How “Bedazzled” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” inspired Alexandria Bellefleur's first paranormal romance novel

Would you trade your soul for a chance at true love?

That question inspired Alexandria Bellefleur to write her next romance novel (and her first paranormal!), The Devil She Knows, which Entertainment Weekly can exclusively debut the cover below.

In fact, she was specifically moved by Brendan Fraser's response to that question in 2000's Bedazzled. "One of my all-time favorite movies is Bedazzled," the author tells EW. "Brendan Fraser is Elliot, a sweet and geeky man who can’t read a room to save his life and has a crush on his coworker, but he’s too shy to ask her out. After a failed attempt at striking up a conversation, Elliot says that he’d give anything for Alison to be with him. The Devil, played by the incomparable Elizabeth Hurley, overhears Elliot and offers to give him seven wishes in exchange for his soul."

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"After rewatching the movie in 2021, my mind was churning with what ifs," Bellefleur continues. "What if while attempting to woo his heart’s desire, the hero fell in love with the Devil instead? Now that would be a high-stakes conflict. And what if Elliot wasn’t quite so bumbling and what if Elliot wasn’t a man, but a lesbian pastry chef from Louisiana? With those what ifs... the idea for The Devil She Knows was born."

The novel, which hits shelves on Oct. 21, follows Samantha Cooper, a pastry chef who finds herself without a place to live after her proposal to her girlfriend goes awry. When Samantha ends up trapped in an elevator with Daphne, she's startled when Daphne claims to be a demon and offers her six wishes in exchange for her soul. Samantha is determined to outwit Daphne; after all, how many wishes does she actually need to win back her ex? But as Daphne fights to win the final soul required to end her own deal with the devil, the two grow ever closer.

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The cover, designed by Jenifer Prince, features the elevator that hosts their meet-cute and that was Bellefleur's main wish for the cover (no soul bargaining required). "So many pivotal moments in the book take place in an elevator, so it felt very fitting to incorporate that into the cover," she notes. "My other must was Daphne’s demonic shadow! Jenifer Prince absolutely knocked it out of the park, capturing the exact sultry, paranormal vibe I had in mind."

For those readers who can't help falling for all the morally gray heroes in romance of late, Bellefleur is also offering a sapphic alternative. "I love a morally gray character, especially morally gray women," she adds. "Daphne’s a high-ranking demon, so she’s cunning and not afraid to bend the rules, but she’s also trapped in her own deal with the devil. She is a demon, but she knows what it feels like to be taken advantage of and duped. There are lines she won’t cross, and while she absolutely tries to seduce Samantha, consent matters to her."

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In fleshing out who Daphne is, Bellefleur took inspiration from other demon-related pop culture, namely Lucifer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "I love the show Lucifer!" she gushes. "He’s so witty and layered and impossible not to root for. Even when he’s bad, he’s good! I’m also a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Anya, a vengeance demon, is one of my favorite characters. I’m always a sucker for complex characters that use humor as a shield."

In fact, the hardest part of writing The Devil She Knows wasn't creating an irresistible demon so much as determining the rules she'd live by. "The world-building was definitely new!" Bellefleur says of writing her first paranormal romance. "In a sense, it was liberating because I wasn’t beholden to real places. But I also had this really funny moment while drafting where I asked myself 'Wait, what are the rules regarding demons? Like, what’s the lore here? How does someone become a demon?' And I laughed to myself, because obviously the rules were up to me."

Check out the cover below and read on for an exclusive excerpt.

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Chapter One

It was stupid to focus on, insignificant in light of, well, everything, but Samantha Cooper’s bent knee was beginning to ache.

“Marry you?” Hannah’s eyes flitted around the room. “Sam, you’re—you’re kidding.” The color drained from her face. “Oh God. You’re not.”

Sam’s heart stuttered to a sluggish stop. “Is it . . . is it the ring?”

It was . . . dainty would be putting it delicately, all she could afford. But it would look so pretty, perfect on Hannah’s slender finger.

