No One Asked for Tenderness (Korali Nights #2)
Sage Hayes
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
When the Korali's refrigeration fails, the summer route dies with it. Rania Vellis — the boat's chief mechanic, sober nine years, quietly holding more than any one woman should — has called in the only specialist she trusts. That specialist is Salma Haddad, and she arrives in good linen and steel-toe boots with a manner that could cool a room without any mechanical assistance whatsoever.
Salma has spent a decade taking seasonal contracts across the Mediterranean, always with the next booking already confirmed before she finishes the current one. Motion is the only version of self-sufficiency she trusts. She sends money home to Lyon, insists she is fine, and is funny about it in the dry way of women who learned to get there first.
In the close heat of the dry dock, they bicker about compressors, oil pressure, and method — and both women know, without naming it, that the bickering is the only contact they are allowing themselves. Their attraction is the problem they can't diagnose and the one fault neither will enter in the log.
But Rania is running on no sleep, managing her father's care between shifts, and refusing respite help from anyone. And Salma sees it before anyone else does — and cannot figure out how to offer what she wants to offer without making it feel like charity.
No One Asked for Tenderness is a found family sapphic romance about two women who built sustainable lives on the premise that loneliness is safer than dependency. They are both wrong. In the same way. At the same time.
What happens when the person who finally sees you is the one person you cannot afford to need?
