E l y s e ast night on my family’s couch was sweet and romantic and intense. Seeing a sle ep-rumpled Sinclair this morning was the best way to kick off Christmas Day, even if we were all awakened long before sunrise (thanks, Fleurie). But tonight is just for me and Sinclair. I’m headed to his apartment so he can “give me my Christmas present”. I’m pretty sure he ke eps that kind of present in his boxer briefs. He headed off to Fairwater after a quick breakfast, but after eating lunch and exchanging gifts with his family, he came straight back to Manhattan, organizing me a town car so I could do the same. Which is why I am now shooting up in his building’s express elevator: the one I’m pretty sure leads straight to heaven. The doors open, and he’s waiting for me. He pounces before I’m even out of the elevator, but he doesn’t have to do much work because I jump right on him. With a shriek, I wrap my legs and arms around him as he clamps a big hand under my ass and walks me through to his main living area. The last time I was here, I was oblivious to all these layers of dec eption between us, but now we’re equals. Now everything is peeled away. Figuratively. And literally, if you give us about thirty seconds. His mouth is on mine, his tongue seeking access—which I give, obviously. I’m not a moron. He was so sweet and tentative last night, but we’ve been texting all day and I think he’s truly starting to acc ept that I’m not going anywhere, that this is happening. I hope I’m right, because tonight I want the full Alpha Sinclair experience. He sets me on the kitchen island, and I instantly get to work unbuttoning his shirt while ke eping our lips locked and my legs wrapped around him. This guy’s not going anywhere. He unzips my jeans, banding his arm around me for a moment so he can lift my ass off the work surface and get them down before he tugs off my shoes and socks—and the jeans. He straightens up, standing between my legs and grinning triumphantly as he makes short work of the snaps on my favorite black bodysuit. “You didn’t think those were going to stop me, did you?” he teases, leaning in for a slow, dirty kiss as his knuckles glide down my inner thighs in a way that makes me shiver. I shake my head as best I can. “Not for a minute.” “Fuck,” he groans, lifting me off the island like he can’t decide what to do with me. He puts me down and sinks to the floor, laying himself down right there on the concrete. “Come here, sweetheart. Come and sit on my fucking face.” He slaps the floor. I bark out a surprised laugh as I tug my bodysuit off, conscious of his filthy gaze raking all over me. “Is this my Christmas present?” “No, it’s mine. Bra and panties off, like a good girl. You know what to do.”
Yes, I do. Clearly, neither of us is in the mood to mess around. I lose my black lace bra and thong and straddle him. He still has a couple of shirt buttons fastened, so I get them loose and push his shirt open. Smooth, tan skin greets me. Dark hair. And a something-pack. Six? Eight? Somebody has been crunching their way through their self-imposed exile at Fairwater. “There he is,” I say, lowering myself down on his crotch. Oh, fuck. He’s hard through his jeans, and that denim feels seriously good against my naked pussy. I allow myself a little shimmy, and — “Elyse, get the fuck up here, now or I will actually die,” he orders me, glaring at me like a man whose self-control has been stretched to its absolute limits. I laugh and shimmy up his body on my knees instead, enjoying the way he’s eye-fucking every inch of me. He hooks his hands around the backs of my thighs as I clamber gracelessly over his arms. Our eyes lock. His are glazed with desire, pupils blown out, leaving only a thin band of blue. His lips are swollen already. He gives me a bossy nod, like You know what to do. And then he moves his hands to my waist, grips hard, and shunts me down onto his mouth. The beard. Oh my fucking God, the beard. Instantly, it’s different from before: somewhere between ticklish and scratchy, but in a seriously good way. Texture, that’s what it is. Friction. Oh, holy hell, the friction level is off the charts. That’s not necessarily a good thing, because I haven’t had an orgasm at Sinclair’s hands for, ooh, six or seven weeks. So even his lips and tongue would probably be too much for me. But with this... facial playground, I guess, going on, I won’t last five seconds. “Oh, God,” I moan, unable to take my eyes off the vision below me: Sinclair laying there, eyes blazing, jaw muscles working as, out of sight, his mouth and that beard do absolutely lethal things to my clit. I will take this memory to my deathbed, that’s for sure. He releases his grip on my hips and slides one hand down between my ass cheeks until a couple of fingers find my entrance, while he uses the other to trace a line northward to my breast so he can roll and pinch my nipple. I moan again and grind my pussy down on him like a shameless ho who may just fuck her boyfriend’s mouth so badly that she squishes his skull against pure concrete. But I’m losing my mind here. The sensation of having Sinclair touch and lick and suck on me like this, like he’ll die if he doesn’t get enough of how I feel and taste, is melting my brain. All I care about is coming, as hard and as soon as possible. He’s turning me into an animal, and boy, am I here for it. It’s the beard that finishes me off, the rough rasp of it against my hypersensitized flesh in addition to all the magical, filthy things he’s doing with his tongue. I bear down and I milk the poor guy for all he’s worth, rubbing against him until my soul leaves my body and I explode, bucking over and over as he coaxes every last drop of my orgasm from me. As soon as it’s ebbed away, I’m slithering down his body so I can kiss him. The kiss is feverish, filled at my end with the need to show him what that meant to me and at his end, I assume, with the very urgent need to blow his load. I hope he plans to make love to me all night long, but clearly we both have a lot of edge to take off before we can take our sweet time. I scramble to my knees as I attempt to get his jeans off, but he jumps to his feet. “I need you inside me,” I demand in a breathy voice I barely recognize as my own. “Right there with you, sweetheart.” His laugh is pained as he shoves down his jeans and boxer briefs, jumping around a little to get rid of them.
