Title: ⟫ Dirty Love
Author: ⟫ Bethany Winters
Rating: ⟫ 5/5
Blurb: ⟫ In a small town like ours, you’re either straight or you keep your mouth shut.
Being gay would be dirty.
Touching the guy who’s been your little brother since you were three would be dirty.
Falling in love with him would be even worse.
I protect him because it’s my job.
I resist him because I have to.
But when one night leads to two and two nights lead to more, lines are blurred and morals are tossed and my sanity takes a walk.
Now we’re risking everything we have for something we know we shouldn’t want.
And the only thing we’ll have left is each other.
This is a 60,000 word, M/M, dark high school, stepbrothers-to-lovers romance with themes some readers might find offensive.
Complete standalone with a HEA and no cliffhanger.
Review: ⟫ Have you ever had the hankering to read something dirty/bad/wrong? Like, the kind of book that you’d hide from your Mom even at the grand old age of *
well over 21*, full of red flags, drugs and just downright WTF? Okay, then you might be looking for this book.
To be fair, our male leads are stepbrothers so the whole incest thing isn’t quite there, but they were brought up together from the age of three so there’s that.
Kade is the older brother – by a whole three months I believe – and has been protecting Nicky from everything from a young age. Everything includes a father who murdered their mother and regularly beats Kade – adding being gay to that would paint a target on Nicky’s back that even Kade couldn’t protect him from. Kade is protective, possessive, obsessive and sounds hot in all the wrong ways, including how he treats his on-again/off-again girlfriend and the animalistic way he makes money by bare-knuckle fighting on the weekends.
Nicky isn’t a dreamer – life would have beaten that out of him years ago – but he is much more in touch with his emotions than Kade. And from a young age, his emotions have fixed on Kade as his safe place. His everything. He’s not ashamed of being gay or being in love with his brother, but he is understandably scared.
The warnings about this book being dark were not kidding – there is no fade to black when it comes to the violence and drug-taking, and that might not be to everyone’s taste.
I was
so in the mood for this book and it didn’t fail to deliver in any way. I didn’t care about things that I might ordinarily nit-pick because I was too busy devouring the whole book in one sitting. I picked it up this morning and read it immediately and when I finished, I was literally sitting there with a huge grin of satisfaction on my face. The sex scenes were hot and steamy; the whole bantering, snarky vibe between Kade and Nicky was so my cup of tea, and how the story was handled worked for me on every level.
Especially when we meet the boys’ uncle.
I’ve grabbed the other book by the author that I could find even though it’s M/F which I haven’t really had any luck with this year because I really loved the style of writing and wanted to read more.
If after reading the warnings – and other reviews – you think you might want to take a chance on this book, I don’t think you’ll regret it!
