll see we’ve come across four whales. . . .” she announced.
    Evan gave a swift nod. “Grays.”
    “. . . They’re all