I tug his button-down off his arms and meet his eyes, even though his naked body and rock-hard dick have been the stuff of my relentless, unwilling fantasies for the past month and a half. Jeez, that thing is so enormous that I’m wondering if he put himself on a jerking-off ban on top of everything else. “I want you bare,” I tell him. God, I want it so bad. I want to be stuffed full of Sinclair’s dick with nothing at all in between us. His expression goes absolutely feral as he turns me by the shoulders and marches me over to the couch, with me leading the way. “Yeah?” We stop in front of it, and he pushes me gently forward until I’m bent over the back of it. Oh, I get it. He needs it as hard and fast as he just gave it to me. Time to goad him into action. “Yeah.” I wiggle my butt for good measure. I can’t fucking wait to feel him notch his crown against me. How far we’ve come from the pillory. A st ep forward has him doing exactly that as the hairs on his thighs brush against the backs of my legs. He leans over, and I feel the heat of him. “Trying to knock me up?” He pushes in half an inch, and it’s so perfect that I can’t bear it. “Maybe you’ll try to knock me up,” I retort halfheartedly. “Hijack my career again before it’s even gotten started.” For a second, he freezes. Oh, shit. It’s way too soon for that kind of joke, even if I shared the details of my Bellamy meeting with him last night. But then, an evil laugh es capes him, his hand flexing on my waist. “Fuck me, why didn’t I think of that?” He shunts in an inch. I’m going to die. I’m going to die of pleasure overload. “That’s a truly excellent idea, sweetheart,” he whispers in my ear. “And you should know that if I knocked you up, all I’d be doing is bringing my nefarious plans for you forward by a couple years, so it’s no big deal to me.” Now it’s my turn to freeze. He’s got me. He straightens up behind me. “So now would be a very good time to tell me if you’re not on birth control.” “I’m on birth control,” I bleat, but my head is reeling. Sinclair wants me to have his babies. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. “That’s too bad,” he croons, stroking my ass. I have no idea how he still has enough blood flow left in his head to ke ep talking with the way his crown is swelling inside me. “But when I’m pumping you full of my cum in two minutes flat, I want you to imagine that you’re not. Got it?” Once again, I’m totally out of my league with this guy. I think I can survive him, and I’m so naïve. I’ll never be able to survive if he says things like that. Sinclair Voss on his own is bad enough; Sinclair Voss with a freaking breeding kink will end me. “Uh... yes,” I gasp. “Excellent.” He slams the rest of his dick into me with one savage thrust, and oh my fucking God. It is so de ep like this. I’d forgotten. How could I have forgotten? I’m so full of him that there isn’t room to think about
anything else. He drags right out and shunts back in again, driving the air out of me. I hold on to the couch cushions for dear life as every last nerve ending in my vagina erupts in celebration that we are back in business. “God, I love you.” His voice is ragged as he says it, and I understand that I’m not the only one who’s coming undone here. “I love you so much. You’re so beautiful. Just look at you.” “I love you,” I manage, my voice shaky. “I love you.” It’s not the stuff of poetry, but the way he’s fucking me, slamming home over and over, as if he’ll find his every life’s dream inside my body, is allconsuming. And, however filthy it is, however primal, it’s also romantic. It’s Sinclair, finally permitting himself to be unleashed on me and me, finally trusting him enough to allow it. “God, you feel so good,” he grunts. “I can’t last.” “Me—neither.” My entire vagina, already primed from that outrageous oral, is jacked all the way up. The way he’s fucking me is so freaking good that I probably could have come after one or two thrusts. I’m hanging on for dear life here. Then he takes me by surprise, hauling me up so I’m flush against him, my shoulder blades hitting his pecs. He bands one arm around me and finds my clit with the other. “Remember the first Alchemy session?” he whispers throatily. I turn my head so our lips are almost touching, arching my back to take him as de ep as I can like this while his fingers toy with my slippery clit. “I remember.” “It was just like this—but it wasn’t.” “Uh-huh.” Oh shit, I’m gonna come. “Because now we love each other. God, I love you