Baby On Board

Baby on Board

Liz Fielding / Patricia Thayer / Raye Morgan

By Request
March 2013

Secret Baby, Surprise Parents

Grace McAllister thought being her sister's surrogate would be a selfless act. When tragedy strikes, Josh rushes to take care of Grace and baby Posie. He's been running from this all his life, but could this woman, this baby, be his family?

Her Baby Wish

When their name is finally at the top of the adoption list, Kira and Trace McKane begin to find a way back to each other after drifting apart. Looking up at her husband as if for the first time, Kira realises she has all the family she needs. It's then that she's given a miracle...

Keeping Her Baby's Secret

Cameron Van Kirk. Popular and gorgeous, he was always out of her league. Now he's back after ten years and he's telling Diana - who is pregnant and alone - that he wants to help her. Diana Collins can't believe she's hearing these words from her former secret crush...

Here's an excerpt...

Josh Kingsley looked up at the majestic sight of Everest, pink in a freezing sunset. 

He’d come here looking for something, hoping to recapture a time when he and his brother had planned this trip to Base Camp together.  Older, a little wiser, he could see that it had been his big brother’s attempt to distract him from his misery at their parents divorce. 

It had never happened.  Now he was here alone but for the Sherpa porters, drawn to make this pilgrimage, take a few precious days out of a life so crowded by the demands of business to be entirely on his own.  To find a way to come to terms with what had happened.   

Now, overcome with the sudden need to talk to him, share this perfect moment, make his peace with the only member of his immediate family he cared about he peeled off his gloves, took out the BlackBerry that he’d switched off three days ago. 

Ignoring the beep signalling messages – work could wait, this wouldn’t – he scrolled hurriedly through his numbers.  Too hurriedly.  The slender black miracle of computer technology slipped through fingers rapidly numbing in the thin atmosphere.  And as if he, too, was frozen, he watched it bounce once then fly out across a vast chasm, not moving until the heard the faint sound of it shattering a thousand feet below.

When he finally looked up, the snow had turned from pink to grey and as the cold bit deeper he shivered. 

Read on here -

Mills and Boon UK

or here

 Amazon UK

AUDIO BOOK!

Well, here's a thing! An entirely new way of getting a Liz Fielding fix!

SECRET BABY, SURPRISE PARENTS has been turned into an audio book by those lovely "Clipper" books people you see in the libraries.
Every single word of it - six discs.

It's hideously expensive, so obviously you'll want to put in a request at your local library, but meanwhile you can log onto the publisher's website and listen the a short extract here.


And if you can't place the lovely Maggie Ollerenshaw, who is reading my book, you might remember her best as the dithery Mavis from OPEN ALL HOURS.



And I've finally found out which of my books is being reprinted in GORGEOUS GROOMS.

It's HER WISH-LIST BRIDEGROOM.

Having sworn off men for good, Juliet has gone home - only to come face to face with Gregor McLeod. Greg has been number one of her wish-list since she was a teen. She's old enough for him to direct all that gorgeous, flirtatious sex-appeal in her direction these days but there are two problems with that -

1. She's sworn of men.
2. He's got a few secrets of his own.

The other two books in the anthology are Jackie Braun's HER STAND-IN GROOM and Natasha Oakley's ORDINARY GIRL, SOCIETY GROOM. A reading treat for me.

GETTING BACK TO NORMAL...

We've been decorating. Since the middle of January.

Obviously this hasn't been just a slap of paint and freshen up job. We've had new patio doors put into both the rooms looking over the garden, new windows upstairs.

We've built a brand new en suite bathroom and added fitted wardrobes in the bedroom and generally thrown out more accumulated rubbish than you can believe two ordinary people could accumulate in the nearly seventeen year we've been in this house -- we moved in just before my first book was published.

There's just the new bedroom floor to be fitted (Les is coming on Tuesday to do that), the new curtains to be hung, and trip out to choose a blind for the bathroom and some rugs for the toes to step onto first thing in the morning, which we'll hopefully manage today.

