AUTHOR: ⟫ Shae Bryan
RATING: ⟫ 2.5/5
BLURB: ⟫ It was never meant to be more.
But somehow it was, and suddenly we were two halves of a whole.
Even if it was forbidden.
Oliver Scott swept me off my feet and flipped my world upside down, only to break my heart. When my mother died, I told him I wanted nothing to do with him, that he was dead to me.
I lost her because of him.
Somewhere along the way, Oliver needed the drugs more than he needed me. And I paid for the consequences of his actions.
The problem is, even through the pain of his mistake and my hate for him, something deeper still lingers between us.
A second chance was never in the cards for us, until it was. But my feelings of betrayal still simmer in the background, making it hard to forgive him.
I’m gambling with my sanity, knowing he could ruin me.
The worst part?
I want him to.
Because I want nothing more than to make him mine.
It’s always been him.
This is a stepbrothers MM romance.
REVIEW: ⟫ I found this book following a recommendation in a Facebook group. The author is new to me and I was interested in the premise. The fact that they were stepbrothers and grew up together from the age of ten was the least of my issues with this book. I guess I was expecting there to be more explanation of their relationship and how it developed – instead, there was pretty much an insta-love between them when they met, with one MC identifying as gay whilst the other one stubbornly refused to accept that he was at least bi.
Hunter was, to me, an awful character. I kinda understood his desire not to lose his father’s love but the way he used people, especially women, was just abhorrent. He had numerous girlfriends because he wanted to be seen as a ‘man’, treating them as disposable and less than human. He knew what he was doing – with one long-term girlfriend, he couldn’t climax, knew that this was making her insecure and yet continued to date and sleep with her. At one stage, he has sex with her specifically so that Ollie can hear them together through the wall – that is just so freaking awful to do to someone. She was less than human, just a means to taunt his stepbrother. The way he broke up with her and treated her afterwards was somehow even worse.
Ollie was at least relatively honest in what he was doing. He accepted the loss of his father’s love, knew that what was going on between he and Hunter couldn’t carry on, and turned to drugs. It was self-destructive but I would say much less toxic than Hunter’s behaviour. I’m trying to see past the fact that Ollie painted Hunter naked and sold the painting without Hunter’s permission because he at least obscured Hunter’s face in the painting.
The 2.5 rating is because the descriptions of the hold drugs had on Ollie seemed to be accurate and made made me feel some sympathy for him. I also liked Ollie’s sponsor who was insistent that he needed to concentrate on his sobriety. The background cast of Hunter’s team-mates were almost as bad as him, but at least they weren’t homophobic. I finished this because I wanted them out of my head, not because I wanted them to have a happily ever after.
