"A workplace battle of the exes where our biting heroine prioritises her career over anything else – including love "
"No more reckless emotions, like the first time. No more cringeworthy bad behaviour. I’d pass my bill, make history and fix the glaring black mark on my conscience. Untie the knot of guilt and shame that had, if I was being honest, twisted up my heart for five long years."
Many romance writers worry about how to have a likeable heroine, and sometimes the way to try to do this is to have a character who is a goody-two-shoes, never doing anything morally grey and are generally gooey and kind, with only bad things happening to them, not because of them – this is not the approach Winstead has taken here! Lee is ruthlessly ambitious in her (environmentally conscious) campaigning job, at the weekends a big drinker and drug-taker, refusing to get emotionally attached to anyone she sleeps with – and she cheated on her ex Ben with his rival, just because she thought he might otherwise get there first. The novel asks if they can get a second chance, when they’re thrown together again in Lee’s most important campaign yet.
| Primary Genre | Romance / Relationship Stories |
| Other Genres: |
In this fierce and funny battle of the exes, Ashley Winstead's Fool Me Once explores the chaos of wanting something you used to have.
Lee Stone is a twenty-first-century woman: she kicks butt at her job as a communications director at a women-run electric car company (that's better than Tesla, thank you), and after work she is 'Stoner', drinking guys under the table and never letting any of them get too comfortable in her bed...
That's because Lee's learned one big lesson: never trust love. Four major heartbreaks set her straight, particularly grad-school boyfriend Ben Laderman - who wasn't actually cheating, but she could have sworn he was, so she reciprocated in kind.
Then Ben shows up five years later as a policy expert for the Texas governor, just as Lee is trying to get a clean-energy bill rolling. Tension builds as old sparks reignite when they're forced to work together, fanning the flames for a romantic dustup the size of Texas.
Don't miss The Boyfriend Candidate, Ashley Winstead's next laugh-out-loud rom-com about learning to embrace living outside your comfort zone!
Fool Me Once features in the following genres: Romance / Relationship Stories, Contemporary lifestyle fiction, Modern and Contemporary romance, Fiction
Fool Me Once is available in Paperback
Fool Me Once was written by Ashley Winstead and published by Aria an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Fool Me Once has 368 pages
£8.99