All I have to do now is catch up on the dust, make one last run to the tip to dispose of the detritus and hopefully that will be that. There's a certain amount of pressure to get that all done this week since the dd and s-i-l are coming for the Bank Holiday and at the moment we're in the guest room. I'm praying for good weather since the s-i-l has never seen Wales other than soaked in precipitation and when the sun shines there is no prettier place on earth.

I did take a break from the painting to meet up with the Carmarthen Chapter of the RNA on a brilliantly warm and sunny spring day last week. It wasn't a "glamorous author day", but a casual meeting of writers, some of who'd travelled a long way to join us. We met at an ancient thatched pub and talked writing and ate a great lunch. We're a mixture of pub'd and unpub'd and provide a support group for one another.

The post man (the incomparable Steve) brought me a package containing my author copies of the Large Print reprint of Gentlemen Prefer...Brunettes yesterday.

This is one of my earlier books that never had a LP Library edition -- I'm working through these. His Little Girl was published earlier this year and Dangerous Flirtation, An Image of You and Eloping With Emmy will be available to borrow from the library (worldwide) in LP format within the next nine months.

Here's the background --

Nick Jefferson can't resist a challenge, or a blonde, so when the latest platinum-haired woman to cross his path challenges him to cook her a romantic dinner, he accepts. Cooking can't be that hard, can it? Women do it.

Big mistake.

TV chef Cassie Cornwell is not Nick's type -- she's a cuddly brunette -- and he's certainly not hers. She's allergic to sweet-talking playboys. But she needs him as much as he needs her and a deal is struck. It should have been plain sailing, but Nick discovers that he's much rather be in the kitchen with the cook than seducing the blondes.

To whet your appetite, here's where they meet.

Veronica, the blonde, who plays a lively role in this book has her own story in A Suitable Groom, by the way, which Mills & Boon published in LP several years ago.

Finally, just a reminder of the Mother's Day contest over at Anne McAllister's website. Drop in on her blog, too, to see pictures of her new grandson, Henry. He is gorgeous.

REVIEWS AND THE "SECRET" IS OUT IN AUSTRALIA!

Hi, everyone. I'm Grace McAllister and Liz -- working hard on page proofs for her next book but one -- asked me to drop by and tell you about the really lovely 4.5 star review for Secret Baby, Surprise Parents that dropped into her inbox this weekend from Julie at Cataromance.

"Secret Baby, Surprise Parents is a powerful, emotional and heart wrenching romantic tale from the wonderful pen of multi award-winning author Liz Fielding!

"Moving, poignant and wonderfully written, Secret Baby, Surprise Parents is not just a terrific romance, but also a compelling family drama that will make readers think about the choices and dilemmas which modern women have to face on a daily basis.

"Secret Baby, Surprise Parents is an exceptional romance by one of contemporary romantic fiction’s finest – Liz Fielding!" More here.

I read it out to Posie while Josh was feeding her this morning and she blew an oatmeal bubble she was so excited. Josh just shrugged in that "what can I say?" way that men have as he wiped the cereal off his chin, but I could see he was pretty pleased with the "terrific romance" bit.

And another really exciting thing is that our book is available online now in Australia and New Zealand here.

It'll be in the shops next month.

Josh was blase about that. Australia is his second home and he expected nothing else, but the stay-at-home in me is still getting used to having another home on the other side of the world.

FAME AT LAST!

My cover was on the TODAY SHOW! They were filming in Barnes & Noble, doing a piece on the fact that romance novels are recession proof -- in tough times we get a happy ending where we can find it -- and the Secret Baby got in there twice!

See if you can spot it here!

SECRET BABY, SURPRISE PARENTS EVERYWHERE THIS WEEK!

It's always a big week when a book is published. Interviews, blogs, comps and talks. This week I'll be doing my stuff at my local WI which promises to be fun. I've got a lovely book to give the winner of the "first lines" competition that I set.

