Review: Should've Been Us

Should've Been Us by Jess Bryant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've been waiting for Lulu's love story since she sobbed in Trent and Lance's arms at the end of Stay a Little Longer. I've been waiting, and waiting, and waiting until finally it. IS. HERE!!!!!!





Lulu Nichols held this undying belief that she and her best friend Derek were going to wind up together; they were meant to be regardless of how many times Derek brushed her aside or broke her heart by being oblivious to her feelings. Until he announces that he's getting married and she finds herself sobbing in Trent and Lance's arms because there goes what she was so certain was going to happen. So how was she going to survive not only a destination wedding but being a part of said wedding where the person she'd thought was hers promised himself to someone else?



Enter Connor Shaw. Connor was the third wheel in Lulu's friendship with Derek. He was the best guy friend to Lulu's best girl friend. The three of them went through everything together and while Lulu was strung up on Derek, Connor had always been strung up on Lulu. She was the one woman he wanted that he thought he could never have and over time, the jealousy towards her feeling for Derek took a toll on not only their relationship as friends but his relationship with Derek as friends. He makes it his mission to make sure that Lulu survives the destination wedding that could break her while hoping to make her see that she should have been with him. That it always should have been them, not her and Derek.



I'm a huge fan of Jess Bryant and her Fate, Texas stories. She weaves together stories filled with heart, laughs, memorable characters, and smoking hot chemistry and Should've Been Us does not disappoint at all! This was a friends to enemies to lovers story with epic banter and explosive chemistry. There is nothing - NOTHING - that will convince me that Connor and Lulu aren't my new favourite Fate couple - and that's saying A LOT! Have you read Lemon & Shane???? No??? Then you have no idea and you can't speak to this insanity until you've read Call Me, Irresistible so I say you should go grab it now so you have something epic to compare them to.



I'm not gonna wait for you - reading Lemon & Shane's story has no bearing on Lulu and Connor, but I'm telling you, you NEED to read it because it's just that good!

Now, where was I???



Oh, right… Destination wedding, epic banter and a hilarious (and welcome) "extra shit jerk" cameo by Maren Lee's Sierra as a pseudo-fairy godmother of epic proportions! She didn't leave her crazy self in Bounty County - oh no! She brought it with her and forced Lulu to sip some truth tea where it came to Connor and just how she really felt about him. Sierra saw it and she was her matchmaking badass self by putting it out there.



All that banter between Connor and Lulu, like flint striking whenever they came together making it inevitable that those sparks would catch fire in an explosion of epic proportions!



And oh, how they burn!



They steam up the pages in moments that are sweet, tender and passionate. And HOTTTTTT!!!!



Favourite Lines -

“I’m not the best man.” She admitted in a small voice. “I’m not the best anything.”

Connor’s sigh was heavy in the quiet room, “That’s not true.”

“Sierra.” Dark eyes narrowed even as a smirk played on his lips. “Behave.”

“And that killjoy would be my husband, Brenden.”

“In my experience it’s only the rides you don’t take that you end up regretting and that, my dear, is some first class wisdom I’m sprinkling on you like your very own fairy godmother.”

“Connor. He watches you and when you space out, when you disappear and you get that sad look in your eyes, that’s when he starts a fight. He pulls you back. He wipes away the sadness by replacing it with whatever he has at his disposal. The teasing? The fighting? He’s fighting for you.”

“Lucy Lee Nichols, we’re officially late.”

“Connor Asshole Shaw, you call me by my full name one more time and the only thing you’ll be on time for is your funeral.”

“A big, purple headed friend that hits spots you couldn’t find with a map and compass.”

“I think if I’m not really careful, I could become addicted to the sweet words that come out of that filthy mouth of yours, Connor Shaw.”

He’d wanted to be inside Lulu since he’d figured out what the thing between his legs was used for.

I'm quite serious when I say - BEST LINE EVER!!!!!

Hitting a tiny white ball and then chasing it down was not a sport in his humble opinion.

“I’m gonna need a cold shower if you two keep that up.” Sierra was fanning herself dramatically from her chair a few feet away when Lulu glanced at her and blushed. “Don’t y’all have a room because I’m pretty sure they frown on live porn at the public pool in these kind of places.”

“Every single time with you is and then you go and make it better and my only worry is that I’m going to die from so many orgasms. Ok?”

“I’m falling in love with him.”

“That’s probably just sunstroke.”

“Jesus, you’re such an ass sometimes.”

"I love you, Con. You make me crazy. You make me mad. You make me smile and laugh. You make me happy and I love you for it. I love you for always choosing me. Even when I was too blind to see it, even when I was too stupid to choose myself, you always put me first. I’m only sorry that it took me so long to take the blinders off. I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you. I promise.”

Lance snorted, “If you say he has a nice ass again, I might actually kill you both.”

Go grab this book today! You NEED Connor and Lulu in your life - you don't know it yet, but you do! And once you've fallen in love with them, head back and fall in love with everyone from Fate.



