TBR Challenge 2015: The Last Woman He'd Ever Date

The Book: The Last Woman He'd Ever Date by Liz Fielding

The Particulars: Contemporary romance, Harlequin Romance #4324, 2012, Out of Print, Available Digitally

Why Was It In Wendy's TBR?: I tend to impulse buy Liz Fielding books when I run up against them.  I find her writing style charming and her books tend to have that meet-cute rom/com vibe.  Basically?  She's kind of a comfort read.  When I want light and breezy, I can usually find that with a Fielding book.

The Review: This is going to be a dreaded review to write, mostly because I don't have a lot to say about this book.  It delivered exactly what I was looking for, and despite some minor quibbles, it kept me entertained throughout it's 200-some pages.  So that's good - I didn't hate it!  But it also didn't rock my world.  Which means in about a week I'm going to probably lack recall on what this story was about.  Hey, thank heavens for blogging, right?

Hal North is a bastard - both literally and figuratively.  His mother, a cook/housekeeper sort, had an affair with her employer, the owner of stately Cranbrook Park.  She passed Hal off as his drunken stepfather's child, but the players involved in the drama knew the truth.  When Hal, a rebellious teenager, rides his motorbike into the great hall, Sir Robert has his estate manager throw the boy out on his ear - banishing him from the property.  Since Hal is a romance hero, this has translated into him making something of himself and now he's a millionaire businessman.  Meanwhile, Sir Robert, in failing health, owes most of his internal organs and a fair amount of his hide to the tax man.  Before you can say, revenge plot, Hal is buying Cranbrook Park.

Claire Thackeray's father was the estate manager who did Sir Robert's dirty work all those years ago - which means, you guessed it, our hero has revenge plans for her since her Daddy is now conveniently dead.  Claire is now living on the estate, in Hal's childhood home of all places, works for the local newspaper, and is a single mother to 8-year-old Alice.  Claire's mother had big plans for her daughter.  She was going to get out of Cranbrook and make something of herself.  Naturally when that did not happen (and Claire wound up pregnant to boot) their relationship suffered.  But Claire is a make-lemonade-out-of-lemons sort, and likes her life.  Although she's naturally worried about her living situation now that Cranbrook has been sold to a mysterious buyer.  Imagine her shock when she finds out it's the prodigal bad boy returned.

Per Fielding's modus operandi, there's a meet-cute at the beginning of the book involving Claire, her bicycle, a runaway donkey (seriously) and a fishing pole.  There's lots of banter and embarrassment, and eventual sizzle when Claire rediscovers the fact that she has hormones.  Once the word gets out that Hal owns Cranbrook, he and Claire continue to be thrown together because 1) she lives on the property and 2) she's a reporter.  What exactly are his plans for the crumbling estate, the only claim to fame in their tiny English village?

Quite a few readers find revenge plots distasteful, but this one doesn't have the bite of say, a Harlequin Presents.  Certainly, Hal has plans - but those plans begin to lose their shine once Claire is back in his orbit.  They take jabs at each other, but I never felt like Hal was outright cruel to her.  Mostly the revenge idea is used towards the end of the story to spur our couple to their happy ending.

This was a nice pleasant read, but not without some quibbles.  Both Hal and Claire have a decent amount of parental baggage.  Claire's upwardly-mobile mother who has her dreams dashed when Claire gets knocked up.  Hal being the bastard son of a man who won't acknowledge him.  And yet?  Outside of Sir Robert being involved in the first couple of pages of Chapter 1, none of the parents play any sort of healthy role in this story.  They're off-page, as it were.  And given the baggage we can tie to them?  This seemed like an oversight to me.  I also felt, at times, that the pacing was a bit off.  That meet-cute in the beginning goes on for several chapters (four to be exact), which seemed a bit like overkill.  I also wanted a lot more "house stuff."  Claire starts poking around towards the end, going through Daddy's old journals, uncovering a secret in the stables etc. and I would have killed for more of that throughout the story.  But that's probably my love of "house books" showing through.

What we have here is going to seem very damning with faint praise, but what can I say?  I liked it.  It kept me entertained.  I didn't hate it, but I do think it could have been better.  So chalk this one up to a perfectly pleasant "comfort read" that entertained for the few hours I spent flipping through my print copy.  Charming, light, fluffy fun.

Final Grade = B-

For His Eyes Only

For His Eyes Only by Liz Fielding is a book I really wanted to like. Looking at the concept, on paper, I probably should have loved it.  The hero is an artist (a sculptor) driven to distraction by the heroine's bootylicious curvaceousness.  The heroine is a career-minded, driven, go-getter who has been burning the midnight oil to get a coveted promotion at the upscale real estate agency where she works.  It seems great, on paper, right?  Except when it isn't.  This is one of those books that gets off on the wrong foot with me and never quite recovers.

