Rating: 3.25 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | All Romance | Amazon UK
Length: Novel
Mathew Chance grew up as a throwaway kid. Bounced from foster home to foster home, he finally settled with a foster mom who actually cared about him, only to find himself timed out by the system and forced to move on. Determined to never worry again about keeping a roof over his head, Mathew works two jobs, sacrificing sleep and relationships, in order to get there. Then fate decides to throw Asher Mulgrew in his path.
Asher is a wealthy divorce lawyer who’s let life pass him by while he built a successful practice. Despite having a supportive sister and an adoring niece in his life, Asher is lonely. When he meets the sexy bartender, Mathew, Asher is instantly drawn to the younger man. Yet age is only a minor obstacle for Asher to battle as he tries to break through the wall Mathew has built around his heart.
This really was a sweet romance story about a young man who has never been given a break his entire life. Rejected by his birth family, his life was a revolving door from foster home to foster home. The only thing he’s managed to carry with him is his friendship with a fellow foster kid, Kenneth. Now, age 28, Mathew’s been killing himself slowly by depriving himself of sleep and social life in favor of saving every dime in order to ensure he has a place to call home. His only problem is that the years of deprivation are beginning to take their toll.
Asher, on the other hand, has managed to get to a place in life where he no longer has to struggle financially, only to find out that he’s 45 years old and has no one special in his life. When he meets Mathew at a bar, he’s instantly attracted to the much younger man, except he thinks the attraction is a one-way street.
Enter in his meddling sister and her good intentions of helping Asher find someone to share his life with. When Mathew collapses at work, she brings him to Asher’s house to recuperate. Before long, the two cannot keep their hands off each other. While book’s blurb mentions kink, the sex between the two is fairly vanilla with a just a hint of spice, mainly in the form of pillowtalk and no action.
As Asher learns more about Mathew and his past, he decides to use his resources to help Mathew find out who he really is by tracking down his birth mother – which may set Mathew up for a second rejection – so that he can begin the healing process.
One issue I had with this story was that it was at times very confusing to read because characters were constantly be thrown at readers during the first few chapters. While I am okay with the multitude of secondary characters, there were so many names – both first and last – of characters that seemed like there wasn’t really a point in knowing. It made it difficult for the story to flow smoothly since I kept wondering if each of these characters was somehow important to the story, when in fact most of them were not.
The second issue I had with this book is that it never felt as if I really knew who the main characters were and they were kind of flat at times. For instance, we don’t know really anything about what either of these characters look like until several chapters in when we find out bits and pieces when they meet each other. It makes it hard for a reader to connect with faceless characters.
Overall, while I loved the plot of the book, I had a lot of trouble staying focused on the story because as a reader I need an author to create me a visual picture to go along with the words. I also prefer stories where the secondary characters stay secondary and I don’t really have needless information about them to clutter up my mind.