“Is it the—” Hannah choked on what was either a sob or a laugh. “No. The ring is . . .” Her freckled nose scrunched, kickstarting Sam’s heart into beating again. “Fine. That ring is fine.”

“Oh.” Good. That was good. Hannah thought the ring was fine. Hannah thought—

Oh.

This time, last year, Christmas, Hannah had gifted her an immersion blender. A fancy, fifteen speed number Sam had been lusting after for months, too pricy to entertain purchasing on her paltry pastry chef budget. One with a blade guard and rubber handle and nonstick edge, cordless and easy to operate. Perfect for pureeing, emulsifying, blending, and blitzing. It had seen its fair share of use in the months since. Hannah’s favorite soups. Her favorite protein shakes.

Now, it felt like Hannah had taken that immersion blender and shoved it into Sam’s chest, setting it to blast, turning her insides to pulp.

Proposing wasn’t entirely out of left field, not some wild whim. They’d talked about this, the possibility of it, marriage. Granted, not in a while but when they’d first started dating. Back then, everything about Hannah—from how beautiful she was to the sharp, sweet sound of her laugh—had turned Sam’s brain to mush, rendering her speechless or giving the worst case of verbal diarrhea, nothing in between. It was on their first, second maybe, date that she had blathered on about her parents, how in love they were, happily married for thirty-five years. How, one day, she wanted that for herself. Embarrassing stuff, honestly, but Hannah had smiled and said she’d always dreamed about having a big wedding.

Months later, Sam had stumbled on Hannah’s Pinterest wedding board, thousands of pretty pinned images—diamond rings and big bouquets and satin wedding dresses. Irrefutable proof that they wanted the same things out of life, that they were on the same page.

Only now, she wasn’t sure if they were even reading from the same book, in the same language. Considering that, of all the ways she’d imagined her proposal playing out, Hannah dropping her head into her hands and hissing, “People are staring. I cannot believe you’re putting me in this position,” had not been among them.

People were staring. The older couple seated at the table across from them stared unrepentantly from behind their menus, leaning in, straining to hear over the dulcet tones of the harp being plucked in the corner of the dimly lit restaurant. Over by the bar, the maître d’ and bartender whispered, and in the corner, a girl no older than fifteen held her phone aloft, recording. Before midnight, Samantha would be TikTok’s latest viral sensation, the laughingstock of the internet.

She scrambled back into her chair. “Why don’t we table this?”

“Table this?” Hannah’s voice hitched, broadcasting Sam’s shame to the entire restaurant. “I can’t just . . . you proposed. Publicly, no less. Unless I’m mistaken, that means you want to . . .” Hannah looked the way Sam felt—like she was going to hurl. “Marry me.”

That was generally what a proposal implied. “I do? Want to. Marry you, I mean. And you always said you liked public proposals. Your Pinterest boards are full of pictures of jumbotrons and—and skywriting. But if the timing isn’t—”

Hannah laid a gentle hand atop hers, expression closer to contrite than Sam had ever seen it as she snapped the robin’s egg blue box in Sam’s sweaty hand shut, sparing them both the misery of continuing to stare at the itty, bitty diamond Sam had spent a small fortune on. “I don’t want that.”

No number of skinned knees, broken bones, papercuts, and grease burns could hold a candle to the painful silence that followed.

“That’s okay,” she said, voice full of false cheer. A camera flash went off somewhere over her shoulder causing them both to flinch. Wonderful. A picture for posterity. As if she had any desire to remember this moment. “What is marriage but a piece of paper, anyway?”

A sharp of pang of longing ricocheted through her chest, but she breathed through it.

All she really wanted was to spend the rest of her life with Hannah. What that life looked like didn’t matter, only that they spent it together.

She tucked the ring box away, out of sight like it had never even existed. “Seriously. Consider it forgotten.”

“It’s not marriage, Sam.” Hannah reached for the bottle of Dom and filled her glass to the brim with a put-upon sigh, pity swimming in her hazel eyes. “It’s you.”

