Sailing Past Straight

A Steamy Sapphic Vacation Romance
by Riley Kendra

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bisexual Awakening, Late Bloomer, Vacation Romance, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Opposites Attract, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, Control/Surrender, Light Bondage, Commitment-Phobe

She wanted a contingency plan. She got the captain.

Megan Hartwell has color-coded packing cubes, a divorce too polite to hurt, and a promotion sitting unopened in her inbox. What she does not have is any intention of spending ten days on a sailboat in the Greek islands. Her sister booked it. The charter company refused to let her cancel. Three times.

Alina Petrou runs her boat alone: skipper, cook, mechanic, and the one who decides. She has a brass compass, twenty years at sea, and one rule she wrote herself and has never broken. Skippers don’t sleep with guests.

Then the woman in white linen ties a perfect bowline on her first try, says “Aye aye, Captain” like an insult, and kisses her in a bougainvillea alley before announcing that she doesn’t, and she isn’t.

One gale, one broken cabin fan, and one very small bunk later, Megan is writing rules in a notebook and Alina is signing them. Yes or no. No hiding. Nobody says fling unless she means it.

But a charter only has ten days in it. Megan plans everything. Alina always leaves first. And day ten is coming, whether or not anyone has asked anyone to stay.

Sailing Past Straight is a high-heat sapphic vacation romance with a late-bloomer bisexual awakening, a captain who finally lets someone else steer, dual first-person POV, and an HEA that outlasts the trip.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A divorced, over-organized heroine finding out what she actually wants at thirty-nine
✅ A Greek sailboat captain with a command voice and a rule against exactly this
✅ Forced proximity: seven women, one 52-foot boat, walls a centimeter thick
✅ “The fan is broken. You’ll have to stay in my cabin.”
✅ Yes-or-no consent that is hotter than it has any right to be
✅ Praise kink, sail ties, and “Please, Captain”
✅ The planner learns to let go; the runner learns to stay
✅ Island-hopping the Cyclades with a found family of fellow guests
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat from Chapter Three, and an HEA guaranteed

Buy Now

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes throughout, including oral, a strap-on, and light consensual restraint with power exchange) and strong language. Also includes an amicable divorce in progress, a storm at sea, and discussion of the past deaths of a parent and a spouse. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Megan

The offer arrived somewhere between the airport and the sea.

I knew the exact moment, because my phone buzzed against my thigh in the back of a taxi doing ninety on a road posted for sixty, and when I looked down, there it was. Richard Shore. Managing Director, Chicago: Formal Offer. Confidential. A paperclip icon. Eighteen years of my working life, flattened into a PDF.

I didn’t open it.

I told myself that was because the driver was steering with his knee while he lit a cigarette, and a woman ought to keep both eyes free for her own death. Then the taxi stopped, I overpaid, and I was standing on a quay in Piraeus at eight in the morning with the message still sitting there in bold, fresh out of excuses.

The heat was already indecent. Boston heat shows up in August like a personal insult and is gone by Labor Day. This was heat with tenure. It rose through the soles of my sandals and pressed down out of a sky so flat and blue it looked like a rendering error, and it smelled of diesel and salt and somebody frying dough.

Zea Marina was a near-perfect circle of water with several hundred million dollars parked in it. Rigging ticked against masts like cutlery. Men hosed down decks. A cat slept on a coil of rope with the confidence of something that owned property.

I had dressed for this. White linen trousers, white linen shirt, tan sandals that cost more than my first car payment, sunglasses the size of a small regret. On the plane I’d looked like a woman in a catalog for people who use summer as a verb. Ten minutes onto the quay, the shirt was pasted to my spine, and my hair, which a man named Anton is paid handsomely to keep at one precise length, had started to get ideas.

My phone buzzed again.

Are you on the boat.

Megan.

I can see that you read that.

My sister. I typed with one thumb and dragged the suitcase with the other hand. At the marina. It’s a thousand degrees. Looking for the pontoon.

Do NOT open your laptop.

I didn’t bring my laptop.

Three dots. Then: You brought the iPad with the keyboard, which is a laptop wearing a hat. This is a divorce gift, not a networking opportunity. Say it back.

Lauren is five years younger than I am, teaches seventh-grade science, and has never once been intimidated by me, a quality I treasure most months of the year. In March, while I was on a client call, she’d booked ten days on a sailboat in the Greek islands under my name. Something called Reset at Sea. Women only, six guests, one skipper. When I phoned to cancel, a very pleasant man at Aegean Wild Sailing informed me that my sister had warned him I would try, and that he was under instructions to say no.

I’d called twice more. He’d sounded happier each time.

It’s a divorce gift, I typed. Not a networking opportunity.

