Page 16 of His Secret Gift

“I think that’s stupid, too.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, sir.”

“Hm.” I pick at a callous on my hand. “What’s she like anyway?”

“Who? Kayla?”

“Yeah, the new steward.” I take my time to enunciate the last word.

He straightens up and rubs his hands on his pants. “She’s really nice. Pretty quiet.”

Good. Quiet is good.

“For the most part, she seems like a smart but also sheltered girl from a small town in the Midwest.”

“Is that so?” Before I met and fell in love with Harper, who was a retired runway model born and raised in New York City, I thought that was exactly the type of girl I wanted to end up with.

Maybe it still is,I wonder.

“Yeah. I think she said she was from Indiana.”

“I see.” I’ve only ever been to Indianapolis.

Before we can say anything else, my phone rings in my pocket.

“Sorry, I have to take this.”

“No need to apologize.” That’s what I like about him, he’s chill and seems to always go with the flow. Oh, and he’s also incredibly hard working.

I walk to the other side of the boat and answer.

“Jack? It’s Dimitrios.” He is the agent of the Greek author I’m trying to get to sign with my company.

“Hey Dimitrios. How’s it going?”

“Good, good. Are you still planning to be here in a about a month?”

“Yep. We’re about to sail off any minute.”

“Ah, great.”

Like with most people, I made up a lie about why I couldn’t just fly over. When it came to him, I went with my go-to and said I’d recently had an ear infection that could cause it to be very painful for me when descending with the altitude changes andpressure. The truth was, that I was deathly afraid of flying. But admitting that out loud made me seem weak, and that’s one of the last adjectives I want to be associated with my name.

“How’s Yannis doing?” I’ve been working on him for months now, but he keeps insisting he wants to publish his brilliant thrillers with the same smaller publishing house that he worked with in the past.

“He’s okay. He’s in the middle of writing the third book in the‘Til the War Startsseries.”

“Right.” I haven’t had time to read the first two, but Bryant did, and he’s a huge reader. So, I trusted him when he told me how good they were. “Well, I don’t plan on taking up too much of his time once we get to Karpathos.”

“I know. But I do hope you can get through to him.”

I run my fingers through my short, dark hair. “Me, too.” His books haven’t been getting the attention they deserve, and I know he’s only making a small fraction of the money he could be make once on my team. That means, his agent gets more money, too.

“I showed him the good things you did for Marco Pisenti.”

He’s another thriller writer who I signed when he had less than a thousand copies of his book sold. However, once I got my hands on him, he quickly passed fifty thousand, then one hundred thousand, and so on and so forth. He’s a millionaire today. I truly believe that if it wasn’t for me, he’d still be a starving artist writing his days away in an Italian café.

“And?”

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