so much. I’ll love you forever.” He kisses me lazily, fucks me lazily as the hand around my waist slides up to find my breast. I shake harder and harder as my entire body braces to blow again. Everything south of my waist is so stretched and so swollen, and I can’t. I can’t. I — I ignite once again, convulsing as Sinclair fucks me through it, reds and oranges swirling across my eyelids as I ride out wave after wave of whitehot pleasure. He grunts into my mouth, sounding as wrecked as I am, and then he freezes before pumping and pumping. I can actually feel him emptying himself inside me, and I’m not sure it’s possible to be any closer to another human being than we are right now, standing here together, his body a shield around mine. I knew, from the very first time I laid eyes on him across that bar, that Sinclair Voss was a dangerous man. I knew as soon as I slid my robe off at his instructions and allowed him to restrain me in that contraption that he would ruin me. I was right on both fronts. But as we come down from our orgasms together, his blue eyes softened and suspiciously damp, I know something else to be true: He will never ruin me again. Never harm me again. From here on in, he will be my
staunchest ally. He will be my safest space. “H E p i l o g u e Elyse, five months later: ow’s the coffee, Kurt?” my fiancé asks my dad before giving me a wink. I try not to laugh, because the question is totally unnecessary. On Dad’s face is an expression of rapture so great that I think his soul must have left this plane of consciousness. “That is the best goddamn coffee I ever tasted,” Dad pronounces as he sets the china cup back in its saucer. “Damn, I knew I married into the right culture.” As it turns out, the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz is pretty good at coffee. It’s pretty good at everything, to be fair, as we’ve found out over the past forty-eight hours. In true n epo-baby style, Sinclair chartered the company jet to fly us over to Paris. I feel kinda bad about how much shit we gave him for that flex because this trip is both his brainchild and his gift to my family, and it really is incredibly generous. I get emotional when I think about what he’s really doing here. That he isn’t just treating us to a trip of a lifetime but putting his money to work so that we can build relationships with my mom’s family and immerse ourselves in our history. I swear, Sinclair is more obsessed with our family history than I am. At first, I thought it was because he’s from the kind of family for whom history is absolutely everything, but now I know better. He’s obsessed with our history because he can’t trust his. He says everything about the Vosses’ lore is just that: lore that’s been edited and erased and is just a load of hot air. I know that’s true. I have a stack of letters, sealed with wax, that tell me just that. He’s also obsessed with this term enshrined. He used it in one of his letters to me. I guess it means making something special and memorable and sacred, but in a loving way, rather than a cynical, sociopathic way. He adores how our family ke eps Maman’s memory alive through a hundred tiny acts, and that’s why he wanted to bring us here. He can’t handle that we lost her, and her French family lost her, and that we have each other but can’t afford the practical logistics of building that relationship in person. Honestly, it really upsets him. He thinks it’s such a waste. And so he whipped us into shape, making us apply for passports a few months ago and chartering the jet and planning the trip. Like I said, we landed in Paris before flying down here. Sinclair and Dad hatched a plan that Dad would take Sylvie and Fleurie to Disneyland Paris for a few nights while we had a romantic time in the city. Sylvie is way more mobile now, but she graciously acc epted a wheelchair, along with a guide to push her, because I guess the Disney st ep count is on a whole other level and her occasional-use walking stick wasn’t going to cut it. While they were away, Sinclair checked us into a suite at Le Bristol and I pretty much lost my life. We walked everywhere: the Tuileries, Montmartre, Le Marais, while my amazing boyfriend plied me with pastries and coffee to ke ep me fueled up. And then we ended up on a small, drab side street in front of a small, drab door. I wasn’t really paying attention until he sank to one knee in front of me. I stared down at him in total shock as he pulled a small black velvet box from his pocket.
