Chase Sterling always felt like furniture. The kind you don't notice, the kind that's easy to shove in a corner and forget. He was used to it: people looked right through him, brushed him off like lint. But it only takes one phone call to erase a lifetime of being overlooked. When his estranged family meets a tragic end, Chase suddenly finds himself in charge of the sprawling Sterling fortune. Turns out, riches aren't the only thing the family left him. There's a curse running through his blood, warping love into something hungry and dangerous, impossible to escape.

Vivian Ashford never set out to blow Chase's life to smithereens. Just one decision (a sharp, ruthless move at graduation) was all it took to set their worlds spinning out of control. While Vivian soaks up the Hollywood limelight and collects red-carpet headlines, Chase slips into his new role as Manhattan's most intimidating heir. But no matter how far they run, something keeps yanking them back together, like a stitch in an old wound that refuses to heal.

London was already scheduled before the elevator and before the headline and before the morning after, the film shoot arranged four months ago when the project finally got its financing and the director confirmed his availability and the production calendar was set, and the timing of my departure, which lands three weeks after the tabloid ran its ENEMIES REUNITED AT MIDNIGHT piece, is not deliberate but is not unwelcome.


I need the distance. This is not a new conclusion, I've been needing the distance in various forms for years, but the specific need of this particular departure has a quality that the previous attempts at distance haven't had, which is the feeling of arriving at a city that does not know Chase Sterling in the way Los Angeles knows Chase Sterling, where his name is not the background noise of every industry event and every press inquiry and every photograph that catches me looking in the wrong direction.


Chapter 206 - "Different Cities"