Okay. It's real, it's dated, and I've been unbearable to live with. What the Crown Desires, Book 3 of the Sorvaine Series, is out 20 November 2026.
Here's the thing about Nicolas. You've met him — he's the one who came through Books 1 and 2 between races, took one look at a room full of his own family, and had the entire situation diagnosed before anyone finished a sentence. That's who he is everywhere. Eight years on the F1 grid, a face people recognize on four continents, the steadiest voice on the radio and, if you ask the right rivals, the last man you want in your mirrors. Reading people is the thing he's best at. It's never once let him down.
So of course I wrote him a year where it doesn't matter.
Vera Shin turns up on the circuit because a foundation partnership put her there — a full season of race weekends she didn't request, for a sport she has no particular opinion about, doing work she actually cares about. Everyone Nicolas has ever met arrived already knowing how they felt about him. Vera didn't get the memo and wouldn't have read it anyway. She's just there to do her job. He notices that inside of a minute and spends the rest of the book unable to stop.
And I want to be clear that Nicolas has been around. Women he dated, women he didn't, one very famous popstar who turned him into an entire album's worth of material. He knows what all of it felt like — which is precisely how he knows, immediately, that this is a different thing altogether. No slow dawning. No two hundred pages of denial. He falls, he knows he's fallen, and then you get to watch what a man like that actually does with a certainty like that.
What you're in for:
- Speed. I have written slow burn twice and complained about it twice, so consider this me making it up to you. Nicolas doesn't creep toward it. He's gone by the early chapters and the book moves — it's built for a man whose whole nature is to know the second he knows.
- No walls. The first two books lived inside the palace, with all its protocol and distance doing the emotional heavy lifting. This one steps outside every bit of that. No institution standing between these people and the world, and a level of attention that turns an ordinary afternoon into something you have to survive.
- A man out of answers. Nicolas has spent two books being the one who always has the right words at the right moment. I hand him something here that no amount of reading the room can touch, and I'll admit it: watching him with nothing to say is the part I'm most excited for you to reach.
- The four of them. I won't be elaborating. What these brothers are to each other does more work in this book than almost anything else, and if the brotherhood has ever gotten you before, prepare accordingly.
- Felix. Present, on the circuit, doing Felix things. He will absolutely weaponize that album at his brother's expense. Beyond that my lips are sealed and my heart is already a little bruised.
New readers can start here and be fine — but if you've walked with this family since Julian and Imogen, every quiet look between these men is going to hit somewhere tender. To those of you who have: I don't know how to thank you properly, so I'll just keep writing them.
20 November 2026. Teasers, and a great deal of me yelling are on the way. But don't worry, I haven't stopped talking about Lucien and Isabelle yet either.
Nicolas falls fast. Try to keep up.