He took my hand in his as I continued to gape. “This is the studio where your mom trained,” he told me, his entire face twisted with emotion. “I think about your mom a lot, about how much courage she must have had to pack it all in twice, once for Paris and once for New York. But when she followed her dreams, she made mine come true.” The tears rolled down his cheeks. “And I’ll never stop being grateful to her. Never, ever.” I stood there, staring down at this beautiful man with his beautiful heart, my own heart an absolute riot of emotions at what this meant, at what he was about to ask, at the fact that my mom had danced here once, and hoped, and dreamed, and Sinclair brought me here. I was speechless, my eyes aching and heavy with tears even as they started to fall. He released my hand so he could open the box and took out the most insane oval diamond I had ever seen sitting on a diamond band. It had to be the shiniest, sparkliest diamond in the world. “Please, please will you marry me?” he asked, holding it up. “I can’t live without you, my darling. I don’t even want to try. And I promise you, I’ll spend the rest of my life loving you and supporting you and lifting you up. I just want to be in your orbit.” I was crying properly now. “Of course I will!” I sobbed. “Of course I’ll marry you!” He practically shoved the ring onto my finger before he was back on his feet, pulling me into his arms and kissing the breath out of me and telling me between kisses that no man had ever been as happy or as fortunate or as unworthy. “I can promise you it’s not a Voss family diamond,” he deadpanned after we’d recovered a little and were kind of swaying in the deserted street. “We don’t need that kind of bullshit energy in our marriage.” I laughed at that. Yeah, I didn’t really want a diamond that came from the same family vaults that contained the locked-up secrets of past scandals and ruined lives. “A fresh start is way better,” I said, and he bent to rest his forehead to mine. “That’s what I’m planning on.” After a while, he put his arm around me as we stood in front of the little gray door. “I don’t even know if it’s a studio anymore,” I said. “I can’t see any sign.” “It’s not,” he said. “But your dad gave me the address when I asked him for your hand. I told him I wanted to propose somewhere that had meaning to your mom. It was the best way I knew to include her in the process.” Yeah. That definitely set me off again. That evening, Sinclair took me to see Giselle at the Palais Garnier, the theater where the ballet premiered in 1841. It was undoubtedly the most beautiful building I had ever been in, and we sat in one of the most prominent boxes in the theater. “My wife will never sit in the shadows,” he told me as we sipped champagne. Last time we’d seen this ballet, I’d thought it was the start of something great for us. I was wrong, but this evening, I knew it was the start of something great.
Especially because Giselle saved the deceitful nobleman with her forgiveness. Nice touch, that, and one my fiancé was intent on driving home to me. A ND NOW , here we are in Biarritz, watching Dad lose his mind over great coffee as he gets stuck into eggs and the region’s famous jambon. (I bet his meal’s namesake is having the time of his life with his Auntie Glo and Uncle Reggie.) We sit on the beautiful terrace overlooking the sparkling blue Atlantic and breakfast at a leisurely pace, like the French do. Our coffee cups are endlessly refilled as Fleur plays with the street-dancethemed sticker book that was one of many waiting for her when we boarded Sinclair’s jet. I look over at the man next to me. His blue linen button-down is immaculate, his dark hair is brushed off his face, his skin is annoyingly, gorgeously tan from just a couple days on the beach, and I just know that he’s eye-fucking me from behind those fancy shades of his. My fiancé is absolutely perfect. And he’s drinking his coffee with his left hand so he can hold my hand across the gap between our chairs. A woman comes into view as she strolls across the terrace—tall, effortlessly elegant in a linen sheath dress, almost-black hair in a flawless bob under a wide-brimmed sun hat. I’m low-key checking her out when I realize with a start that she’s doing the same to me. She stops by her table and waves a glossy magazine at me, back page facing me. “Excusez-moi,” she says to me. “Ca, c’est vous, hein?” This is you, huh? I blush. It’s only been a couple of months since the LANE campaign came out, and I’m pretty sure I’ll never get over having my face broadcast everywhere. Sure, I get photographed all the time when I’m with Sinclair, but earning a billboard is way different from being on Page Six because of whose arm you’re on. “Oui, madame, c’est moi.” She gives me a happy little pout. “Vous êtes charmant.” You’re charming. I thank her, and she goes on her way. As she turns the magazine around, I see that it is French freaking Vogue. My family thankfully waits until she’s headed off before the low-key teasing starts. “Seriously,” my sister says, “we should turn this into a drinking game.” But my fiancé leans in and whispers in my ear, “I’m loving being the arm candy of the hottest model in the world.” All I can do is roll my eyes. M Y MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER is still alive. Aside from the trip we took when I was a baby, the only time we’ve met her is at Mom’s funeral. Her family cobbled together the money to send her over to New Jersey so she could bury her daughter in person. She stayed a couple days, and I remember, even through my own devastation, how old and grief-stricken she looked. We ke ep in touch by email and text, mainly to send her photos of Fleurie, but it’s not a great basis for a relationship. To make matters worse, my mom was an only child. In the email, my grandmother told us she was throwing us a little fête, and we honestly haven’t known what to expect. So it’s wonderful to discover, when we show up at the address my grandmother has sent us, that she has many other relatives and friends. Sylvie and I are a little worried about how our French will hold up. We spoke it to Maman all her life, but this is a lot of people, all talking over each other and all very excited. I’m hoping smiling and nodding will go a long way for us.
