The Second Chance in the Mediterranean (EBOOK)

A chef looking for her perfect job and a deckhand dreaming of being a captain. Marcella knows second chances shouldn’t be wasted.

My job requirements:

1) Cook amazing food

2) See the world

3) Get paid

4) Avoid sleeping with the hot deckhand—again

When I arrived in Montenegro to start my new position as the head chef aboard the superyacht Themis, I thought I was finally achieving my dream—until I realized I’d be working with Seb, the man who’d cost me my job six months previously.

He thinks I ran away, and I know better than to get involved again. But the tension is building, and the crew has to stick together to get the job done. The more I see Seb, the more the memories make my heart pound. . . .

Five airports. That was how many I’d passed through in the last forty-eight hours, and the thought of trying to find a near-stranger in a busy airport was almost enough to make me sit down and cry.
I searched through the crowds in the terminal, looking for a face that should be vaguely familiar. The airport of Tivat, Montenegro, was small but modern, and I loved it simply because it was my final destination. I had already picked up my bags and was trying to navigate the crowds with a luggage cart, so that was an improvement. In Belgrade, my fourth airport of this trip, I’d forgotten where I was and had to ask an energetic business traveler what city I was in.
My face had been pressed to the window of the airplane during our landing. Our plane had come in low over the Bay of Kotor, a huge body of water connected to the Adriatic Sea. The runway came right up to the edge of the bay, the surrounding land flat compared to the rugged mountains inland.
A sign caught my eye: “Marcella Baresi.” The man holding it was in his late forties, with salt-and-pepper hair, very handsome—my new boss.
Dominic Morris’s eyes connected with mine, and he gave me a friendly smile.
“Marcella,” he said, letting the sign fall with one hand and offering me the other. “It’s great to see you again.” Dom was a Kiwi from Auckland, a sailing mecca, and had a breadth of experience that made mine insignificant. I wasn’t much of a sailor, but Dom’s credentials included qualifying for the Olympics, sailing in the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, and participating in the America’s Cup.
We met last year when I had been working as a chef on the superyacht Odyssey in Antigua. The owners of Odyssey had friends—Natasha and Justin Boyd—who were superyacht shopping, and they had already hired Dom as the captain to help in their search.
Dom, Natasha, and Justin had stayed only one night, but we’d made a huge event of it and I had impressed Natasha and Justin with my chef’s degustation. Months later, when I looked for a position, they were in need of a new chef, and thanks to my superyacht crew connections, I was recommended for the job.
I shook his hand. “Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t expect you to pick me up yourself.”
“Yeah, no worries. I like meeting new crew quickly and getting them settled in. Plus, I work the rest of the staff to the bone; at least I get to slog off and enjoy the nice drive.” He winked.
Dom grabbed the handle of one of my bags and tossed it over his shoulder. “Right this way.” I followed him out the airport doors, where the mid-June heat of the Mediterranean summer shocked me. He pointed us toward the parking lot. We loaded my things into the back of his car and pulled out, heading down to the waterfront.
“You flew in from . . .Tahiti, is that right?”
“Yes, I did.” I closed my eyes and leaned back against the headrest. Though the scenery was beautiful, I was exhausted.
“Sweet as. That must have been beautiful. How many flights was that?”
I smiled at Dom’s Kiwi-ism. I looked at the ceiling of the car and ticked off my fingers. “Tahiti to Vancouver to Paris to Belgrade to here. Four flights.”
He gave a low whistle. “And you were crew on a private yacht?”
“Right. I was unpaid but still doing most of the cooking. Obviously, it’s nothing like I did on Odyssey or will do here, but I also didn’t work nearly as hard.”
“You had time to get out and see the islands, hey? That part of the world is gorgeous.”
“It is.” I closed my eyes again, remembering the clear waters and idyllic beaches of French Polynesia.
“Are you sad to leave the boat? You were with them for a while.”
“Sad, yes. It was a good crew and a lot of fun people; the adventure was amazing. But”—I shook my head—“my bank account is unhappy.”
“Well, it’s not over. You have a new kind of adventure now.”
* * *
We pulled up to Porto Montenegro, a huge modern marina in Tivat. There were no skyscrapers here, just low-lying Mediterranean-style buildings with terra-cotta roofs. The marina was more modern, with a massive row of superyachts tied up. Each boat was backed up to the dock, and gangways were rolled out to allow for boarding onto the stern. Themis was different, though. The largest yacht in the marina, she was tied up on her side, a passerelle in the middle of her port beam. Her shiny navy-blue hull reflected the light and glimmered.
