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She has spent fifteen years learning how to need no one.

Nora Sterling is the Cruise Director of the Vesta. She runs a department of a hundred, remembers nine hundred guests by name, and can talk a shipful of frightened people through a mid-ocean helicopter evacuation without once raising her voice.

She has no address. She has never slept on a mattress that was not somebody else's first. She has spent her entire adult life at sea and she has been perfectly, deliberately fine.

Then the ship takes on a new Music Director.

Erland Isbister is Orcadian, unhurried, and quietly immovable. He does not perform, he does not push, and he notices everything. He also reports directly to her, which puts him squarely on the wrong side of the company handbook and squarely in her path ten hours a day, months at a stretch.

On a ship, there is nowhere to put a thing like this.

Nora has spent her whole life being the person everybody relies on and nobody worries about. She has never once, in thirty-three years, said out loud that she wanted something.

She is about to find out what it costs her not to.

An Orkney Hearth is a slow-burn, closed-door cruise ship romance set aboard a luxury liner and on the windswept islands of northern Scotland. Forbidden workplace romance, forced proximity, found family, and an unhurried hero who says almost nothing and means all of it. No explicit content. Guaranteed happily ever after.

Book One of Love and Other Ports, for readers of Jenny Colgan and Susanna Kearsley.

Written by Sara Romera, a former Cruise Director who spent fifteen years at sea.