Love Lost and Found Read Free

providing snarky commentary about all and sundry on
     board. Damn Michaela for falling in love with investment billionaire Dylan Johns,
     leaving to take on the world at the head office, and having beautiful green-eyed babies.
    Felicity sighed again. The new cruise director was no eye candy, and he was not a fan of her witty repartee.
    Fool.
    Her eyes flicked back to the water, and the visual of Port Vila Harbor settled her.
     At least the ocean was still her friend. The only friend she felt any lasting affinity
     with now. The sigh deepened. When she woke from a rock climbing accident with her
     boss almost five months ago, it was a white, anonymous world she surfaced into. They’d
     been out of town, which explained the emptiness to start with, but when she got back
     home, no one was familiar, not at work, in her apartment building, or in her life.
     Worse, the five years she lost threw her back to just after her ex Brendon cheated
     on her, told all their friends, and laughed about it in her face. Bastard.
    Searching for clues about her five-year-older self, she’d found plenty of meetings
     in her diary, especially with her boss. But when the IT department gave her access
     to her e-mail and forgotten passwords, there’d been nothing untoward in her communication
     with the head of Biogena, Richard McCarthy, so any thoughts of a romance between them
     were quashed. Seems she’d simply been a complete workaholic.
    The captain’s voice droned on. “Impeccable attention to detail, make everyone feel
     welcome…” She sighed and the cruise director frowned at her again. He was never going
     to win the welcome prize on board the Pacific Empress , that was for sure. Though welcome was not how she’d felt when she dragged her sore, sorry ass back to the Biogena head office
     in San Francisco either. There’d been a few phone calls to check in on her, but those
     were stiff, the platitudes carefully constructed rather than easy, heartfelt well-wishes.
     Seems she’d been a loner as well as a workaholic. The two certainly went together.
    She’d started a journal on the advice of her counselor, and, looking back at it every
     so often in her stateroom on board, couldn’t believe how lonely and lost she’d been.
     It had been all she could do not to cry herself to sleep every night. “Give yourself
     time,” the hospital counselor had told her, but it felt wrong to waste time waiting
     for…something. Between feeling lost and lonely at work and heartbroken about a breakup
     that had happened five years ago, there didn’t seem to be much worth sticking around
     for in San Francisco.
    Maybe her five-years-older self would have pushed the hospital staff more vigorously
     to let her sneak into the ICU, see her comatose climbing companion, and check if she
     felt anything for him. Maybe she would have at least stayed to wait for him to wake
     and explain why he’d decided rock climbing upstate was a good two-person team-building
     exercise. Would have tried harder to slot back into a life where everyone told her
     she’d been part of a dedicated and geektastic biotech team. But she wasn’t her five-years-older
     self. Post-accident Felicity felt as if she had been recently lied to, cheated on,
     and taken from, and all she wanted to do was to lick her wounds, get happy, and work
     on getting her memory back. Preferably as far away from her lonely-ass old life as
     possible.
    The cruise ship ad jumped out of the paper one morning and everything else fell into
     place. She had some money saved, so she could afford to keep her apartment in case
     she discovered her five-years-older self wasn’t such a sourpuss and her old life was
     worth throwing herself back into. And the one bunch of memories she did have left was of being homeschooled on a boat. Being in the middle of the wide blue
     ocean was kinda close to that, and it was sure as hell as far from San Fran as she
     could think of. Taking a job with a little more