Dad has a few phrases, but he’s always been better at understanding it than speaking it. And Sinclair, of course, remembers enough of it from pr ep school to have had French panties melting off left, right, and center during our travels. Our mémé’s front door opens right onto a narrow street, but the house is larger inside. Even so, it is crammed full of people. People who’ve gathered here to meet us. Oh, God. I’m not going to last five minutes without bursting into tears. “Mémé,” Sylvie says, her voice catching as our grandmother embraces her. Mémé looks even older than last time we saw her, her tan face crisscrossed with a million lines, but today, she is positively glowing with happiness. She hugs Sylvie so tightly, and then me, and the moment she puts her frail arms around me, I lose my shit. This is my mom’s mom, the woman who gave birth to her, who shaped her, who braided her hair and bought her her first pair of ballet shoes. Who knew her better than anyone for a long, long time. This is the woman who buried her husband and then her only child and has remained standing, something I’m not sure I could find the strength to do. Sinclair was right: we may have lost Maman, but these ties that bind us to our past, to a culture we’ve only experienced through our mother’s memories and customs and rituals, are so strong. They’re strong enough to stretch across oceans. Across generations. They’re strong enough that, when I look into Mémé’s face, I see my mom’s eyes. Thank God for Sinclair, who is by my side throughout it all, quietly thrilled for us, hanging out with Dad when it all gets too much, even though he’s honestly a bit of a mess, too. What can I say? It’s a seriously emotional occasion. Fleur, who speaks almost no French apart from words and phrases —Sylvie has been far too busy surviving single, working parenthood to teach her daughter a second language—is the center of attention, celebrated and adored and cooed over. She quickly makes friends with all of the kids, children of Maman’s cousins’ kids, and they play a whole load of games in the small, leafy yard where the language barrier is a total non-issue. And my sister? Sylvie gets a lot of attention from a distant cousin who’s so insanely, re voltingly hot that some ad agency should immediately put him on billboards, shirtless and sipping from a sweating bottle of Kronenbourg 1664. “Remind me what the French take is on fucking a cousin?” she asks Sinclair and me when the hot dude—Luc—has trotted off to refill her wineglass. My fiancé spits his beer back into its bottle and misses, while I laugh. “Cousin-fucking is not okay,” I tell her sternly when I’ve recovered. I pause. “Unless they look like that. Then you can probably find a loophole.” “He’s not really a cousin, though,” she whispers urgently. “He’s, what, Jean-Jacques’s son? And Jean-Jacques was Maman’s... second cousin!” Sinclair sighs. “Let’s run the math, shall we?” He starts typing into the search engine on his phone. “Okay, so his dad and your mom were second cousins... Let’s see.” We try not to laugh as he runs his “math”. Finally, he looks up.
“According to Google, you can officially fuck your third cousin in any country. Congratulations, and go forth and copulate.” Over my shoulder, Luc is making his way back over here, his long, tan fingers closed carefully over the drink he’s bringing back for my sister. His face is open. Hopeful. Even adoring, I’d say. I’m not surprised. She looks particularly smoking this afternoon in her sexy sundress. Sylvie holds out a hand for a high five, and Sinclair hits it. “His English isn’t great,” she says, as if trying to talk herself out of it. “Girl,” I say. “You’re not doing this for the conversation. All you need to know is that the French for condom is préservatif. Go fuck the hot French cousin.” Sinclair frowns. “It’s extremely disturbing that you know that.” I give my fiancé a little smile and a happy shrug, and his face lightens. “I’m full of surprises.” Luc returns with Sylvie’s wine and what I’d call a hot cousin-fucker grin, and we melt away. I have a suspicion Fleurie may get to have a sle epover in Grandpa’s suite tonight. Sinclair, one month later If you assumed that my parents would hate every part of my proposing to Elyse, you’d be right. And if you assumed that my mom would create a press-friendly version of events that felt glamorized and shallow while being technically true, then you would also be right. Her version goes something like this: My new fiancée is half French and a successful model who is well on her way to becoming a household face and name. She is the daughter of a classical ballerina who once trained in Paris. She and I met at a super-exclusive members club. See what she did there? True, but also... cre epy. I think my issue is that it implies that I set my sights on Elyse because of all those things, that I went out there in true Voss style and thought, Ooh, that successful, half-French model would make a suitable wife, when obviously I fell for Elyse regardless. That is not our story, but no matter. She and I will set the record straight with the people who count (exc ept for the Alchemy part, obviously), and the rest of the world can believe what it wants. If my mother requires some Disney-fied version of our love story in order to tolerate Elyse, then I’ll happily let her have that—not because I care what she or Dad or any of their friends think, but because we plan on spending a ton of time at The Lindens, and I can’t bear the idea that my parents might give her a hard time for being exactly who she is. That Elyse and her family are better human beings than my parents will ever be just adds insult to injury. Honestly, it works in our favor that my folks like to preserve appearances at all costs. It means that they can brush their misgivings under the carpet and we can blithely ignore them.
