The Single Life

The Single Life
Liz Wood

Meet Lauren Wilt, Chicago's newest hot thirty-something. She's making a splash Carrie Bradshaw-style with a sex column in the Chicago Gazette that has singles in the city craving more.Meet Lauren Gard, the fifty-something writer once loved by the literati, dealing with an empty nest, a new life alone and a tangle of leaky pipes.And no one can know they're one and the same.So when readers clamor to see their relationship diva in the flesh, Lauren and her friends must perpetrate some fancy sleight of hand à la Cyrano de Bergerac to keep the paper from finding out the truth…and they find out being single requires a lot of solidarity!

Love hates the game of words…

Lauren Wilt—Her star falling, this award-winning but aging novelist rejuvenates her career by writing a successful singles column. Too bad it couldn’t do the same for her figure. With her fortunes skyrocketing, she needed a pretty face to live up to public expectations.

Helen Matter—Young. Attractive. Blond. Blue-eyed. Extremely intelligent. Fashion disaster. Dating train wreck. Every man’s dream just wasn’t being advertised properly. Until she became the face of Chicago’s hottest news topic: “The Single Life.”

Enter: gentleman callers, inquisitive media and mutually assured disaster.

Is there a lesson to be learned in loving the single life?

Liz Wood

Liz Wood has lived on four different continents and in twice as many countries, but her favorite things remain quite domestic: books, chocolate and coffee, preferably all together. She reads everything from French comics to Italian scandal sheets, German philosophy to American romances (the latter late into the night). When she is not reading, she is trying to train her beagle to do some housekeeping, so she can have more time to, um, read.

The Single Life

Liz Wood

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

From the Author

Dear Reader,

The idea for The Single Life came to me one afternoon when a friend and her seventy-something mother described the latter’s recent experiences with Internet dating. As we laughed about the complicated security measures they had adopted to protect her from senile Don Juans and toothless Lotharios, I began to wonder what insights she might bring to a singles column. Were her experiences all that different from younger women who keep looking for a crock of good men at the end of the rocky road to romance?

I’m still not entirely sure about the answer to that question, but I did realize something else that afternoon: it’s never too late to begin again. This realization guided me as I sketched out the story of the unlikely friendship between three women trying to turn their lives around. Though they face very different challenges in their single lives, fifty-something Lauren, forty-something Clare and twenty-something Helen come away with the same lesson: the immeasurable value of friendship.

I hope you will have as much pleasure reading about these singles as I had writing about them.

Liz

Many thanks to Tara Gavin, whose suggestions for

revision went right to the heart of the matter. Thanks

also to Lena Wood for being such a generous guinea pig.

I dedicate this book to my mother who, despite her many

experiences, has never really known the single life.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 1

Borrow my words, then!—

Your beautiful young manhood—lend me that!

And we two make one hero of romance!

Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

“You’re going to have to sell the house.”

Lauren shut her eyes tightly, hoping that she hadn’t heard correctly, that she was still asleep and would wake up to something other than the jarring sound of the telephone and Clare’s devastating proclamation. After all those hours spent exploring the varied shades of darkness, she wasn’t even sure she had actually slept. Not until she heard Clare Hanley’s voice at the other end of the line.

“What time is it anyway?” she asked in a hoarse voice.

“Way past the time for you to be still in bed. The last time I looked, it was going on eleven. What happened? Did you stay up to catch the late show?”