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Review: One Giant Leap

One Giant Leap by Kay Simone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When you look up at the night sky, what do you feel?



Do you wonder about what's out there? Do you feel as though you're looking out on something so greatly important that it will shape and change the future of our existence? Or do you just see bright lights in the sky? Or a lack thereof because you live in a densely populated city with so much light pollution that you can barely see any stars?



Or are you like Curtis "Launchpad" Larkin and you're crying because you think you won't ever see them up close again?



I found this book by accident. I was browsing through one of my favourite Facebook groups for M/M recommendations and someone asked for a book where someone faints - for whatever reason. I thought, "Hey, now that actually could be interesting!" and I started reading through some of the recs. The last one on the list was One Giant Leap and the premise that this would be a love affair with an astronaut had my heart racing for a moment. I have a fascination with all things space and space-related - I even watch the NASA channel on TV when they're doing spacewalks on the ISS so why wouldn’t this one appeal to me? That Curt, the mission commander, falls for his CAPCOM in mission control sight unseen with only his voice and personality to judge by? That really piqued my curiosity.

"CAPCOM to Mission Commander, do you read?"

The first time those words are spoken, it starts a dialogue between two souls who love space. The vast infinity of the stars and the promise of something more to learn, more to explore, more to find out there meaning that they are greater than the sum of their parts on Earth. It isn't an immediate connection - that would be false and nowhere near as powerful as the love story of Curt Larkin and Patrick Harte deserves to be. Yes, this is a relationship that builds slowly over time. It's a time window that seems short in some ways and unbearably long in others, but the end result is something sweeter and more beautiful than I think I have ever read. It's reached my list of all-time favourites, and I don't think that will ever change.

Curt Larkin - disgraced astronaut forced to resign to save face for NASA when an encounter with a Moon landing denouncer in a bar leaves him under arrest and makes him the centre of a scandal that allows the politicians to debate the merits of spending on the manned space flight program.



This is something that governments have been talking about for years, for all the money that's pumped into NASA, how far have we gone? What new do we know? Actually, we know a lot more now than the politicians think we do, but they try to denounce every breakthrough and colour the opinions of the public through tainted lenses.



Curt's forced resignation leaves him feeling without a tether to the Earth. He has no real connection to his family, no one to share his life with and so, that time became a spiral into drunken despair. He moved as far as he could out to an area of Texas where the light pollution was so small he could truly see the stars from the ground that he was sure he would never see again. His drunken ramblings after hearing of plans to disassemble NASA and the space program by the current leadership finds him drunk in a bar spouting poetic about the space program and the idiocy of politicians all while being captured on some college kid's smartphone. It brings him the attention and the power to bring him back to NASA, to inspire the people to try and fund a manned mission through crowdfunding and get the administration to pay attention. It's inspiring and features two real-life men I admire (though with similar but different names) to back him being the potential leader of this crowd-funded mission.



I'm gonna just leave them there…



But he's still lonely. Curt is still untethered to the Earth even when he's preparing to go up in the Hermes I shuttle. This will be his last mission. He's going to turn forty on the trip and when he's back on the ground he's going to retire, but to do what?

MORALES: So even if you’re asked to in the future, you'll never go to space again?

(Larkin pauses, looking at a point somewhere past the camera. He looks enormously sad at the question.)

LARKIN: Until NASA has one of those scifi style one-way missions where they need a volunteer who's ready to never come back to earth? No, I'll never go to space after this.

Patrick Harte dreamed of being an astronaut. He even begged his parents to send him to space camp as a child, but having Meniere's disease meant that his hopes were dashed upon diagnosis. He would never go to space himself, like his childhood crush Curt Larkin, but maybe there was a way that he could help humanity, help the space program, help those people who risked their lives to further the exploration of the universe. He's an engineer, usually one of those backroom engineers who design and fix problems, not one of the people sitting in mission control and when he winds up being chosen as the only person who could possibly be the new CAPCOM when the current one has a stroke while on duty, Patrick can’t believe it. He can't see that he deserves it, that he's anyone special enough to deserve that kind of responsibility, and he doesn't know that he can do it.



This book was watching two beautiful souls come together. And yes, Curt does faint when he finally sees Patrick for the first time and it is a glorious moment meant for the history books! There are bumps along the way, hurdles to jump just like any other courtship and one that gets a fair bit of attention is the fact that Curt is older than Patrick, 40 to his 27. It isn’t a noticeable thing all things considered, nor does it seem like something meant to be an impasse to their relationship. One of the most beautiful things I've ever heard comes from the subject:

"I don't know how else you can explain the fact the solid reality that out of every century on earth, out of every epoch, with every different combination of atoms and cells and situations out of the sheer chaos of the universe, you and I just happened to exist on the same planet at the same time," Patrick says. "If that's not luck, those are some pretty incredible odds we just beat. What's thirteen years compared to the whole history of the galaxy?"