I hope you'll find time to visit Coffee Time Romance and take part in the competition for a book and some Liz Fielding goodies here

I'll be blogging here at RomanceTV on Thursday -- Trish Millburne is there today -- and at CTR on Saturday (if I can ever get the hang of the system they use!)

It's your chance to make any point you want so come and join in the fun. I'll be delighted to see you. Meanwhile, click on the link below and you can read the whole of Chapter One.

FIRST THE GOOD NEWS…

I had some lovely news on Sunday morning – along with the flowers and cards for Mothering Sunday; an email from the organisers of the Colorado Award of Excellence competition telling me that WEDDED IN A WHIRLWIND is one of five finalists in the Short Contemporary category of the competition. You’ll find a full list of finalists in all categories here within the next few days.

WEDDED was a very special book for me. The heroine, Manda, made her first appearance in Reunited: Marriage in a Million. She was not, on first acquaintance, a sympathetic character. She was pretty horrible to Belle, the heroine in that book, but she was sharp, lively, clever and I enjoyed her somewhat biting sense of humour. A woman like that had to have a back story and by the end of the book her brother, Ivo, in revealing his own desperate pain, gave us some clues. By the end of that book I really liked Manda and I wanted her, like him, to have a happy ending.

It wasn’t an easy book to write. Most of it takes place in the dark as Manda and Jago, two strangers caught up in a life-threatening situation, learn to know one another, sharing their secrets, shedding anger, guilt, pain as they reached for the light. For life. For the future.

It became a book that roused some controversy on the eHarlequin members board, too. One reader suggested that I had “chickened out” of addressing a subject that had become the “elephant in the room” in romantic fiction because my heroine lost the baby she was carrying before she had finally confronted whether or not to go ahead with the abortion she was contemplating. For me the abortion issue was an irrelevance and anyone who read Manda’s story deeply enough to understand her would have known that she could never have gone through with it. She was a woman who had been starved of love. A baby would have given her that – and unlike its wretched father – given it unconditionally. No contest.

It was guilt at the knowledge that she’d even contemplated an abortion that caused her mental breakdown. And that was, for me, the last taboo. The fact that she’d had a breakdown and been “sectioned” -- locked away for her own safety; that although she was academically brilliant and on the surface had made a full recovery, had no trust in her own emotions.

I loved her vulnerability, felt her pain, rejoiced in her awakening. I’m totally thrilled and touched that readers and booksellers in Colorado felt the same way.

AND THEN SOME MORE GOOD NEWS…

I guess that hitting the #1 spot when your book is being given away for free is not something to shout about, nevertheless I was still as pleased as punch to see THE BRIDE’S BABY #1 in Contemporary Romance Kindle downloads over the weekend. Such moments are fleeting but can still lift the spirits. Now if only I could manage to do the same on the Waldenbooks list the way that my fabulous colleague Caroline Anderson did with her Harlequin Romance last month you’d hear me celebrating in Queensland!

AND MORE…

Many congratulations to new Harlequin Romance author, Golden Heart finalist, Barbara Wallace, who signed this week. It’s the sign of a vigorous series when new authors regularly join the line-up and this is the second in the last twelve months.

More details when her first book is published.

AND FINALLY…

A reminder that SECRET BABY, SURPRISE PARENTS is about to hit the stores in April in both the US and the UK.

The tragedies of infertility, of broken homes, touches nearly everyone.

SBSP is a story of healing, forgiveness, sacrifice and courage – with the occasional giggle thrown in. There’s an taster on my website, and Author Sound Relations will be running a competition on their newsletter in April – with a $50 Amazon voucher up for grabs – and it’s already available online at Mills and Boon and Harlequin

I’m baaaack…

Sort of.

The laptop, which is my lifeline to the outside world is in hospital at the moment on life support. Its innards have been backed up by the tech guys in Swansea, but are still ungetatable so all unanswered emails will remain that way for at least another week. Meanwhile I’m picking up the ones that are making it through on the dh’s laptop – although I’m not sure whether mail to liz @ lizfielding.com is getting picked up. Sigh.

