Senior flight attendant Sloane Reyes had one rule about hookups on the job.

Then she flew to Reykjavík, broke a different rule with an Icelandic textile artist at one in the morning, and boarded the return leg to Boston with the captain's card in her breast pocket and the captain himself in the left seat for another eight hours.

Nobody tells you what to do with the return leg.

Nobody tells you that Mr. Westbrook from Boston Back Bay — who watched her work the outbound and did not touch the call button once — is going to be a passenger again with a folded piece of paper in his hand and a job pitch that is actually a job pitch. That the woman in row 4A is going to be a retired oncologist who has decided, twenty-two years into hearing other people's real stories, to be told one more. That the weather over Boston is going to close, hard, and put the whole crew down in a Halifax airport hotel for a night that is not on any schedule.

And that Captain Marek Reeves is going to knock on her hotel room door at seven-eleven p.m. local, and say the sentence Sloane has been waiting one hundred and fifty flights for someone to finally say to her.

The captain was for later.

Later is tonight.

Crosswind is Book 2 of the Cabin Crew series — the return flight, the weather divert, the hotel-room payoff of the slow burn Book 1 promised. Spicy contemporary romance (18+). Bi FMC; the F/F thread continues on-page. Publishes October 13, 2026. Free ARC in exchange for an honest review on launch day. Read Book 1 first: Cabin Pressure.