My mom knows how to read the political, cultural, and social temperature of any room (appearances as levers, remember?), and her sources are all telling her the same thing: the press fucking loves that I’m marrying Elyse. Don’t underestimate how far that dictates my mom’s public endorsement of us. Regarding the press, I suspect it’s partly the novelty factor—Elyse is not part of that closed circle of women from which I might have eventually and reluctantly been expected to make my choice—and partly that she’s a fresh new face in the cosmetics industry in her own right. They particularly like that she’s the new face of LANE, and there’s a lot of speculation about how I’m handling my fiancée working for Voss’s biggest rival. The answer, as you well know, is that it’s called karma, bitch, and I deserve nothing less. Also that I’m so fucking proud of her that I might burst with it. F AIRWATER in late June is the perfect time and place to throw an engagement party. After all, it personifies Marion Voss’s entire MO, which is showing off without appearing to try. You might even say it embodies her entire MO (you’re welcome, Elizabeth). The peonies may be over, but the roses are in full bloom, and the gardens resemble a David Austin brochure. The lawns are a perfect green velvet, and the obligatory banks of hydrangeas are exploding against the rear wall of the house: masses of Annabelle turning white and the tasteful blue-to-periwinkle excess of the bigleafs. But, most perfectly, the linden trees that flank my house are at their best right now, in full bloom, their yellow-white blossoms throwing off the loveliest scent. Forgive a poor, lovesick fool for finding it auspicious that they are here to welcome the Bayonne contingent: Kurt, Sylvie, Fleur, Gloria, Reggie, and, of course, Jambon, who are my and Elyse’s guests at The Lindens this weekend. The other surprise guest? Luc. a. k. a. the cousin-fucker, who will be bunking up with Sylvie. Elyse’s agent, Olivia, has introduced him to a buddy of hers at Vantage. They’re going to do some test shots of him while he’s here, so he may be switching up his career and his location in grand style. Watch this space. Speaking of Sylvie, I may have had to revert to my old, dastardly ways in recent months, by which I mean I meddled. I ramped up Sylvie’s PT to four times a week, which meant that, by late January, she was in good enough shape that I could move Elyse out of her twin bed in Bayonne and into my bed in Manhattan. I may also have pulled a few strings at work. You only have to spend five minutes with Sylvie to realize that she’s smart as fuck, and less than five minutes more to understand that it’s better if she channels all that snark and intelligence into her job and not into crushing her future brother-inlaw’s ego on a regular basis. So I hooked her up with our HR d epartment with the promise that I wouldn’t interfere (I’m not stupid enough to meddle in the Ward sisters’ careers a second time). What do you know? She got a job in our digital marketing d epartment based fully on her own merits. It only requires one day a week in the office... and it comes with an excellent healthcare package. Back to the hydrangeas. They are everywhere on this perfect late-June evening: banked along the house and exploding from the vases dotted along the tables under the white open-sided marquees and in huge
blue-and-white urns along the edge of the terrace. The lawn is strewn with fairy lights, an excellent band is playing, and my fiancée is the happiest and most radiant I have ever seen her in a short white sundress that has me positively feral. My buddies are here: Kieran and Felix, Kieran sizing up the female guests quietly and Felix more vocally. Even by his standards, Felix is looking particularly smug today. I know I’ll regret asking him why, but I do it anyway and instantly want to punch myself in the face. “Guess who got called in for a sit-down with Katrin this week?” he asks me with a self-satisfied grin. I roll my eyes as Elyse smiles at him. She’s way too accommodating. “What did she say?” “She has a sexy little project for yours truly.” Elyse giggles. I purse my lips. This cannot be good. “Just say it already.” He smirks. He’s enjoying this far too much. “A new member is joining and she’ll need a little... TLC. She’s high profile, if you get my drift, and she needs an induction.” “Who?” my fiancée asks, eating right out of his sweaty, British palm. “I’m not supposed to say.” At this rate, I will detach my eyeballs from their sockets. “Like that’s ever stopped you.” He looks around to check no one besides us is listening—they aren’t; he’s not that interesting—and stage-whispers, “Grace Sutton.” Elyse gasps before clamping her hand over her mouth. I snicker and shake my head. “You sneaky bastard.” Grace Sutton is as A-list as they come, an Emmy-award-winning actress who’s starred in the show American Royal for what must be four or five seasons now: think a Kennedy-esque family based in Newport with Succession levels of dysfunction (or Voss levels, if that’s more clarifying). The show is fantastic, Grace Sutton is hot as hell, and she’s — Shit. Isn’t she still dating her co-star? “I thought she was dating Oliver Scott,” Kieran says. My point exactly. Oliver plays her on-screen husband, and they’ve been together off-screen for most of the show’s history, I believe. Even dudes like me and Kieran, who follow the tabloid press as little as humanly possible, know this. “Apparently they’re toast,” Felix, who is really a seventy-five-year-old curtain-twitching grandma, says with glee. “Their managers are ke eping it on the down-low, because they’re filming season six and it’s good for publicity if they’re together. But they’re not, which means poor little Grace needs someone very discreet and very hot to fuck her senseless on the side. Maintenance, you know? She has to get it somewhere.” My fiancée looks like she might pass out from the scandal of this. “But you’re not discreet,” I point out. This should be self-explanatory. “You just blabbed to us. Your st epmom would not be impressed.”