I really hate the dh’s laptop. Not it’s fault. It’s a big, beautiful, glossy black job, but the keyboard doesn’t work for me. The right hand shift key is a tiny little thing lost amongst a group of other keys and my finger doesn’t know where to find it (I’m a touch typist). And it seems so slow having to go to my server for mail instead of downloading it. So hold off sending me emails for the moment. I’ll tell you when I’m back up to full steam.

Never mine. Lots of good things have happened.

HER DESERT DREAM has now gone through copy edit and so the CHANGING PLACES duet is now scheduled for November/December this year. These are Cinderella stories. In the first, CHRISTMAS ANGEL FOR THE BILLIONAIRE, Lady Rose yearns to be an anonymous "nobody". In the second, HER DESERT DREAM, Lydia becomes the "princess". These two books proved something of a challenge to write, largely I suspect because both women are pretending to be something they’re not, but editors cried, so I’m pretty happy with the outcome.

But enough of future books. SECRET BABY, SURPRISE PARENTS is available now at the Mills and Boon and eHarlequin websites -- links opposite -- both in paper and eBook versions. And they’ll be on sale retail in April (as always, a month later in Australia and New Zealand).

So what is this story about?

A while back, when I pitched a story to my editor, she did that yeeees, thing. The one with doubt in every inflection. Then she said, "Could you add a baby.’ Pause. ‘And a marriage of convenience.’ Well, I tried, then I abandoned that idea and wrote this book instead. With the baby, the marriage of convenience and secrets galore. (Not the baby though – everyone knew about the baby!) But a secret love, desperate fears, and a desperate tragedy. And a couple of monstrous mothers.

Romantic Times have given the book 4.5 stars, which always makes me glow a little. But the people who really matter are the readers. My last book, Wedded in a Whirlwind, started a very heated debate on eHarlequin -- let's see what you all make of this!

WRITING BOOKS CAN MAKE YOU FAT...

It's a fact and one that all writers quickly learn.

In my case it probably had more to do with giving up the day job -- brisk walk there and back -- and the teens growing up and moving on so that I wasn't constantly on my feet chasing around after them. And getting to that age where weight seems to creep up in a stealth attack that you don't notice until you're suddenly wondering who's standing on the scales with you.

But there is apparently a scientific reason -- something to do with the brain getting hungry. You can check out the full story on Tess Gerritsen's blog, here.

I'll be pounding the wii...


AUSTRALIA

You may have heard of the horrendous temperatures and bush fires raging in south-east Australia. Several Harlequin Romance authors live in this area, so please spare a thought for them and their families.

FINALLY



On a more cheerful note, I've just received this review and a very thrilling 4.5 stars, for SECRET BABY, SURPRISE PARENTS from ROMANTIC TIMES.

"Multi-layered characterizations, a potent conflict and some very special twists on reader favorite plot elements make this story a joy from beginning to end."

So all the blood, sweat and tears -- this was not, not, not an easy book -- was, apparently, worth it.

It'll be retail in April, but will be available online in March, in both paper and eBook formats, from millsandboon.co.uk and eHarlequin.com




And finally, finally --

Harlequin Romance is spotlighted at eharlequin.com in February with six Diamond Bride miniseries books and the chance to have your dream proposal appear in an upcoming Harlequin Romance book! Click on the events tabs at Harlequin Celebrates

GERMAN SURPRISE

Last year, A SURPRISE CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL was published in the "Love & Laughter" series in Germany. Clearly it was a hit because yesterday I stumbled on this book at the German Amazon site, giving it a second outing and I loved the cover so much that I had to share.

We don't always get copies of foreign editions, or even discover they've been published until the half yearly statement arrives many months later. Yesterday was one of those moments when, despite all the problems I have with it, I love the 'net.