You’re not the girl I fell in love with, Sam. When I met you, you were going places. Places I wanted to go with you. But now you come home late every night, covered in flour, reeking of butter and God only knows what else you use in that kitchen. You never want to go anywhere or do anything. Nothing fun. You come home and you rot on the couch watching old episodes of that British baking show you’re obsessed with, and you know what? I’m pretty sure you love those damn cats of yours more than you claim to love me.

Don’t even get me started on how you’re delusional about the restaurant if you honestly think Coco’s going to promote from in-house. It’s never going to happen. I know it, and deep down, you know it, too, but you refuse to look for a job anywhere else. When we met, you had so much potential, and I’m not going to wait around a second longer and watch you continue to squander it.

“—am? Sam!”

She jolted, jumping a little at her name. If the way Mrs. Nelson looked a touch exasperated told her anything, her one gloved hand holding the elevator door, she’d been trying to get Sam’s attention for a while.

“Sorry.” She smiled sheepishly and squeezed inside the elevator. “I’m a space cadet tonight.”

Mrs. Nelson smiled warmly, looking so much like Sam’s grandmother in that moment that her heart squeezed. “You look tired, dear.”

Sam caught her reflection in the elevator’s smudgy mirror and cringed. Her face was drawn, her cheeks hollow, her already deep-set eyes heavy. She looked like death warmed over. Actually, no. She was pretty sure there were corpses out there that looked livelier than her.

No wonder Hannah didn’t want to marry her.

“Didn’t sleep great, I guess.”

Mr. Nelson tutted softly and pressed the button for the thirteenth floor, sparing Sam the trouble of reaching through the throng of bodies. “Where’s Hannah tonight?”

She opened her mouth only for nothing to come out. She imagined saying the words, each imagined confession increasingly honest, vulnerable, nausea inducing.

We broke up.

Hannah ended things.

I proposed, and Hannah said no.

I put my heart in my hands and asked her for forever and Hannah asked me to move out.

Mrs. Nelson would look at her, through her, watery gray eyes sympathetic, and demand Sam come over for tea, straight away, late hour be damned. She’d ply Sam with tea and cookies, trying to get her to open up and—Sam wasn’t ready for that. She wasn’t ready to talk about tonight, because talking about it would make it real and Sam . . . all Sam wanted was to crawl under the covers of the California King she’d shared with Hannah for the last two years and live in delusion for just a little longer. Cling to the hope she’d been bursting with at breakfast, buoyed by the idea that tonight was going to be the first night of the rest of their lives. She ached to pretend for just a little longer that when she woke up, tucked beneath the five hundred thread count sheets Hannah had waffled over for weeks, that everything would be okay. That this night was nothing more than a bad dream, a living breathing nightmare.

“On vacation,” she said, forcing the words up and over the boulder size lump in her throat. “She’ll be in Rhode Island for the next few days.”

I know this is sudden, so I’m not going to ask you to be out by the first. I’ll give you until the seventh, Hannah had said, already standing, reaching for the wool coat draped across the back of her chair.

Sam hadn’t argued. Beyond the fact that her name wasn’t on the lease, she literally hadn’t been able to make her mouth work, her mind racing but her vocal cords paralyzed by . . . confusion? Shock? She’d stared up at Hannah, hunched low in her seat, wondering how she’d fucked up so badly that the love of her life wanted her so desperately out of hers.

Mr. Nelson, Mrs. Nelson’s loveable Grumpy Bear husband, harrumphed. “Without you?”

Hannah took vacations without Sam all the time. Trips with her friends to Miami, to musical festivals in Chicago and Ojai, to Vail to go skiing. The one time Sam had joined Hannah and her friends for a weekend getaway upstate, she’d unknowingly maxed out her credit card within the first four hours. Humiliating hadn’t begun to describe it.

“I couldn’t get the time off.” The lie tasted sour in her mouth, like bad milk.

Mrs. Nelson tutted. “You work too hard.”