This is a beautiful book! I wish I could find more like it - there's so much wonderful in there for everyone with a beautiful, touching love story making its slow burn across the pages ensuring that even after its end Curt and Patrick will live on forever in the stars above. If only we should take the chance and look up.

Grab this one - whether you grab it in Kindle Unlimited or you buy a copy like I did, Kay Simone wrote a phenomenal story that combines a love of science and the exploration of space with a heartwarming love story. You'll love it as much as I did, I'm sure! This one is also an amazing audiobook!!! I can't recommend it enough to anyone who loves slow burns and relationships that develop over long distances.



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Review: Your Neighborhood Bastard

Your Neighborhood Bastard by Tarrah Anders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Have you read Noah's story? Your Neighborhood Bartender?

NO?????



Go get it, I'll wait for you…



Nah, I'm not waiting, and neither should you! You don't need to have read Noah's story first - his bite-sized story isn't important to Miles' story, well Noah's important to it but his love story with Valerie isn't - but I promise you will want to after you finish with Miles and Missy!

I'm pretty sure I love Miles even more than I loved Noah - and I loved watching his development into the Noah that we glimpse throughout Miles' story - and that's saying something!!! There was so much at play in this story and not all of it was how Missy and Miles finally came together - but the family dynamic that was between Miles and Noah and acknowledging that they were indeed family.



I think that was one of the best parts of the story - how Noah embraced having a brother, even when that brother had known for a while but hadn't been able to find the right way to share the news - and what a family man Miles is! He's there to take care of his mom, who is like many of our parents are now and doesn't want to see their roles reversed at first. She's the one who's supposed to take care of him, but he's there saying you need the help and I'm an adult. He's a good son, a good man, and he endeared himself to me in seconds.

And then there's Missy… Missy that Miles had loved in school but whom he'd thought he could never have. Missy who had been his friend until he heard her saying he was some poor charity case and not really her friend at all. Missy who left him reeling and sent him tumbling back to Mercy after he evaluated his life as he saw it.



Miles never thought he'd see her again. Hell, I'm sure Miles never thought that she'd wind up in the bar where he works and then they'd wind up with slightly intoxicated almost hate sex back at her place and HOLY HANNAH was that hot!!!!



This is what I love about Tarrah Anders - she gives you heart, she gives you a story, laughs and she gives you steamy scenes that light the pages on ffffiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrreeeeeee!!!! I'm amazed the pages weren't smoking! Those two were electric and while once they patched up their differences they took some time to tumble into bed again, once they did you knew that they were solid - and she did all of this in so few pages!!! This really is a bite-sized tale but it's totally worth your time!



Grab your copy of Your Neighborhood Bastard without thinking and enjoy every bumpy second of this romp! Can you go wrong? I don't think so!

Come hang out at the Neighborhood and see if you meet your match!

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Review: Loving Rebel

Loving Rebel by Taylor Delong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Again, he scrunched up his face. This time, it made me giggle. My laughter quickly faded when he turned away from me, his cheeks red.

"I'm sorry," I said. I hoped he wasn't mad at me.

He turned back to face me a moment later. "I like you. Want to be my friend?"

This book was a roller coaster of emotions. With so many obstacles in their way, that Jamie and Kyle managed to find a way to come together for their happily ever after was so rewarding! I don't think I could have expected this outcome from the way the Prologue started - don't tell me you just knew it, because I won't believe you!!!!



I have never read anything quite like Loving Rebel, and having never read anything by Taylor Delong I have happily found a new author to read and love on!

Sort of a Friends-to-Lovers, sort of a Second-Chance, sort of Childhood Sweethearts - this was a hard one to pin down for a trope, but it sort of fits in all of those. I think I loved it more because Jamison gave Kyle (I won't call her Katherine because she hates it almost as much as I do!!!) his heart on the first day of school and never really got it back. Not that he wanted it back, he only wanted her…

And when he gets her!!!! The pages seem to sizzle once they are finally together - and it's beautiful!



Except…



There were moments when I felt like the universe was out to get them. Even Kyle had a bad feeling, like something terrible was going to happen to them, for most of their time in their little bubble. It was almost proven right - things could have gone so much worse for them in that defining moment when the universe stepped in and stomped all over their happiness! But they survived, and when faced with emotional and physical fallout, they almost imploded but they found their way back to each other and to a stronger relationship because of it.

Favourite Lines -

I think it was seventh grade when I realized I loved Kyle; it may have been even earlier, since in some ways I felt like she'd always been my girl, the girl I loved.

"Don't get me wrong, I still love Kyle, but that's for you. Rebel is for me."

"Hand over your burdens, Rebel. It's my turn to finally help you carry them."

"I love you. First, most, best, last."

Lingering Thoughts -

1) There's only one here - I would love Jessa and Kevin's story. Any thoughts on giving us that too?



I really enjoyed this story. Loving Rebel was so much more than I was expecting and I know that you will love it too!



Grab your copy today, whether in KU or one clicking it, you can't go wrong!!! Go love up on Jamie and Kyle!

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