Good. Proud of you. Send a picture of the boat. And Meg? Try to have one bad idea out there. Just one. I’ll never tell.

I put the phone in my pocket, where it sat against my hip like a hot stone.

The facts of my divorce were not interesting, which was most of the problem. Ethan moved out in January. He left eleven boxes in the front hall, and for six months I’d walked around them the way you walk around furniture. Nobody cheated. Nobody threw a plate. He’d sat across the kitchen island from me, the marble we’d spent an entire weekend choosing, and said, I don’t know how to reach you anymore, Meg, and I don’t think you want me to. My first clear feeling, the one I’d confessed to no one, was gratitude that he’d picked a week when my calendar was light.

After that I was fine. I said so to everyone. I said it so often it stopped sounding like English. I worked until the cleaning crew knew my coffee order, and somewhere in there the firm noticed and decided to reward me with Illinois.

I knew what was in the attachment without opening it. A salary with a comma somewhere I’d never had a comma. A relocation package. A glass corner on the fortieth floor above Wacker Drive, with my name on the door in a typeface someone had billed forty hours to select. Richard would have added two warm lines at the top, and one of them would contain the phrase a clean start. Everyone kept offering me a clean start, as though I’d spilled something.

It was everything I had spent my adult life positioning myself to be offered. I stood on a Greek quay with my thumb a quarter inch above it and sweat running down the backs of my knees, and I could not make the thumb come down.

I’m not a superstitious person. I decided it was the glare.

Pontoon C lay on the far side of the basin. The suitcase wheels caught on every seam in the concrete, a steady, humiliating clack that announced me to each boat I passed. A deckhand polishing a rail looked at the suitcase, then at me, with something close to pity. I had read the packing guidance. Soft bags strongly recommended. I’d interpreted recommended the way I interpret most suggestions from people who haven’t met me.

Then the pontoon ran out, and there she was.

Halcyon, said the gold lettering across her stern. Fifty-two feet, according to a booking confirmation I had more or less memorized. White hull, a deck of honey-colored wood, one mast so tall I had to tip my head back to find the top of it, which nearly cost me the sunglasses. She was tied with her back end to the quay and a narrow plank bridging the gap, and she was moving. Barely. A slow rise and settle, like something asleep and breathing.

I had not accounted for the breathing.

A broad man in a company polo stood at the foot of the plank with a clipboard. He found my name, looked at my suitcase, looked at me, and grinned with such unconcealed pleasure that I knew at once whose voice I’d been arguing with since March. He pointed to a wicker basket full of shoes. Then to my feet.

Three hundred and forty dollars of Italian leather went into the basket on top of a pair of drugstore flip-flops. I crossed the plank barefoot with the suitcase clutched in front of me like a riot shield.

“Oh my God, you’re the last one! We’ve been taking bets.”

I was hugged. This is not a thing that happens to me without notice. The woman doing it was small and freckled and smelled of coconut sunscreen, with a peeling nose and a ponytail escaping a baseball cap, and she let go only to hold me at arm’s length and beam.

“Dani. Brisbane. I’m a nurse, I talk a lot, you’ll get used to it. You’re Megan. Boston, right? I had you down as a lawyer or a surgeon.”

“Consultant.”

“What do you consult?”

“Companies. On what they’re doing wrong.”

“So like a nurse, but for money.” She took my elbow. “Come meet everyone, and then I’ll show you your room, because I’ve already snooped the whole boat and yours is… well. You’ll see.”

You’ll see is not a phrase I enjoy.

The cockpit was a horseshoe of blue cushions around a table, shaded by a canvas awning, and it held four women and a pot of coffee. Dani did the introductions at a speed that suggested pediatric triage. Claire, from Dublin: tall, silver-blonde, an architect’s heavy black glasses, a wedding ring she turned with her thumb, and a smile that arrived half a second late, as if it had come a long way. Ruth and Jo Henderson of Toronto, mother and daughter, the same sharp chin thirty years apart. Ruth held her mug in both hands and watched the plank as though someone might take it away.

And Priya.

Priya Shah sat in the corner with her bare feet up on the cushion and a notebook closed on her knee, wearing a man’s striped shirt and an expression of pleasant, total attention. Late thirties. Cropped black hair, a gold stud in her nose, a London accent with the edges sanded off by expensive schools.

“Hartwell,” she said, shaking my hand. “You’re the one who tried to cancel.”

“I inquired about the refund policy.”

“Three times, Yannis says. He’s dining out on it.” Her gaze moved over me, the linen, the suitcase, the grip I had on the suitcase, and I had the distinct sensation of being read like a menu by someone who already knew what she was ordering. “I write about travel. Food, mostly. I’m told I’m here to be impressed.”

“Are you?”