Sam offered up a wan smile. Not hard enough, apparently. The more hours she worked to afford to keep up with the sort of lifestyle Hannah deserved, the more exhausted she became, the less time and energy she had to go to the places or take the sort of trips Hannah wanted. It was an impossible predicament, a catch twenty-two. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.

It wouldn’t be, if her difficult boss would just pull her head out of her ass and look in-house for the new executive pastry chef at Glut. Oh, but no, Coco Duquette, Glut’s chef de cuisine remained fixed in her belief that there was someone better out there to take Michel’s place after he retired. Someone better than Sam.

Coco had had it out for her since Sam’s first day at Glut, back when Coco was only second in command in the kitchen and not yet in charge of hiring. Sam was too young, too green, and she hadn’t studied under the right chefs, Coco had complained, sneering down her nose, always finding some aspect of Sam’s technique to critique. Most humiliating, Coco had loved to force Sam to repeat herself two, three, even four times before acting as if comprehension finally dawned on her. It’s not my fault you sound like you just crawled out of a swamp.

Even Sam, who hated conflict with a passion and preferred to let rudeness roll off her like water off the back of a duck, had a breaking point. Si vous ne comprenez pas mon anglais, préférez-vous que je parle français, Chef? she’d replied, happy to speak in a language Coco could understand.

As it turned out, despite the haughty way she liked to drop her r’s and link her words, Coco Duquette—assuming that was even her name—had only the most basic grasp of the French language, unlike Sam who’d been taking it since kindergarten.

After that, it didn’t matter how talented Sam was or how hard she worked, or that she arrived early and stayed late. It didn’t matter that the dish she’d conceived had earned Glut its first Michelin star. With a single sentence uttered in French, Sam had made an enemy of Coco.

A grudge like that wasn’t easily overcome. The harder she tried to make nice, the worse Coco saw fit to punish her, spite, unfortunately making fools of them both each time Coco tried to sabotage her with critical ingredients mysteriously missing from the pantry, orders never delivered to the kitchen, the blame landing squarely on Sam’s shoulders.

Coco wanted her gone, and she wasn’t going to rest until Sam was out the door.

Still, like an idiot, she clung to the hope that Coco would get over herself. That she’d wake up one day and realize that sabotaging Sam wasn’t serving anyone. That she’d stop being petty, bury the hatchet, and offer her the promotion.

Maybe Hannah was right. Maybe Sam was delusional.

After an eternity of nauseating stop-starts that had Sam wishing she’d braved the stairs, the elevator reached the ninth floor and Mrs. Nelson patted Sam on the arm.

“You, missy, are coming over on your next day off. No excuses.” She wagged a finger and wisely, Sam kept her mouth shut. “Bring Hannah if you’d like. But you are going to take it easy, even if it takes forcing you to do it in front of me.”

The doors closed, sparing Sam from making a false promise, a small favor on a night that hadn’t offered her any semblance of mercy. She didn’t have the heart or the guts to tell Mrs. Nelson she’d be out of the building inside of a week. That she didn’t know where she’d be. Couchsurfing, if she was lucky. On a bus back to Iberville Parish if she wasn’t.

Alone inside the elevator, the brave face she’d pasted on crumbled, the tears she’d held back stinging her tired eyes, escaping to run hot and salty down her wind chapped cheeks, Hannah’s words playing over and over in an excruciating loop in her head.

You had so much potential, and I’m not going to wait around a second longer and watch you continue to squander it.

Hannah had opened Sam’s eyes to a whole world of possibility, that for a middle-class girl from bumfuck nowhere Louisiana, had simply never been on her radar. All she’d ever wanted was to get a world-class culinary education and have a quiet, content life managing a bakery, her own sweet little slice of patisserie heaven. If she was lucky, marry someone nice, someone who loved her as much as she loved them. She’d never dreamed of more, never imagined more could exist, but then Hannah . . . God, sometimes it felt like Hannah just happened to her. It was like Hannah had a gravitational pull unto herself, drawing Sam in like a bee to honey, her words sweet, the way she made Sam feel even sweeter.

