Love Overboard
By Andrea K. Stein & Sawyer Stone
Genre: Steamy Contemporary Romance
Release Date: May 2, 2017
Series Synopsis
In the rarefied
world of superyachting, the rich and powerful come together with the young and
playful for steamy nights at sea. Celebrities and massage therapists,
modern-day rogues and sexy captains, all find each other in a stew of romance
and laughter. Whether in the Caribbean sipping mojitos, in the Azores cooking
by volcano, or wandering the beaches of the Seychelles, you can fall in love
slowly, you can fall in love hard, or you can fall in love overboard.
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Captain Lindsay Fisher has
committed the unthinkable in the tight little world of superyachting. She's
lost not one but two ships under her command. She takes chances, she’s a little
too abrasive, and, oh yeah, she’s taken swearing like a sailor to a whole new
level. Celebrity Chef Alton Maura earned the acclaimed “Kitchen God” title and
basked in the international limelight for years until his affairs with his
kitchen staff landed him twice in a poisonous stew. When Lindsay and Alton are
thrown together on an uneasy cruise through the Grenadines, sparks fly. She
doesn’t like his shoes or his attitude. He can’t believe a woman who looks that
good in a captain’s uniform can be such a hard ass. This is their last chance
to prove themselves, but the worst thing you can do when trying to save your
career is to fall in love…WAY TOO DEEP.
Excerpt
CHAPTER
ONE
48°37’17”N, 20°12’20”W
Aboard the Boadicea
One Day Southwest of Falmouth
Captain Lindsay Fisher jolted
awake to thundering pain centered over a golfball-sized knot on the right side
of her forehead. Hot, sticky blood trickled from a gash on her scalp.
The cabin lights were out, but in
the gloom she could hear the roar of seawater cascading along the floor of her
starboard aft cabin. She’d fallen into her bunk a few hours before encased in
foul weather gear -- and a life jacket.
The ship was in a severe list.
Dazed and still barefooted, she used handholds to make her way to the main
saloon. The dim glow from the overhead deck bevels illuminated water pouring
through the galley from the forward cabin. Shit. The custom glass top over the
owner’s cabin had shattered.
The sixty-four-foot
Hallberg-Rassy must have done a full roll. Lindsay had been asleep on the floor
of her cabin and had probably smacked her head sometime during the spin.
They were sinking. Fast. And her
first mate, her uncle Tommy, had been on watch at the helm.
She ignored the stuttering of her
heart and snatched the ditch bag carabineer, clipped to the galley counter
rail. She nearly collided with her second crewman in a race to the top deck.
“Jim, deploy the life raft. Now.”
she shouted, shoving the bag at him.
“Got it,” he yelled, and pounded
up the companionway ahead of her.
She hauled herself up, two steps
at a time, and called out, “Tommy.” She didn’t wait for an answer but hit the
top deck running.
The wreckage above sickened her.
Anything not tied down was gone. The rigging still stood, but the sails were
soaked, twisted and ripped. The top quarter of the mast had broken off.
A late, fierce storm, at least
Force 11, was kicking up monster size waves, and sixty-knot winds whipped the
surface water into a roiling mist. Airborne spray and foam narrowed visibility
to nearly zero.
The earlier weather faxes she’d
checked had shown the storm passing west of them. Mother Ocean must have
changed her mind.
Tommy. I have to get to him.
Lindsay exhaled hard at the sight
of the lifeboat valise still lashed to the safety rail. Her third crewman Jim
worked at the straps to free the big rubber inflatable, the only thing between
them and the frigid North Atlantic waters.
When the huge raft was prepped,
he would splash the lifeboat into the savage waves battering the broken yacht.
He’d already attached the raft’s painter to the ship to keep it from blowing
overboard. When the ship sank, the emergency tether would break free.
The steep tilt of the deck meant
she had only minutes to call for help and find her first mate before the yacht
plummeted to the bottom of the sea.
She punched the DSC button on the
waterproof radio strapped on her chest to broadcast their GPS coordinates. Then
she pushed transmit and spoke calmly.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is
Captain Lindsay Fisher on the Boadicea, Boadicea, Boadicea. We’re a day
southwest of Falmouth at 48°37’17”N, 20°12’20”W, and sinking. The ship has
rolled with three passengers aboard. One crew member possibly overboard. We are
deploying the lifeboat and EPIRB beacon.”
She waited a minute and repeated
the plea while crossing to the wheel where Tommy should be.
They were still less than two
hundred miles out of the English Channel. If she didn’t get a response soon
from the Brits, she hoped another nearby ship listening to Channel 16 would
relay her call for help.
When she reached the stern behind
the wheel, the only sign of Tommy was a taut portion of his six-foot safety
tether. Lindsay squinted through the spray peppering her face like needles. The
strap wound down the backside of the wallowing yacht and disappeared into the
black waves.
There was still tension on the
line. She heaved up on the tether, but the weight on the other end wouldn’t
budge. She didn’t dare divert Jim from getting the life raft ready.
Lindsay heaved again on the
strap, this time using her whole body weight but lost her grip when her bare
feet slipped on the wave-soaked deck. No dice.