I've also just received the hardback editions of my first book for next year, SECRET BABY, SURPRISE PARENTS. The cover image -- a really rather lovely one -- seems to have disappeared from my computer, but it's in the sidebar. It won't be retail paperback until April, but look out for the HERE COME THE BRIDES/GROOMS competition with Kate Walker and Anne McAllister in January when one of these babies will be up for grabs. The heroine -- Grace McAllister -- was named to honour two of my favourite authors. One is Grace Green, now sadly retired. The other is-- well you can work it out for yourself!

AND TWO WINNERS!

This is just in from Susan Meier...

Karen Kish and Snookie won the drawing!

Each receive a copy of my book and a sample box of candy from the candy factory I toured as research to write next year's Christmas story.

I'll need snail mail addresses from Karen and Snookie!

Thanks everyone for stopping by.

WINDMILLS AND CHOCOLATE…

I hadn’t forgotten I was going to tell you about my holiday. Since I returned, though, I’ve been locked in the deadline cave finishing a book that was just a little bit overdue. However, SECRET BABY, SURPRISE PARENTS has now been delivered, revised and is safely in copy-editing. I do have two more books to write this year. They’re linked and I’ve spend the last week playing with plots, finding my heroines – and more importantly my heroes. Pages have already been written and as a reward I’m now here to tell you about my trip.

We began our adventure by train, first from Swansea to London where we stopped for the first night. We stayed in one of those vast brick and marble hotels in Bloomsbury and our first stop was the British Museum where we’d booked a table in the upper courtyard for lunch. The last time the dh was there, with the dd, he was mistaken for someone else (he has “poet’s hair” and these days does look like a grand old man of letters!) and whisked past the queue to a reserved table overlooking the reading room. This time he had to be contend with being Mr Liz Fielding – and the reading room was blacked out because they’re constructing the Hadrian exhibition -- but the service was wonderful and so was the food. We called in on the Mummies (what have they done with “Ginger”?) and then had a look at an exhibition of American prints.

Next morning we went to St Pancras to take the Eurostar to Lille. We went early so that we could explore this fabulous cathedral to the railway that was saved from demolition at the last moment largely thanks to Sir John Betjemen.

The trip on the Eurostar was wonderful. The service from beautifully trained young French men and women something that is only dreamed of these days on the Great Western, sigh. We drove from Lille to Bruges and then out to walk the City. It’s very old (unlike Belgium which only became a country after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo) and very beautiful. The traffic is basically one-way, but cyclists can go where they like and everyone else had better watch out. Only the horse drawn carriages have more respect, in fact the carriage drivers have their sculpture – Zeus, Pegasus and Leda in a carriage!

Bruges is famous for two things. Chocolate and lace. We bought both – lace table clothes for the dd and d-i-l and some bits of pieces for me, but I was very restrained with the chocolate despite the constant temptations. I’m not sure how many chocolate shops there are in Bruges, but here are a few of them! I was helped by the fact that it was very warm – not chocolate weather – and the constant scent of the stuff seemed to fulfil the senses. Eating it would have been almost too much! I did have just a taste at the chocolate factory, but it really was a case of “if music be the food of love…” We walked a lot, saw a fabulous Michelangelo statue, took a carriage ride, went on the canal – in other words behaved like total tourists! We did have loads of scrumptious food, though, and the odd glass of Belgium beer. Oh, and of course chips, for which the Belgians are justly famous.


Then we took the train to Brussels and from there to Holland. Travelling by train in Europe is just so much fun. Last year we did it in Italy with our trip from Rome to Matera, this year we really extended ourselves! The service is so good, the staff incredibly helpful. (On our return from Velp, when we had to change, we received a little print out with our itinerary.)

Holland is delightful. This time we took a trip to Velp, wooded and hilly, it’s the highest point in the country, a river bus to Rotterdam and visited the fabulous windmills at Kinderdijk.





In seven days we saw not one spot of rain and scarcely any clouds and we finally flew home, totally exhausted!