“You guys don’t count,” he says. “I’m fucking beside myself. Grace bloody Sutton! I need to book in for some mans caping next week.” Elyse loses her shit completely at this unnecessary detail and bends over double. I rescue her champagne flute before it ends up on the ground. “I’m ordering you a t-shirt from the Etsy shop where my brother gets his boxer briefs printed,” I tell him. “And it’ll say, She has to get it somewhere.” O N A MORE WHOLESOME NOTE , Fleur has been playing all day with my niece and n ephew, Will and Ellie, who are intent on revealing every wonderful, secret corner of Fairwater to her. After all, I hope she will spend a decent part of her childhood summers here. Their mother is still legally married to my brother, although Charlotte and Seb are gearing up for an amicable split. Whether my parents can be civilized about it is another question. In a far corner of the outdoor dancefloor, Charlotte is dancing to “L-OV-E” with her best friend from college, the woman who has held her heart for most of her adult life. I know Elyse and I will cheer the day they can finally express their love publicly. I only hope my brother can find the same kind of happiness. As for us, we make our rounds of the party, ensuring that we check in with everyone. I can barely stand to let Elyse out of my sight. No matter what theories my parents’ friends may hold privately, it’s clear that she’s a huge hit—and how could she not be? She’s kind and charming and genuine and beautiful. She is a winner of hearts and minds, someone capable of binding the old guard to the new, and so ravishing in custom Carolina Herrera, hair slicked back and lips scarlet, that she would fit in anywhere. Honestly, the only hint of snark I pick up on—and it’s the WASPiest, most passive-aggressive kind of snark—is from the women who wanted me to choose their daughters. And to them, I would say: I could never, ever have chosen better than Elyse Ward. Probably the most terrifying pairing in the entire yard is Katrin Lawlor and Vanessa Tan, who are getting on far too well. Elyse introduced them against my (very explicit) advice, and I’m convinced they are forming an alliance against me. Vanessa is hitting the mint jul eps hard, and I’m very glad we have no journalists here. It says a lot about her and Katrin’s adoration of Elyse, though, that they consider her engagement to me as the ultimate endorsement. In other words, if I’m good enough for her, then I can’t be a total douche. Maybe just a partial one. Katrin gifted Elyse lifelong Alchemy membership as her engagement present. Apparently, the directive came straight from Gen. I’m still banned as a member but allowed in as Elyse’s guest “at her discretion.” Unfuckingbelievable. (Still, it’s a win that means we can celebrate our anniversaries with pillories and stirrups and spanking benches, so I’ll take it.) We are photographed by the party’s private photographer, who will release a couple of photos to the press. She takes Elyse and me down the jetty and away from the party for what she hopes will be the official engagement shot against the Sound. We stand in the shingle gazebo at the end of the jetty, and we smile for the camera. I imagine I look like the happiest fucker alive. After she’s left us, I wrap my beautiful fiancée up in my arms as the strains of “The Way You Look Tonight” drift down from the lawn. We’re as good as alone down here, the Sound sparkling in the evening sunlight, and I for one am in no rush to get back to the party—especially when they’re playing a song about a guy who desperately wants to imprint the face of his love onto his mind’s eye forever.