Natasha Gordon has been charged with selling Hadley Chase, one of those monstrous English "country" homes that could easily house eight families of 5.  There's only one Hadley left, and he needs to sell the house thanks to various taxes and such he is ill-prepared to fork over.  So Natasha does what Natasha does best - and that is to start drumming up interest in various magazines, real estate rags etc.  Except when the final copy rolls out in the pages of the most notable glossy publication?  Yeah, it's all about how Hadley Chase is a falling down dump.  What the hell?  Natasha didn't approve any of this!  And yet when her boss goes checking up on how such an egregious error could be committed?  Everybody, and I mean everybody, throws Tash under the bus.  Her boss suggests, strongly, that she check herself into a local rehab facility because she's "obviously" suffering from exhaustion.  This is, naturally, code for "damage control."  Tash knows the truth though, someone set her up to take a very nasty fall and she's damned if she's going to make things easy for her bosses especially since their rehab "solution" has smeared her good name all over town.  Nope, she's just going to have to sell Hadley Chase all on her own.  A neat trick that first requires her to get back into Darius Hadley's good graces.

Darius is an artist and the house holds nothing but shoddy memories for him.  He just wants it gone, and now thanks to that bumbling Natasha Gordon he's likely going to be stuck with the albatross around his neck for a good long time.  Except when he should be sticking pins in a Tash voodoo doll, he's instead drawing her from memory.  Completely captivated by her, just itching, dying, to sculpt her.  And here he thought muses were nothing more than urban legends.  He can't get the delectable, albeit obviously incompetent, Natasha Gordon out of his mind - and as if by magic, here she is, in his studio, offering up a proposition.  She'll sell the hell out of Hadley Chase.  He eventually agrees, on one condition.  He wants her naked.  Darius Hadley is going to sculpt her, in bronze, and for that?  She's going to have to sit for him.  Naked.  As the day she was born.

This story opens with Natasha getting called to the carpet by her boss for the disastrous press regarding Hadley Chase.  Natasha's answer to this is to banter.  Joke about it.  And then when Darius walks into her boss's office, naturally extremely pissed off, Tash's brain flies out the window and she's turns into a giant puddle of oozing female hormones unable to string a sentence together.  All because a hot guy walks into her boss's office while her boss is calling her to task.  Oh, and there's that flushing sound in the background of her career going down the toilet, and yet Tash stands there tongue-tied.  And when she's not tongue-tied?  She keeps on trying to joke the problem away.

Really?  I mean, really?!?!?!?!!?!?  This is a woman whom I'm supposed to believe is so killer at her job that her bosses are ready to hand her partnership?  That she's been burning the midnight oil to move up the ladder?  And yet when her career is literally flailing on the floor at her feet, as everything she's worked extremely hard for is circling the drain she's....distracted by some hot guy in her boss's office?  Where's the denial?  Where's the outrage?  No when Tash finds her Big Girl Words she merely, jokes about it all?  Really?  I mean, really?!?!?!??!?!?!  She thinks banter is going to save her bacon?

How can I possibly take this girl seriously?  I can't.  That's the problem.  Tash gets off on the worst sort of foot and even though things do get better the deeper we go into the story - I just can't get past my first impression - which is that Tash is a little girl wearing grown-up clothes.

And no matter how hard I try to "let it go" - I can't.  Even when this book follows the "it gets better as it goes along" formula.  I'm stuck with that first impression and I spend the rest of the story....not really caring.  No matter that good stuff follows.

The good stuff being the chemistry between Tash and Darius, and their requisite baggage.  Darius has all the trapping of a "poor little rich boy" - but I really liked that the author gave his angst a different bit of spin.  Also, Tash spent her childhood essentially wrapped up in blankets, protected and doted on to the point of stifling.  I enjoyed seeing these two get together and talk about their pasts.  Definitely the highlight of the story was reading about them opening up to each other, and I especially loved the small glimpses we get into Darius' "artist" world - those moments when he's working, even if he might just be scribbling or doodling, were a nice touch.

But I just can't get past the set-up.  Because no matter what happens after that point, the seed has been planted.  Yes, maybe Tash will have some good ideas for selling Hadley Chase, but then there was that time when her career was dying and she got flummoxed by the hot guy standing there to witness the death throes.  Yeah, I just can't.  This story still has the requisite charm and verve I expect out of a Fielding story, it just flubbed on the execution for me.

Final Grade = C