Rating: 2.5 Stars

Publisher: Emory Winters

Genre: Gay Paranormal Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Age Gap (Almost 15 Years), BDSM, Daddy Kink, Exhibitionism, NOT Mpreg, Omegaverse, Series, Shapeshifters (Fox), Small Town

Length: 242 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

This review has a couple of spoilers.

Keep that in mind if you plan to read the book.

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Blurb –

Welcome to Foxwood Hollow
In a world of fox shifters sits a small, quaint town where everyone knows your business. Often stifling, always safe and forever a place to call home.

Cooper
I was done hiding. Okay, I was working towards being done hiding.
For the first time in my life, I’d accepted who I was.
An alpha who liked other alphas, and a submissive one at that.
But then, I never expected the Daddy Dom of my dreams to be the guy who I’d been a tiny bit obsessed with ever since he’d returned to Foxwood Hollow.
Patrick Morgan was an enigma. A firm Dom with a gentle hand, yet walls so high they were impossible to scale.
But boy did I want to try…

Patrick
Cooper Bailey was a temptation I needed to stay away from.
My ex left me with more issues than Vogue, but mine were strictly of the trust variety, and a soft-hearted sub like Cooper didn’t need my baggage weighing him down.
And yet, everything about him called to me. Submissive to his core, desperate for guidance, and without a doubt one of the most beautiful people I’d ever met. Wanting him was dangerous. Having him? Out of the question… Right?
Cooper needed a version of me I thought had been buried in my past, but if anyone could squeeze through a crack in my walls, it might just be my little fox.

Review –

He’d looked so boyish. The size and appearance of a big alpha with the soul of a playful little fox.

Cooper, 23, is a rare type of fox alpha. Instead of being attracted to omegas, he’s attracted to other alphas. He’s alphasexual. Also, unlike most other alphas, he’s submissive. Every alpha he’s been with has been too rough, so he takes a chance and goes to a kink club. After being creeped out by a sleazy Dom, he’s rescued by Patrick Morgan, a man Cooper’s had a crush on forever. Patrick, 37, owns the diner in Foxwood, where Cooper goes to eat often. Patrick was introduced in A Den for Dylan (Foxwood Hollow, #1), Cooper’s brother’s book.

At the club, Patrick takes Cooper into a private room, and they have a Daddy/boy scene, Cooper’s first ever.

All of that was good. I loved the way Patrick took control, which is exactly what Cooper wanted and needed. This kind of starts something away from the club, with Patrick trying to take care of Cooper in other ways like encouraging him eat fruit, reading books to him because Cooper is dyslexic, and even giving him a cleaning schedule so he doesn’t get overwhelmed in his apartment. They eventually come to an understanding where they’ll do one scene a week at Patrick’s house, which includes sex, but it won’t go any further than the weekly Daddy/boy thing. No relationship, and it will have an expiration date.

All that was well and good. Both develop feelings, but Patrick has made it clear – multiple times – that it can’t go further than it has already. He’d been burned by a cheating ex years before, and he has no intention of putting himself in the position of getting hurt like that again.

Almost the entire book was, “I really want a relationship with Cooper, but because one other guy hurt me, I’m done with relationships forever.” It got so old, so fast.

Cooper is also keeping a secret. For the past several years a little fox has been coming up to Patrick early in the mornings while he’s on his back step having his morning coffee. Patrick is a fox shifter, so he obviously knows that the little fox that he’s poured his heart out to literally for years is not just a fox. They live in a tiny town. At no point did he get curious about who the fox was in his human form? The reader knows it’s Cooper, but Patrick doesn’t until long into the book.

Until the moment when Patrick discovers that Cooper is the little fox, I seriously loved him. He was the ultimate Daddy, even if he was stuck on the ex thing. He took very good care of Cooper both sexually and other ways. I could find exactly zero faults in him other than the ex thing.

Then he had to go and blow it. His blowing it had me knocking at least 1.5 stars off my rating, though the 2.5 I’m giving it is a stretch.

He did some serious Daddy no-nos.

One, he didn’t do the aftercare with Cooper after a pretty intense shibari demo at the kink club because he wanted to be alone after seeing the ex. Two, he said something in anger regarding something Cooper had told him in confidence.

There are some things you can’t overcome, and while the lack of aftercare was bad, what he said was worse. All good feelings I had for Patrick disappeared in an instant. I don’t care that he was angry. It was hurtful, and Cooper didn’t deserve that. He made good later, but not enough, in my opinion.

“I… I accepted too little from you.”

Yes, he did, and he deserved so much better.

Cooper was too precious for this world, too precious for me, but I was greedy and selfish, so I’d keep him anyway.

Yes, he most definitely was too precious for him.

I can’t not mention Cooper and Dylan’s alpha mother. I didn’t have an opinion one way or another in the first book, but I hated her in this one. It was no wonder Cooper had self esteem issues. I loved their omega stepmother, though.

Cooper is an alpha who is attracted to other alphas. At no point in the book did Cooper come across as an alpha in any way, shape, or form. Also, I’m all about people showing their emotions. I have three adult sons and we’ve taught them that it’s okay to show their feelings, not keep things bottled up. But Cooper cried on almost every single page of the book. At first, I understood, and I sympathized with him, and I thought it was sweet during certain sexual moments. But the amount of times it happened was serious overkill.

I loved seeing Dylan and Axel again, especially when itty bitty Dylan was threatening to beat up Patrick for hurting his big brother. I was hoping he’d at least get a couple of licks in, but alas, it was not to be. 😉

Overall, this could’ve been a really good book, but I simply could not get past the two things I mentioned above. Throughout almost all of it, I liked Patrick and Cooper together, even if Patrick kept up the thing in his head about the ex. I did feel like Cooper allowed way too much to slide. He needed to be the big alpha he was described as at least once and stand up for himself instead of blindly following Patrick. I get they were in a Daddy/boy relationship, but enough was enough. When he finally did stand up for himself, I feel like he still gave in too easy. He never should’ve forgiven Patrick for what he said in anger. Ever. You do not use somebody’s past trauma against them when they’re extremely vulnerable. You don’t use somebody’s past trauma against them ever. There’s no coming back from that.

The author wrote Cooper as a crying mess, not an established electrician who lives on his own, pays his own bills, and takes care of himself. In the case of what Patrick said, however, Cooper’s reaction was 100% justified. The only thing he did wrong, in my opinion, was allow Patrick back into his life.

A very generous 2.5 stars. It was a solid 4 stars until Patrick turned into an ass. I really hope the author sees all the reviews mentioning it. I’m not the only reviewer angry over what he said and the lack of aftercare. Certain things can be forgiven, but not something so cruel. It was a book killer for me, and the only reason it’s not getting 1 star is because of Cooper and the others.

I’m assuming Jack’s story is next. I may or may not read it when it’s published. This one kind of soured me a bit on this author for now.