We might just need to make this our wedding song. “Dance with me, my darling?” I murmur against her cheek. In answer, she winds her arms lazily around my neck and begins to sway. I stroke the bare skin of her back as we move together, pulling away just enough to see her face: the face I was hypnotized by across a bar, the face that drove me to my lowest lows and has had made me happier than I have any right to be. Now I see her every single night when I close my eyes. And if I need a refresher, I just open them, and she’s right there, next to me. That’s enough—for now. But I’m still a Voss. And I always want more. So I won’t be entirely happy until I see her lovely features on our children’s faces, too. THE END Not ready to say goodbye to Sinclair and Elyse? Meet them and their family five years on in this bonus epilogue: https://geni. us/sor_bonus Are you ready for Grace and Felix... and are you ready to finally peek inside the Alchemy New York Playroom?! Preorder State of Grace now: https://geni. us/state_of_grace A note from Elodie So here we are again, back in Alchemy! I seeded the New York club in Unbind, but I wasn’t sure when, or if, I would be ready to return. Alchemy is an intense place! I think I also needed a year or two to work out exactly what made Alchemy London so special to my readership. It seemed like you came for the spice but stayed for the found family, and that, I think, is what I k ept coming back to. Alchemy became this kind of crucible for me, and you, and the characters to seek refuge in: a crucible where prejudice and shame are left at the door, where you can lean into the fullest expression of yourself without fearing judgment from the outside world. Of course, Alchemy’s effectiveness as a safe space—especially in a world where many of us are hiding out in our ideological bunkers—is partially down to its structures and policies and design. But really, it’s down to the people who frequent it. There’s something about finding your people, even if they’re fictional. It makes you feel safe and liberated all at once. I think it’s so important that we know where to find this feeling in our lives. And, in the end, continuing with the Alchemy world came down to seeing if I could recreate this magic one more time, albeit with different characters in a different city... New York, New York. I have a love-hate relationship with New York. These days, it fries my nervous system, but I spent so much of my twenties traveling there while working for a Wall Street bank. I suspect I’m guilty of loving the idea of Manhattan rather than the frenetic reality of it, and that was what I wanted to create in this series. Because I spent so much of the noughties there, New York is, for me, the city of Sex and the City and The Thomas Crown Affair. It’s old-money glamour and high-octane partying. The energy of this city is like
nothing I have ever encountered. I am (or was) a far more fun version of myself in New York. I knew, from reviews and from feedback in my author survey, that an Alchemy New York series was one of your top requests, right up there with a next-gen series (don’t worry, we’ll get there in the next book!). But I honestly wasn’t ready to write it until I watched Love Story, and then I fell straight back in love with New York. Not just New York, but with John and Carolyn. And I knew it was time to give it a shot. I knew I wanted to develop Sinclair Voss as that guy: the guy every woman in the country wants to date, the guy whose family is ste eped in meticulously crafted lore, the guy whose obscene privilege and extreme dysfunction are inextricably linked. I had just as much fun building the Fairwater world and Voss lore as I did crafting Sinclair’s character. Speaking of Fairwater, it’s a fictional concoction based on various historical homes around the Glen Cove/Locust Valley area as well as surfing far too much house porn on Savills and Sotherby’s. I was once lucky enough to attend a very fancy, very WASPy wedding in Locust Valley, and the old-money elegance and privilege of that part of the world has always stayed with me. You heard it here first: this is not the last we’ll see of Fairwater or the Vosses! And as for the lovely Elyse, I knew that the woman Sinclair fell for would not be part of his world. I also knew that she wouldn’t be a game-player. With every woman in the city out to snag him, I knew he’d fall for the one woman who was simply herself. Because to be seen and loved for who you are is the most romantic thing in the world. I truly enjoyed getting to know Bayonne, NJ from afar, and I hope you will forgive me any inaccuracies or romanticisms. One detail of Sinclair’s grovel came to me as I was served up a news article one day. Evan Spiegel, Snap CEO, and Miranda Kerr forgave over half a billion dollars of medical debt in LA, and it struck me as the coolest and most amazing conc ept ever: the idea that you can buy severely distressed debt at pennies on the dollar while wiping off the far larger face value for many, many people. Writing the scene where Elyse and Sylvie receive that letter and make those phone calls was one of my favorite scenes to write. If you know my books, you will now be used to my therapizing my characters (and my readers). I love a betrayal, I love a grovel, I love a redemption arc, and Sinclair was a pretty fruity one. Sinclair is an Eight Enneagram and Elyse is a Six. It’s a fantastic pairing in romance, because Sixes tend to abdicate authority while Eights tend to seize it. But the Six is known as the Loyalist, and when you betray a Six... OUCH. Sinclair was a fun one to write, because he’s an Eight who operates inside the machinery of a long line of unhealthy Threes. All the Vosses care about is image and r eputation, and they will absolutely hone that at the expense of authenticity or morals or basic decency. I knew that Sinclair didn’t necessarily share that worldview but that he knew exactly how to exploit it. Like he said in his letters to Elyse, if how things look is so important, then that’s the biggest lever you can pull. And what is an Eight’s stress type? It’s Five. When the cost of his horrible actions grew too much for him to bear, all that was left was for him to go inward, to think, to process... and from that withdrawal came his ability to claw his way back to the version of himself he could live with... and the version of himself he could offer his love.
Gen’s advice to him was a little nod to one of my all-time favorite movies, the above-mentioned The Thomas Crown Affair. Catherine asks Crown how she can ever trust him, and he tells her that he’s trusting her instead. It struck me as the perfect about-face for Sinclair. When you’ve behaved far too badly to ever justify asking for someone’s trust, all you can do is abdicate all power and put themselves in their hands. So there we have it! Alchemy New York is out there in the world! And I can’t wait to write Felix and Grace’s story. Expect a lot more cameos... With love Elodie xx Where it all began: Alchemy London One box set: six full-length, standalone age-gap romances set in London’s most exclusive sex club and one full-length dopamine hit of an extended epilogue. Binge all seven books now on KU. https://geni. us/alchemy_box Oceanof PDF . com