New York Always Book #1 — by Lara Strathmore

She came to learn the language of influence. Instead, she discovered that knowledge is no match for want.

Lara Strathmore has always been disciplined—in her studies, in her silences, in the way she lets herself long without asking. Composed, clever, and chronically unseen, she’s a psychology student raised in curated perfection, more fluent in theory than in touch. Desire, for her, has always been distant—aesthetic, imagined, withheld.

Until Julian Levine.

Older, emotionally intuitive, and maddeningly charismatic, he enters her life with an invitation to intern at his firm. As CEO of Levine & Brand, he sees through the polished performance to the ache beneath. What begins as intellectual mentorship deepens into a private gravity—glances that linger too long, conversations that cut too close, and nights that blur the line between discipline and surrender.

Through boardrooms, city streets, and the amber hush of autumn in New York, Lara’s world shifts from analysis to experience. Every decision becomes a negotiation between control and confession, between the woman she was trained to be and the one she’s quietly becoming. When the affair fractures under its own silence, she must choose whether to remain a reflection of someone else’s power—or to reclaim her own.

A work of contemporary women’s literary fiction, Soft Power is an introspective, character-driven novella about forbidden intimacy, psychological power, and female self-discovery in modern New York. For readers of Anaïs Nin and Sally Rooney.

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