It had been dizzying at first, dating someone who had so much faith in her, more than she had ever had in herself, believing Sam was destined for something greater than the life she’d dreamt. You’re thinking too small, Hannah had told her one night in a pique of frustration that had resulted in the destruction of no fewer than three of Sam’s dishes. Good dishes. You could be great, but you’re too damn nice. No one is going to fight for you but you, Sam.

And now here she was, feeling sorry for herself, proving Hannah right with every tragic, mopey, poor little ole me thought.

Sam sniffled and scrubbed at her cheeks, staunching her tears with a good, hard blink. What if she didn’t just sit around and, how had Hannah phrased it? Squander all of her supposed potential? What if she seized it instead?

One week wasn’t much, but if she could show Hannah that she had the initiative Hannah wanted in a partner? Maybe Hannah would give her a second chance. A chance was all she needed.

She just wished—

“Hell of a night, huh?”

“Ohmygod.” She plastered herself against the wall of the elevator with enough force to rattle the mirror at her back. “You scared the shit out of me.”

The you in question was a petite blonde, all of five foot nothing, who stood smirking in the corner of the elevator.

“Sorry.” The soft rasp of her voice was a surprise, deeper than Sam would have expected from someone so small. “You looked like you were nodding off and I didn’t want you to miss your floor.”

“No, I appreciate it.” Beneath her palm, her heart hurled itself against her breastbone like a battering ram, refusing to calm. “You weren’t . . . I guess I just didn’t . . .”

See you standing there.

She trailed off, cheeks burning, feeling immeasurably silly.

While Sam would bet cold hard cash on her ability to perfectly eyeball a tablespoon, wet or dry, guessing someone’s height was a crapshoot the same way knowing her east from her west—just like how she could sort of figure out directions based on where the sun rose and set, height was a wonky figure calibrated by her own stature. With a gun to her head, Sam would say this stranger was five one? Maybe?

Point was, what she lacked in height, she more than made up for in presence. Here Sam was, bundled up, swaddled in a wool pea coat and thick scarf, her—okay, these loafers had seen better days. Slush had seeped through the peeling rubber of her right sole, her fleece-lined tights now waterlogged and her toes frozen. Shitty shoes aside, she, at least, had aimed to dress appropriately for the weather. Sam cocked her head, brows drawing together. The weather and the decade.

Unlike the pint-sized puzzle standing across from her. Crinoline poofed out the swing skirt of her bubblegum pink dress, its sweetheart neckline cut daringly low. Sam had a sudden flash of some decades old cartoon, an anthropomorphized rabbit or skunk with its jaw dropped, a foghorn like awooga accompanying the lolling of its cartoonishly long tongue. Sam was rapt, certain she was having an out of body experience, suffering from a stroke or under some kind of a spell, unable to blink as the woman lifted her hand, fingers dancing across the swell of her cleavage, tracing the soft jut of her collarbone before she swept her long, buttery blonde hair over her shoulder.

She was impossible to miss and yet somehow Sam had missed her.

“I’m sorry?” Sam apologized awkwardly, trying covertly to swipe beneath her chin, checking for drool and feeling like the world’s schlubiest schlub for struggling to tear her eyes from this stranger when the love of her life had dumped her an hour earlier. “It’s been a day.”

The woman hummed softly, lower lip jutting out, expression a little too close to pity for Sam’s liking. “After the night you’ve had, no one could blame you for being out of it.”

Sam froze, heart dropping into her stomach. “The night I’ve had? What do you mean?”

Okay, sure, she looked a little worse for wear, she’d admit, rough around the edges, skin splotchy and her mascara smudged, lashes all clumped together like they were covered in concrete, but she didn’t look that bad. Hell, this was New York City; if you couldn’t shed an anonymous tear or two in public here, where could you?

“There’s no use pretending, Samantha,” she chided, crinoline crinkling, her hem rising mid-calf as she leaned against the wall, ankles crossed. “That proposal of yours?” She whistled. “Totally went tits up.”

Excerpted from The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur. Copyright © 2025 by Alexandria Bellefleur. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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