I Was The One Who Stayed

Every woman who boards this yacht leaves it lighter. This is the one who stayed.

Judy Harlowe has been chief stewardess aboard The Rebound for eleven years, which means she has spent eleven years making eight strangers a week feel like nothing on earth has ever gone wrong. She is very good at it. She is good at it the way other people are good at breathing.

She is also good at absorbing things. Ask anyone. Ask the first officer she's been standing eighteen inches away from for four years, both of them making jokes about seabirds instead of saying anything true.

Then Victor Calloway comes up the passerelle. He is charming. He learns everyone's name. He tips well and picks up dropped spoons and makes the guests laugh — and when he finds Judy alone in a pantry, everything he says is something she could never repeat to another human being without sounding like a woman who imagined it.

Nothing he does is reportable. That's the design. And when the management company decides the tidiest way to resolve the "friction" is to quietly move Judy off the boat, she says yes — because she is the cheapest available way to make a problem disappear, and she always has been.

But there are eighteen people on this vessel who eat dinner together every single night. There are three other women, on three other boats, who have been waiting five years for somebody to ask. And there is one sunny, useless, no-dramas Australian who has finally stopped being funny about it.

Judy Harlowe has spent her whole life being the one who leaves so nobody has to be inconvenienced.

Not this time.

A found-family crew romance with the reckoning the series is named for. Open door. Book 4 of Yachting for Revenge — and yes, you can start here.