“I’ve been aboard forty minutes. Ask me in ten days.” She tilted her head. “You’ve never been on a sailboat.”

“I rowed in college.”

“So that’s a no.”

“It’s a boat-adjacent yes.”

That got a short, surprised laugh out of her, and I felt the small click I always feel when a room recalibrates around me. Fine. I could do this. Strangers were only clients who hadn’t signed yet.

Then Dani took me downstairs.

The stairs were closer to a ladder. Below, the boat was all varnished wood and brass and the smell of coffee and warm rope, a good deal prettier than I’d braced for: a long table, a kitchen the width of a hallway, doors leading off in directions I couldn’t yet map. It was also ten degrees hotter than the deck.

“Me and Claire are sharing back there, the Hendersons are opposite, Priya’s got that one. Skipper’s is the little door by the steps. I didn’t snoop that one, I do have some boundaries.” Dani kept walking toward the pointed end. “And this is you.”

She opened a door. It stopped halfway, against a bed.

I looked for a long moment.

There were two bunks, one above the other, each the width of an ironing board. Between the bunks and the opposite wall ran a strip of floor on which a person could stand, provided she had no ambition to turn around. The ceiling sloped. There was a single hatch overhead roughly the size of a hardcover novel, and clipped to the wall, one small fan, which Dani flicked on to demonstrate. It made a noise like a wasp in a jar. The blades did not move.

“So that’s cooked,” she said.

“My sister booked a private cabin.”

“It’s dead private. You could die in here and nobody’d know for days.”

I took out my phone and opened the confirmation. Single Occupancy Cabin, Comfort Category. I held it up beside the room, as though the room might be shamed.

“I’d chuck your bag on the top one and sleep in the bottom,” Dani offered. “Or the other way round, if you like being close to the ceiling. Bit coffin-y either way. Hang on. Are those packing cubes?”

I had unzipped the suitcase on the lower bunk, there being no floor to open it on. Six cubes. Navy for swim, gray for day, white for evening, black for underthings, a red one that was a complete pharmacy, and a green one for cables.

“They’re color-coded,” Dani breathed. “You absolute psychopath. I love you.”

She left me to it. I stood in my filing drawer with sweat sliding between my breasts and composed. To whom it may concern: I am writing regarding a material discrepancy between the accommodation as described and as provided. It was a strong opening. I had three paragraphs and a proposed remedy before the floor moved under my feet, a soft sideways lean, and I grabbed the bunk rail hard enough to hurt.

Something heavy thumped onto the deck above my head. Then a voice, a woman’s, low and unhurried, said something in Greek that made the man on the quay bark with laughter.

I went up to file my complaint in person.

She was coming down the plank with a wooden crate of tomatoes on one shoulder.

That was the first thing. The second was that she wasn’t holding on to anything. The plank flexed, the boat breathed, and she simply walked: bare feet, navy shorts, a white sleeveless shirt gone soft from washing, one arm crooked up around the crate so the muscle stood out the length of it. A small anchor was inked on that forearm. Black curls, a great many of them, were tied back in a faded red scarf, with one streak of silver escaping at the temple. Something brass on a chain swung out from her collarbone when she bent to set the crate down and settled back against her skin when she straightened.

She was tall. My height, perhaps a shade more. Brown the way people get from working in the sun rather than lying in it. She wiped her palm on her shorts, looked around her cockpit full of women, and smiled. It was a ruinous smile, slightly crooked and in no hurry at all, and I watched five people fall in love with their vacation.

“Kalimera. I’m Alina. This is Halcyon. She’s older than some of you and better behaved than all of you, and for ten days she’s home.” Her English was fluent and faintly salted, the consonants a little soft. “I’m the skipper, the cook, the mechanic, and the one who decides. You are on holiday. So the only thing you must do is what I say, quickly, the first time, when I use this voice.” She dropped it half an octave. “Now. The rest of the time, I’m very nice.”

Dani actually sighed.

Alina’s eyes traveled the group, checking faces against some list in her head, and stopped on me. On the linen. On the phone in my hand with the confirmation still open.

“Megan Hartwell,” she said. “Boston.”

“Yes.”

“You have a question already.”

“Two. The second is about my cabin.”

“The fan. I know. I ordered the part, it didn’t come, it will find us in the islands.” A shrug, wholly without guilt. “And the cabin is small. For this I can’t order a part.” Her glance went to the hatch, toward the place where my luggage was currently occupying an entire bed. “Yannis tells me you brought a suitcase with wheels.”

“The guidance said soft bags were recommended.”

“Yes.”

“Not required.”

“No,” she said gravely. “For required, I would have had to meet you first.”

Nobody had ever dismissed three paragraphs of mine with a shrug and a joke. I found, irritatingly, that I’d lost my place in them.

“What’s the first question?”

