Rating: 3.5 Stars

Publisher: Jacki James

Genre: Gay Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Age Gap (14 years), Daddy/boy, Father’s Best Friend, Opposites Attract, Romance, Series

Length: 400 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

Blurb –

My father’s best friend is totally off limits. Too bad the sexy firefighter is everything I ever wanted in a Daddy.

My friends and I get together once a month to drink wine and talk about our newest, hottest book boyfriends. And if it’s up to me to pick the book, that boyfriend will be a Daddy every single time.

But book boyfriends are safe, and I’m way too cautious to find a real-life Daddy. Besides, why would a strong, confident man like that want a geeky librarian like me?

Enter Keith, my father’s best friend, who happens to be a super hot firefighter from Station 69. The same station my dad works at.

My father won’t like it. And unlike all those Daddies I read about, Keith is a real man who rushes into fires and risks injury. It’s stressful enough to make me wonder if I should just stick with my book boyfriends.

But book boyfriends can’t make you hot cocoa, give you forehead kisses, or keep you warm at night. For those things, only Daddy Keith will do.

Can I handle a firefighter Daddy, or will I get burned?

Controlled Burn is the first book in the Station 69 series about the brave men who fight fires, rescue puppies, and fall in love in the fictional town of Vesper, Texas.

Review –

I love Jacki James’ books. I’ve read over a dozen of them, and no doubt that number will grow over time. I always feel the connection with her characters – until now. Throughout Controlled Burn, I was waiting… and waiting… to feel that spark between Keith and Caleb. It was so bad that I almost DNFd the book at around the halfway mark. I forced myself to keep reading, and it did get better in the second half. I even got a little misty-eyed a few times. Even so, I needed a bit of that in the earlier pages.

This has a 14 year age gap between the two main characters. I seek out books with age gaps more often than not, so I had high hopes for Keith and Caleb. I don’t know if it was simply too much day to day stuff, or if it was Caleb’s dad, or maybe it was something else… but something kept me from feeling these guys together until way too long in the book.

Keith, forty, has been best friends with Robert, forty-seven, for decades. They are both firefighters at Station 69, where Keith’s father only recently retired as the chief. Both men are known as ‘get in and get gone’ when it comes to their dating life; Keith with men, and Robert with women. Robert was married once but his profession was too much, so his now ex-wife took their son (Caleb) and moved across the country when Caleb was young. Now Caleb is all grown up at twenty-six, and is back in town working as a librarian.

I loved the brotherhood and sisterhood of Station 69. I also liked Caleb and his friends, who are in a monthly book club together, The Rainbow Romance Reader’s Club. In the book club, they take turns picking books. Caleb’s picks are always Daddy kink books. He’s had so many ‘book boyfriend Daddies’ that he’s very curious about the lifestyle in the real world. He ends up going to a Daddy/boy night at a local gay club. The problem is that he goes alone and a bunch of guys are sidling up to him before he even makes it fully inside the bar. As Keith would say later, “You’re every Daddy’s wet dream.”

A jerk customer – a Daddy wannabe who just wants control – starts hitting on Caleb. This guy doesn’t believe in the word no. He’s already had to be pulled away from other boys at the club. Who should come to Caleb’s rescue? That would be a very shocked Keith, who had no idea that Caleb was into Daddy kink. Caleb makes Keith promise not to tell Robert anything, a promise that Keith does keep until the end, though it doesn’t take much for him to figure it out on his own. He knows Keith is a Daddy.

All of that was good. Not long after that night, Keith shows up at Caleb’s place and offers to be a temporary Daddy, just to see if that’s what Caleb really wants. All he knows so far is what he’s read in books. He may not like the real thing.

Talk about moving at warped speed. A week or so before Keith only saw Caleb as his best friend’s son that he’d only seen a handful of times as an adult. Being a temporary Daddy wouldn’t have been so bad for me. What was bad were the text exchanges between the two men that started almost immediately. They were a little too comfortable, too familiar for guys who barely know each other.

It was way too much way too fast, in my opinion. They hadn’t even had a chance to form any type of connection before Keith was being Daddy-like in a very familiar way.

And now we come back to Robert, Caleb’s father and Keith’s best friend. Not only are Keith and Robert close outside of work, but they spend a lot of time together working for the fire station. Going into any type of relationship with Robert’s son could destroy decades of friendship. Sure, they kept it a secret at first, but something like this doesn’t stay secret for long. Robert knows Keith better than most. He knows he’s a player who has refused to get into any type of relationship outside of quick hookups since his last long-term partner took off. They’ve confided in each other as best friends do. In the beginning, I guess it was okay because it didn’t cross over from texts and occasional visits to anything sexual. Once the sex started, it was game over, and I’m not just referring to Keith and Caleb’s ‘just friends, pretend Daddy and boy’ relationship. Let’s just say that Robert handled their relationship as well as can be expected.

Something serious happens later in the book that brings everybody together, and they go on to live happily-ever-after. Well, not quite. Yes, they get their HEA, but there’s an arsonist out there who has his or her sights on hurting firefighters. That person’s quick POV was on page at the end.

I also felt that Controlled Burn at 400 pages was just too much. I’ve noticed that a lot of books are coming in at 375 to 400-plus pages these days. While I don’t mind reading a longer book on occasion, I do when I’m feeling like these particular books could tell the whole story in half that amount. I understand how Kindle Unlimited works with page counts and royalties for the authors, so I do understand the why of it all. That’s not a dig at the authors. I just would prefer the stories being told in less, but that’s just me.

Overall, it was okay. Not my favorite by the author by any means, but it did get much better toward the end.