Once again Tania Joyce has delivered an emotional read, pulling on the heartstrings from the very start.
After meeting the guys from the Flintlocks in Scarred Strings and knowing what they had been through with the loss of one of their bandmates, it is now time for them to find someone to fill in the space that he left in the band. It’s not only hard for them to replace him, but hard for the person coming into the band to feel they belong and to live up to expectations. And so it is for Lewis who is given the opportunity to play with them and make his dreams come true.
Lewis fits with the guys immediately, but he’s given goals he needs to achieve to keep moving on with them and he’s terrified of messing up. Then he meets Cole’s sister Tia, who has returned to LA after an accident ended her stunt career. Not only does he not want to mess up by getting involved with her, but Lewis has always known he was gay and has never been attracted to a woman before. I felt his struggle as he tried to come to terms with the attraction he was feeling that grew stronger the more time they spent around each other. I read a lot of MM romance novels, where a guy who has always believed he was straight, is suddenly attracted to another man, and they go through their own struggles with this, so it was interesting to read from a different angle. I believe sexuality isn’t always static and can change throughout our lives, for me it is also the person, not the gender that is necessarily the thing that is attractive. But I fully empathised with what Lewis went through when confronted with this totally off-the-wall attraction for Tia.
While I really liked and empathised with Lewis, I didn’t take to Tia as well in this story. I couldn’t connect with her as I did with Lewis and the previous characters in Tania’s books. Even when she said she’d step back and give Lewis space, I felt she didn’t do this and she pushed him in her own way with all the little things she did to flirt with him. I did feel for her that she’d lost the job she was passionate about and now needed to figure out where her life was going, this is a hard thing to come to terms with and when you’ve only ever had one dream, well to lose it would be devastating.
The relationship between Lewis and Tia once they decide to pursue something was full of off-the-chart chemistry, fun times and serious times, while being an emotional up and down ride for them both to achieve their HEA. I’m glad they both had the support from the guys in the band, I really loved how they fully embraced Lewis as one of theirs and stood by him through everything.
I’m looking forward to Cole and Slip’s stories in future books.
About the book
He’s lost his band, his lover and his grandfather – the friends and family who’d accepted his lifestyle choices.
She’s lost her career, the love of her life and after a freak accident has to accept she’ll never be the same.
A chance audition for The Flintlocks could change his life.
A move across the country could be the fresh start he needs.
She needs to find her way in the world again.
But she’s stuck in a new TV show…in a city that she never wanted to return to.
When these two broken souls meet, will they cause more havoc to their damaged hearts? Oh…hell yeah!
This is a love-is-love, gay-to-bisexual romance. The majority of the story is a MF slow burn, angsty, steamy, sexy heart-wrenching rockstar romance. If you aren’t open-minded to all forms of love and you can’t handle intense emotion with all the feel this book may not be for you.
Genre/Tropes: Rockstar. New Adult. Opposites attract. Bisexual. Fish-out-of-water. Forced proximity. Broken souls.
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NOTE: Paperbacks will hopefully also be live by release date and will be available via Amazon.
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