“I’d like to see the weather contingency plan.”

“The what?”

“The written plan. Alternate routes, decision thresholds. At what wind speed we change course, where we shelter, who gets notified.” I could hear my own voice, the one I use on boards. “I assume something’s documented.”

She considered me for a moment with real interest, the way you’d consider a bird that had landed on your boat a long way from shore.

“The plan,” she said, “is that I look at the forecast, I look at the sky, I look at the boat, I look at you. And then I decide.”

“That isn’t a plan. That’s a personality.”

Priya made a small, delighted noise into her coffee.

“The Aegean doesn’t care about your spreadsheet, Megan.”

“The Aegean has clearly never managed a quarterly budget.”

It was out before I’d vetted it. For a second there was nothing but water slapping the hull, and then Alina laughed, a real one, head back, throat bare, the brass thing jumping on its chain. The sound went through me in a way I had no category for.

“No,” she agreed. “But she has drowned a few people who did. Sit, please. Safety.”

I sat. I took out the small leather notebook I keep for site visits.

She gave the briefing on her feet, moving, touching each thing as she named it. Life jackets under this seat, fitted like so; she buckled one onto Jo and yanked the strap until Jo squeaked. One hand for yourself and one for the boat, always. The boom is that big pole, and it will take your head off with no hard feelings. Ropes are called lines, and you don’t step on them, sit on them, or wrap them around your hand unless you’re tired of your fingers. Sunscreen, water, hats. If you fall in, don’t swim. Float and shout.

“And the toilet,” she said, “which on a boat is called the head, and which is a delicate, emotional machine. Nothing goes into it that you didn’t eat first. Nothing. If you break it, I will fix it, and I will look at you while I do.”

I wrote, Nothing not eaten first. I underlined it. I was, I noticed, the only person writing anything down.

When I glanced up she was watching me do it, one corner of her mouth tucked in. Then her gaze dropped to my other hand, and I realized I had it locked around the steel rail beside me, tendons up, knuckles the color of my shirt.

“You can let go,” she said, not loudly. “We’re still tied to Greece.”

“I’m aware.”

“Okay.”

I didn’t let go. She didn’t mention it again, which was somehow worse.

Then she took us off the dock, and I stopped writing.

I’d assumed there would be a procedure. A crew. Shouting, at minimum. Instead Alina stepped behind the big wheel, the engine woke somewhere under my feet, and she moved through her boat like a woman crossing her own kitchen in the dark. The man with the clipboard tossed her a rope from the quay; she caught it without looking, coiled it in four turns of her wrist, and dropped it. She went forward along the side at a jog, barefoot on eighteen inches of deck, did something at the front that let a dripping line fall into the water, and came back just as fast, and all the while Halcyon was sliding out of her slot with a yacht the size of a townhouse on either side and a hand’s width to spare.

One palm on the wheel. A look over her shoulder. A fingertip of correction. She was humming.

Something dropped, low in my stomach, and stayed there.

I knew that feeling. I’d had it my whole life around a certain kind of woman doing a certain kind of difficult thing well: a hot, tight, attentive pull, like a fist closing. I had always known exactly which drawer it went in. Admiration. I admired competence. I’d hired for it, promoted it, married it. It was the most natural thing in the world to be unable to look away from the long brown line of a stranger’s arm, the shift of her shoulder blade under worn cotton, the way she planted her feet apart on a moving floor and made it seem like the floor’s idea.

So I filed it, and crossed my legs, and looked at the harbor instead.

The breakwater slid past. Beyond it the water changed all at once, from green to a blue I had previously believed was an invention of the tourism industry. The first real swell lifted the bow and set it down, and my hand clamped harder on the rail all by itself. Behind us Piraeus began to flatten into haze. Ahead there was nothing at all, only a hard bright line where the sea stopped.

My phone had one bar left. The email was still on the lock screen. Formal Offer. One touch. I could have read it, replied Delighted, details Monday, and been the woman I’d been for eighteen years before we lost the signal.

“Megan!” Alina called over the engine. “In ten minutes I put up the sails, and I want you sitting on the high side.”

“How will I know which side that is?”

“It’s the one you’ll want to hold on to.”

I turned to look at her. She was already facing the horizon, smiling at it like the other half of an old argument.

I swiped down, found the little airplane, and pressed it.

The bar vanished. The offer stayed exactly where it was, unopened, and went to sea with me.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

Buy Sailing Past Straight

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

Anchor Watch — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

One year on, at anchor in Kolona, Megan takes the watch, the sail ties, and the captain, in total silence, with a guest asleep on the other side of the wall. Then, on changeover night, with the boat finally empty, she collects on a promise Alina made in a galley: the chart table, and the wheel.

Get the Bonus Chapter →