“Hey! Toby! Can you come help us?” Dom called.
The yacht was huge—I knew the specs from the job listing and I had done a bit of searching online for photos and videos, but nothing I had seen had done the boat justice. At nearly ninety meters, she was one of the largest sailing yachts in the world, probably the largest I would ever work on. Despite her length, she had only three decks, so she wasn’t that tall, but her masts towered over everything else in the marina.
And she was a marvel to look at. Having spent the last few months on a sailboat, I was completely unprepared for how advanced and spaceship-like Themis looked. The way she was set up to sail was different from a normal sailboat, and while back on Eik I had been able to adjust the lines and pull out the sails myself, I had no clue where to even start with any of that on Themis. Thank God it wasn’t in my job description.
There were plenty of people who were much better sailors than I. The yacht was staffed with more yachties than I’d ever worked with before too. Including myself, there were nineteen crew members aboard, and I could already see a few of them hard at work on deck.
At Dom’s call, a young guy polishing stainless steel looked up and waved. He left his job and walked along the rail and down the ramp, meeting us at the base of the gangway and taking my bags from me.
“You must be Marcella, our new chef. Nice to meet you.” Like the rest of the crew on the deck, he wore a standard casual yachtie uniform, knee-length khaki shorts, and a polo with Themis’s logo on the breast—the scales of justice over Grecian block letters.
“Hi, Toby.”
I stopped at the pile of shoes—mostly flip-flops and boat shoes—on the dock, toed my flats off, and picked them up to carry them on board. On yachts—whether it was the seventeen-meter Eik or the ninety-meter Themis—shoes were not allowed in order to protect the soft teak or fiberglass decks.
Dom nudged his shoes off too and led me up the gangway. My bags were deposited to the side and Dom turned to me with his arms spread wide. “Welcome aboard Themis, one of the largest sailing superyachts in the world, and your new home.”
* * *
Immediately we turned left and Dom led me down the deck. “I’ll take you to your cabin first to get settled in.” He checked his watch. “You might have time to nap, too. I’ll come get you around four, then we’ll do a quick tour of the boat and drop you off in the galley with Roy in time for dinner service.”
“Thank you,” I said gratefully. I would really need that nap.
“This is where most meals are served.” Dom pointed at a large metallic table for twelve on the aft deck as we passed by. “There are service stations on either side of the deck and this is our bar.”
My head swiveled every which way, trying to take everything in. The bar was circular, 360 degrees around. A track cut it in half, and sliding doors were hidden in the walls. The service stations, much like flight attendants had on a plane, were full of stainless-steel cabinetry and coffee machines.
Dom stepped into the stairway next to the service station. He pointed up. “To the bridge deck.” But he took the stairs down. “This leads to our two cabins and the utilities area.”
We passed through a small hallway. “My room, on the starboard side, yours on the port.”
I stepped out of the way so Toby and two more deckhands could step into my cabin and drop my bags on the floor. The room was small enough that I stayed in the hallway to give them space. In between the two was another small hallway and a closed door.
“What’s through there?”
“Utility services like laundry and storage, and then beyond that is access to the below-deck storage. We’ve got a sailing dinghy, SeaBobs, eFoils, etcetera. All the fun things for charter guests. There are hatches on the main deck that open to give access too, but it’s often easier to just pop through here.”
The knob handle turned and the door creaked open, a familiar voice calling out, “Dom?”
“Seb? We’re clear—you can come out.” My heart skipped a beat. No way.
The door swung open and a familiar head popped up, wavy black curls looking unkempt, just as I remembered. His facial hair was a little bit more trimmed down than the last time I saw him, but it was still the same beard that had left my lips and the inside of my thighs red and tender for hours.
Seb smiled when he saw me, polite but a little wary, too. “Hey, Marce.”
I was absolutely frozen. How had I not known that Seb was working aboard Themis too? Dom and I had talked about that dinner he’d had aboard Odyssey during the interview, and he had mentioned trying to steal Henri, the engineer, away, but he had never mentioned that my former crewmate and lover, Sebastian Alvarez, would be working with me.