“Gil…I’ll force you into this cart if I have to. I’m not going to be the man who forces an injured woman to walk when I have the ability to help her.”
“Shoals, Lochlan. Stop calling me that. I told you to forget that about me.”
“What will happen if I don’t?”
Fear squeezed my chest tight. I didn’t know if he was acting that way out of some sense of chivalry or because he felt like a protective big brother or—my brain jammed—if he was interested in me as a woman. If I discovered his reasoning, I didn’t know what I would do with the information, so I loweredmy voice and I spoke in as menacing a tone as I could manage. “Then I’ll make you regret remembering.”
Far from looking frightened, Lochlan chuckled. “If you’re trying to intimidate me, you’ll have to work a lot harder than that. I have Roderick for a father, remember? But if you get into the cart, I won’t mention that you’re a woman for the rest of the walk.” Lochlan jiggled the cart’s handles so the frame rattled slightly. “Otherwise I’ll talk of nothing else.”
“Fine!” I carefully climbed into the cart. “But only so you stop talking about it.”
“Excellent,” he said. Once I was situated, we started off again.
True to his word, he didn’t say a word and continued on, whistling occasionally as he pulled the cart along the path. In the cart, I dug through the baskets loaded with knitted goods, hunting for the alpaca wool. When I got it, I searched through each skein until my fingers found a small scrap of parchment coiled around a bit of yarn.
I unraveled it, careful to keep it out of view in case Lochlan looked back, then turned it over, front and back.
It was completely blank.
With a quick glance at Lochlan’s back, I held it up to the light, but there was no watermark, nothing to indicate a message was on there. I hastily rerolled it around the yarn and repacked it, then looked through the rest of the skeins. There were a few more blank scraps of paper rolled around the yarn, and nothing else.
There had to be some trick I was missing. Lochlan was passing information to people, and it was surely about the pixie dust or the pixie blood. They had buyers lined up—he and Roderick and Peter talked of nothing else. Would I be able to get the information out of Lochlan?
“Lochlan?”
He turned to look over his shoulder. “What?”
“What information are you passing through the alpaca wool?”
He looked ahead again. “Now why would I tell you that when you won’t even tell me your name?”
I chewed on my tongue. “What if we exchange information? I’ll tell you something you want to know in exchange for something I want to know.”
Lochlan turned around so his back pressed against the pull handle, walking backward so he could face me. “Does that mean you’ll tell me your name?”
“It’s Marie.”
“You’re lying,” he said with a grin. “Try again.”
“Okay, you got me. My name’s really Bianca.”
“Another lie.” He shook his head. “I’m not telling you anything unless you give me real information. One more chance.”
I rolled my eyes. “I suppose you wouldn’t believe Jillian either.”
Lochlan paused so the cart rumbled to a stop. “Now that one is true. Is that why you picked Gil as a cover name? Because it sounds similar to Jillian?”
I scoffed. “Guess you aren’t infallible after all. Jillian was a lie, too.”
Lochlan narrowed his eyes. “Nope, that name was true and now you’re trying to cover it up. You really don’t like people knowing anything about you, do you?”
“No, I don’t. But since you already know something about me, you owe me information. The alpaca wool—explain.”
Lochlan shrugged. “I pass information about products to buyers. I’m sure you’ve already surmised as much.”
“How, exactly?”
“Ah-ah-ah,” Lochlan said, turning forward again so he could pull the cart over a particularly stubborn root. “We traded yourname for what the alpaca wool is code for. You have to give me more information if you want the same from me. Tell me how old you actually are.”
