Rating: 3.5 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novella
Cracking Ice is a serial that is being published in installments as the Rules to Break series and the episodes are intended to be read in order.
Carry was transferred to the Hell’s Flames after he was released from his former hockey team due to alpha/omega politics. Carry is an omega and is expected to simply find a mate. But Carry wants to play hockey and he’s tired of how omegas are seen and treated by society. When he touched his alpha teammate, Keenan, it set off a chain of events between them, eventually triggering Carry’s heat. However, the men still don’t want to admit the attraction is more than pheromones.
Keenan also just wants to play hockey. He doesn’t want to find a mate and he takes suppressors to resist omegas, but nothing can block out Carry. Keenan has also only been attracted to women and the presence of Carry and his scent is more than a little unsettling. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, he doesn’t understand Carry, and he’s not even sure he wants too, because being the true mate of a male omega is way more than Keenan can wrap his head around. The men are completely in sync and their pairing can be legendary, but they both have a lot to work through before that can even be close to a reality.
The first episode in this series introduced us to Keenan and Carry and their worlds of being an alpha and an omega. Keenan has long insisted that he is not attracted to men and the mere presence of Carry has been unsettling. The men are linked on the ice, as they can feel and read each other, and ever since Carry went into heat that has only gotten more intense. But they really don’t want to have anything to do with each other off the ice.
There are a lot of politics surrounding alphas and omegas and Carry trusted the wrong person on his last team and he now can’t trust any alpha. Keenan isn’t aware of what happened and he thinks that Carry just doesn’t like him even after Keenan got Carry through his heat. So, the men don’t like each other, yet they can’t stay away.
I like the idea of this series, but there is something off in the delivery for me. I often feel like the characters talk in circles and what should be presented as fairly simple takes pages and pages to get across and even then it’s not always clear. There is a lot of talk about compatibility and Keenan insisting that he’s not attracted to men, which is just one hurdle this pair has to overcome. Carry wants to be able to choose who he is with. He needs an alpha during heat, but he doesn’t want it to be dictated by scent and Keenan is the one that calls to him and he tries to fight it. This episode offers one small mention of contraception, but it’s still not clear if it is possible for Carry to get pregnant and I would prefer if the world building here was more thorough.
While the delivery and overall presentation of the story is a little off for me and keeps me somewhat at a distance, there is a lot of good stuff here and I’m certainly interested in how these guys will get overcome their obstacles and I will look for the next episode.
