Rating: 5 Stars

Publisher: Kelly Fox

Genre: Gay Erotic Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Grumpy/Sunshine, Erotic Romance, Humor, Opposites Attract, Single Dad, Series

Length: 306 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

Blurb –

Good fences do NOT make good neighbors, especially when that neighbor is a city boy with more dollars than sense.

Emery McAvoy is a walking disaster who should never be allowed to step foot on another ladder. Heck, I’d bet my favorite Golden Girls T-shirt that he rearranged his entire life because his ten-year-old daughter likes ponies.

It’s rather inconvenient, then, that he’s one of the hottest, sweetest men I’ve ever met. I regret looking him up on that dating app because now I have photographic evidence that he’s exactly my type.

Not that I’d ever fall for the city boy next door.

Rough Country is a grumpy sunshine romance that features a burnt-out city boy with a knack for trouble, a surly, brokenhearted cowboy with an enviable T-shirt collection, and a ten-year-old girl who loves horses, boots, and swirly skirts.

Review –

Emery is a successful businessman who spends more time working than anything else, and that includes sleeping and eating right. He’s officially burnt out, which is causing him to lash out at the staff for no reason at all. His best friend and business partner insists he take time off. A weeklong tropical vacation didn’t do it, so he decided a whole new start with him and his ten-year-old daughter Stevie in a new location might be better. He’s still the CEO of the company, but he’s now the new owner of a house in the country. He chose this particular location because of the writings of his favorite poet who describes the area so well he knew he wanted to live there.

Emery’s a city boy who literally knows nothing beyond what he can find on YouTube, which means he’s not exactly safe when he’s doing work on the house or outbuildings. This knowing nothing catches the attention of his new neighbor, Woody.

The first introduction doesn’t exactly go well.

I’ll be blunt. Woody is a jerk, and he stays that way pretty much throughout the whole book, except for with Stevie and Emery’s mother.

They may hate each other, but that doesn’t stop either man from lusting after the other. The lust on Woody’s part grows (snort) more as a result of his cousin finding Emery on a hookup app. Let’s just say that Woody didn’t have to wonder what he was getting if and when they finally had sex. 😉 The pictures left literally nothing to the imagination.

Emery doffed an imaginary cap, unaware that I’d fucked myself on a massive butt plug last night while staring at the screenshot I’d taken from his dating profile.

The two men bicker worse than old married couples. Everything finally comes to a head of sorts at a bar when Emery does everything in his power to get under Woody’s skin, and boy does he. Even then, it takes a major argument for them to finally (finally!) have sex.

“I can usually only handle one guy at a time, but if pissing off Woody doesn’t get him naked and under me in a reasonable amount of time, I might just give y’all a call.”

If you like wild and rough sex between two guys, this book is definitely for you. Once it starts, there’s a lot of it. I’ve read other reviews saying there’s too much sex in the book. I kind of agree, but it was okay.

The reason for Woody’s grumpiness comes out in the story. Only a month before Emery and his daughter moved next door, he’d been dumped by the former owner of their house. He was finding himself wanting Emery when the last thing he needed was to get mixed up with somebody else. Shane, the ex, taught him well not to trust, and not to fall in love. All it does is invite pain. It also made him believe that everything bad that happens is his fault, not the fault of others. This belief really hits home when there’s an emergency involving both Woody and Stevie, Emery’s little girl. What happened wasn’t Woody’s fault, but he was convinced that it was.

I absolutely adored young Stevie. She’s a little girly girl who’s all about sparkles and tutus and glitter. You can’t not love this child. Not only is she hilarious, she’s also way too smart for her own good. She has Woody and his cousin Rowdy wrapped around her fingers in no time at all.

As for Rowdy, I loved him. He’s hired by Emery to be a manager of sorts, which absolutely drives a very jealous Woody crazy. Rowdy becomes part of Emery’s little family. He even gets close to his mother, who I loved as well.

“You knew you wanted to marry Dad after one date?”

“No, I just knew I wanted to continue fucking him.”

“Grandma!”

Rowdy’s story is next. I actually found it first, but I didn’t want to jump into the middle of series. I’m glad I didn’t. Rowdy’s a very important part of this one. His love interest will be Kessler, Emery’s business partner and best friend.

The above-mentioned emergency is what finally brings Emery and Woody together beyond just crazy and wild sex. I’m not going to lie, parts of that had my little romantic heart crying like a baby. Which kind of brings me to a couple of minor things that bugged me in the story. Woody went from being a grumpy bastard to basically a crying mess during the second half of the book. I’m not saying that a man crying is a bad thing. It definitely isn’t. It was just very difficult for me to see the rough and grumpy man – who had literally been that way on almost every single page until then – doing a lot of crying, especially in front of Emery before they officially got together. Even so, that doesn’t change my love for the book.

Overall, this book was fantastic. I thought I’d have a problem with Woody being mean all the time, but I didn’t. Honestly, I kind of understood it to an extent. Another thing I thought I’d have a problem with is the southern speak. My lack of love for southern speak in books has been on every single bio of mine since I started reviewing. It’s nice to hear, but it barely carries over in print. That was the case here with Woody a couple of times, but my love for the rest of the book had me overlooking it.

There’s a super sweet and touching epilogue that had me saying, “Aww!” while also getting me all kinds of misty-eyed.

Rowdy and Kessler’s story is next. They were introduced in Rough Country, which was funny. They start bantering right off.

This is my first by this author.