She stood for a moment, scanned
the waves around the ship, and then plunged into the cold seawater. The
towering waves pounded her senseless like a mass of ice mallets pelting her
back. Breathe. Focus.
The roll had knocked out their
running lights, and the water below the surface was as black as an oil slick.
She clutched her lifeline, still clipped to the ship’s jack line, with one hand
while groping along the hull beneath the waves searching for Tommy. She swept a
180-degree arc before realizing his tether was stuck on a piece of the swim
ladder twisted during the yacht’s violent revolution. Dammit.
The tension on the end of the
line wasn’t Tommy.
She unclipped her safety line and
left her life jacket on the ladder to begin a frantic free swim along the keel
beneath the hull. The creaks and whines of the straining ship shrieked in her
ears. Not much time left.
Lindsay resurfaced, gasped in a
few breaths, and dived again to the bottom of the keel. Huge thrashing waves
exacerbated the wallowing motion of the ship, and the black water threatened to
suck her into the claustrophobic darkness.
Her hands and feet were numb, and
she wanted nothing more than to close her eyes and let the frigid water take
her.
No. She wouldn’t give in to the
cold, but she was out of options. One more dive was all her body had left.
She was all in, no backup plan.
In a flash, something brushed against her hand. A fish? Not bloody likely this
close to the surface in a storm.
She made a wild grab and grasped
a sleeve of her uncle’s foul weather gear. His life vest must have hooked onto
a protruding piece of a sensor on the keel during the roll.
She pulled with her last surge of
strength, and his body broke free. Kicking them both to the surface, she hung
on to his life vest and gave silent thanks for her barefoot state. Sea boots
would have filled and pulled her down.
The doomed yacht’s loud groans
and creaks filled the air when she came up, gulping breaths. They were out of
time.
But there, the big yellow raft
bobbed in the water, surrounded by the wake of the sinking ship.
Jim’s face in the low light was
grim, the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen. He’d found them with the
battery-operated spotlight. The EPIRB’s beacon flashed behind him as he
thrashed through the waves. He grasped Tommy by his jacket and pulled him aboard,
then extended a hand to Lindsay.
Once inside the small canopied
raft, she rolled her uncle to his back and leaned over his chest, listening for
breathing. The screaming winds and rain pelting the raft’s rubber top made
hearing next to impossible.
Her frozen fingers were useless.
She couldn’t use them to detect a pulse, so instead she looked for a rise in
his chest. Nothing. She started compressions and after only two or three, Tommy
jerked to life and slapped her hands away.
“You tryin’ to kill me or what?”
He took the bucket Jim shoved toward him, and in a matter of seconds, puked up
seawater. “Son of a--.”
“He’s back,” Lindsay said, her
voice ragged with relief and exhaustion. Painful needles of feeling returned to
her fingers and toes. She collapsed onto the inflated rubber floor and stared
at the peaked roof.
Her career was over.
CeCe Ahlstrom,
massage therapist to the rich and famous, is done with men. Her last rich
boyfriend tried to kill her on an ill-fated cruise through the Grenadines. Now
she’s determined to get on with her life but can’t find the funds to get to her
next spa gig in Portugal. Then along comes notorious womanizer Captain Rene
Baudouin. He’s hell on the hearts of women, he can handle any storm at sea, yet
he might have met his match in a leaky old boat. He needs a first mate crazy
enough to help crew the wreck known as the Tourbillon across the Atlantic.
Destiny draws CeCe and Rene together, but things are not what they seem. Rene
struggles with a family secret that could destroy his future and CeCe will have
to face a truth not even she knows yet. Out on the open sea, Rene and CeCe soon
find themselves…UP TOO CLOSE.
Rania Elsaeid is
the brilliant engineer aboard the 115-foot yacht, the Bonnie Blue. She’s also a
deadly, well-trained security guard. She keeps her cool when everything around
her heats up. Morris “Moj” Johnston, internationally famous music producer, is
on a much-needed vacation cruise through the islands of the Indian Ocean. He’s
not looking for love but trying to heal a broken heart. When Moj meets Rania,
everything changes. Suddenly they find themselves on the run from pirates, lost
on a deserted island, and dangerously close to going…OUT TOO FAR.
Andrea
K. Stein
Andrea K.
Stein’s daddy was a trucker, her momma was an artist, and she's a scribbler.
The stories just spilled out—the pony escaped, the window magically shattered.
Not her fault. Twenty years as a journalist couldn't stifle the yarns. Yacht
delivery up and down the Caribbean only increased the flow. Now those tales
celebrate romance on the high seas. As a sailing captain and instructor since
1996, she's logged nearly 30,000 miles to destinations around the world. She
now lives in the Rocky Mountains and is the author of four historical sailing
romances available on Amazon.com.
Sawyer Stone
Sawyer Stone
grew up dreaming of far-off cities and far-flung continents even though those
exotic locations seemed way out of reach. But the dreams of travel and love
never left. It wasn’t long before Sawyer walked the alleys of Istanbul, watched
the sunsets from the island of Santorini, trekked the Himalayas, and dove
through shipwrecks in the Andaman Sea. Now, while still traveling, Sawyer
writes all kinds of books under all kinds of names. The world needs more
stories about quirky characters falling in love.
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