Liz Fielding: The Last Woman He'd Ever Date

Tall, dark and brooding—and back for good?

Claire Thackeray: Hardworking single mom and gossip columnist. Hoping for the inside scoop on sexy billionaire Hal North, aka her teen crush!

Most wary of: Gorgeous men who set her heart racing. (Been there, got the T-shirt—and the baby!)

Hal North: Bad boy made good. Back in his hometown as new owner of the Cranbrook Park estate. Determined to put his troubled past behind him.

Most wary of: Journalists—especially pretty ones, like new neighbor and tenant Claire Thackeray.

“Ten pounds,” she said. “It’s all I have apart from small change. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll leave it.” Her relief came a fraction too soon. “I’m looking for something a little more substantial by way of payment.” What? “Something sufficiently memorable to ensure that the next time you’re tempted to ride along this path, you’ll think again.”

She opened her mouth to protest that parting with all the spare cash she had to see her through until the end of the month was memorable enough, thank you very much. All that emerged was another of those wordless huffs as he pulled her against him, expelling the air from her body as her hips collided with hard thighs.

For a moment she hung there, balanced on her toes.

For a moment he looked down at her.

“What would make you think again, Claire?”

Had she thought there was a softness in those eyes? She was still wondering how she could have got that so wrong when his mouth came down on hers with an abrupt, inescapable insistence.

It was outrageous, shocking, disgraceful.

And everything she had ever imagined it would be.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my world!

Science fiction and fantasy authors create new worlds where things are strange and new. My world is created from memory and is built with the familiar, the remembered and loved.

I’ve written several books set in Maybridge. Whilst it is a fictional town, it is inspired, like the village of Longbourne and the city of Melchester, by the places where I grew up and know well. In The Last Woman He’d Ever Date, I’ve brought in the little park on an island in the river where I played, and took my own children when they were small. Background stories, heard as I was growing up, add richness to the characters. Cranbrook Park is based on one of the great houses in the countryside surrounding the town where I was born. Oh, and I worked on the local newspaper, just like Claire Thackeray.

That’s where reality parts from fiction. Claire and Hal are characters who became very real to me as I wrote their story: the privileged child who, with bravery and grit, has grown up coping with life handing her lemons, and Hal North, the bad boy who has made good and come home to Cranbrook Park to complete the circle.

Their first meeting is coloured by memory, too, and does not go well. But they both learn to move on, let go of old hurts and find a new life. I hope you’ll enjoy their journey.

With love,

Liz

The Last Woman

He’d Ever Date

Liz Fielding

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Liz Fielding was born with itchy feet. She made it to Zambia before her twenty-first birthday and, gathering her own special hero and a couple of children on the way, lived in Botswana, Kenya and Bahrain—with pauses for sightseeing pretty much everywhere in between. She finally came to a full-stop in a tiny Welsh village cradled by misty hills, and these days mostly leaves her pen to do the traveling.

When she’s not sorting out the lives and loves of her characters, she potters in the garden, reads her favourite authors and spends a lot of time wondering, What if...?

For news of upcoming books—and to sign up for her occasional newsletter—visit Liz’s website, www.lizfielding.com.

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With love

For my lovely daughter-in-law,

Veronique Allsopp-Hanskamp

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EXCERPT

CHAPTER ONE

Cranbrook Park for Sale?

THE future of the Cranbrook Park has been the subject of intense speculation this week after a move by HMRC to recover unpaid taxes sparked concern amongst the estate’s creditors.

Cranbrook Park, the site of a 12th century Abbey, the ruins of which are still a feature of the estate, has been in continuous occupation by the same family since the 15th century. The original Tudor hall, built by Thomas Cranbrook, has been extended over the centuries and the Park, laid out in the late eighteenth century by Humphrey Repton, has long been at the heart of Maybridge society with both house and grounds generously loaned for charity events by the present baronet, Sir Robert Cranbrook.

The Observer contacted the estate office today for clarification of the situation, but no one was available for comment. —Maybridge Observer, Thursday 21 April

* * *

Sir Robert Cranbrook glared across the table. Even from his wheelchair and ravaged by a stroke he was an impressive man, but his hand shook as he snatched the pen his lawyer offered and signed away centuries of power and privilege.

‘Do you want a sample of my DNA, too, boy?’ he demanded as he tossed the pen on the table. His speech was slurred but the arrogant disdain of five hundred years was in his eyes. ‘Are you prepared to drag your mother’s name through the courts in order to satisfy your pretensions? Because I will fight your right to inherit my title.’

Even now, when he’d lost everything, he still thought his name, the baronetcy that went with it, meant something.

Hal North’s hand was rock steady as he picked up the pen and added his signature to the papers, immune to that insulting ‘boy.’

Cranbrook Park meant nothing to him except as a means to an end. He was the one in control here, forcing his enemy to sit across the table and look him in the eye, to acknowledge the shift in power. That was satisfaction enough.

Nearly enough.

Cranbrook’s pawn, Thackeray, hadn’t lived to witness this moment, but his daughter was now his tenant. Evicting her would close the circle.

‘You can’t afford to fight me, Cranbrook,’ he said, capping the pen and returning it to the lawyer. ‘You owe your soul to the tax man and without me to bail you out you’d be a common bankrupt man living at the mercy of the state.’

‘Mr North…’

‘I have no interest in claiming you as my father. You refused to acknowledge me as your son when it would have meant something,’ he continued, ignoring the protest from Cranbrook’s solicitor, the shocked intake of breath from around the room. It was just the two of them confronting the past. No one else mattered. ‘I will not acknowledge you now. I don’t need your name and I don’t want your title. Unlike you, I did not have to wait for my father to die before I took my place in the world, to be a man.’

He picked up the deeds to Cranbrook Park. Vellum, tied with red ribbon, bearing a King’s seal. Now his property.