Long Odds is a contemporary romance novel following two people who grew up carrying the weight of their family names.

Valerie Sinclair is twenty-four, the daughter of one of New York's most powerful investment families, and she has spent her whole life watching people see the Sinclair name before they see her. She boards a fourteen-day Caribbean cruise as one last exhale before starting her first real job, the first thing she has ever earned entirely on her own, at Hayes Global Hospitality Group.

Ethan Hayes is twenty-six, the son and future heir of Hayes Global, dragged onto his own family's cruise ship by his best friend Miles. He has spent his adult life working harder than anyone expected him to, trying to prove that his achievements belong to him and not to his last name.

They meet on the first night and something clicks that neither of them planned for. Fourteen days is a long time to spend with someone in the middle of the ocean with nowhere else to be. By the time New York comes back into view, Valerie knows exactly how she feels.

Then she overhears a corridor conversation and builds the wrong conclusion out of half the truth, and everything falls apart without Ethan knowing why.

The rest of the book is about what happens when two people who are terrible at saying the true thing at the right time finally run out of reasons not to.

At its heart, it is a story about wanting to be seen as a person before you are seen as a name, and about what it looks like when you finally find someone who manages both at once.

• Paperback: 398 pages
• Publisher: White Falcon Publishing; 1 edition (August 2026)
• Author: Ahana Mehta
• ISBN-13: 9789376312986
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 8 inch

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