Wanderfoot (the Dream Ship)

Garrett Westenra has spent his life mastering the scalpel but cannot cut himself free from grief. An Irish surgeon adrift after his mother's death, he boards the Bavaric for a transatlantic crossing that feels less like travel than escape. Then he meets Valentine Valdana, a journalist with a turbulent past and a reckless disregard for the conventions that have kept Garrett locked in his loneliness. She challenges everything: his ideals, his solitude, the careful distance he has maintained from the world. What begins as chance proximity on a ship becomes something stranger and more unsettling. Garrett has dreamed of a woman he has never met, and Valentine bears an uncanny resemblance to the phantom of his longing. As the ocean churns beneath them and their pasts surface like debris from a wreck, both must decide whether to surrender to what draws them together or sink beneath the weight of what they've survived. A romance written in the key of yearning, where love arrives not as comfort but as confrontation.