Rating: 4 Stars

Publisher: Rivera Publishing

Genre: Gay Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Age Gap (6 Years), Humor, Opposites Attract, Romance, Series

Length: 196 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

TW: There’s quite a bit of medical gore described in detail in the book. If you’re squeamish, this book might not be for you.

Blurb –

A forced proximity MM medical romance where a billionaire playboy trades his penthouse for the graveyard shift… and his grumpy boss is the real emergency.

Spite is a powerful sedative. But in the ER, adrenaline is the only drug that matters.

Preston York has spent his entire life as the “Spare” of the York dynasty: the fun one, the flighty one, the one expected to do nothing more than look good in a tuxedo. But when his older brother Maxwell, the Golden Boy Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery, makes a bet that Preston wouldn’t last a week in the real world, Preston decides to prove him wrong. He trades his silk sheets for scrubs, his brunch dates for the graveyard shift, and his dignity for a pair of rubber gloves.

He’s ready for the blood, the guts, and the exhaustion. He is not ready for his boss.

Dr. Lucas Silva clawed his way up from a fourth-floor walk-up in Queens to become the Chief Resident of St. Jude’s. He runs on caffeine, grit, and the crushing weight of his family’s expectations. He has zero patience for tourists, especially not the entitled, devastatingly handsome son of the Chairman of the Board who wears Gucci loafers to a trauma activation.

Luke is convinced Preston is just slumming it before retreating to the safety of the boardroom. Preston is determined to prove he’s more than a last name.

But navigating residency is impossible when the entire York clan is breathing down your neck. Between Maxwell micromanaging from the surgical wing, Jax O’Connell treating the trauma bay like a contact sport, and a mother who tries to bribe hospital administration into treating her dog, Preston is fighting a war on all fronts.

As the late nights blur into early mornings and the shared on-call room gets smaller by the hour, the friction between the Spare and the Chief Resident sparks into something neither of them signed up for. But when the family legacy offers Preston a golden parachute back to his old life, he has to decide: is he playing doctor, or is he finally ready to be real?

The prognosis is chaotic.

A laugh-out-loud romantic comedy and direct sequel to Bedside Manner. Featuring the return of Maxwell and Jax, an eccentric billionaire family with no boundaries, a grumpy-sunshine pairing, and enough medical drama to require a crash cart. Perfect for fans of forced proximity, slow-burn tension, and rich boy fish-out-of-water romance.

Review –

Preston was introduced in the first book, Bedside Manner. He was Maxwell’s younger brother by 13 years. He was 18 throughout the book, but 20 during an epilogue of sorts at the end. In Conflict of Interest, he’s 23. Preston decided to go to medical school out of pure spite. He was very smart, having graduated from Yale at 19. The spite came from Maxwell and Jax joking that Preston would never survive in the real world, especially in a busy hospital.

“You’re going to medical school?” Maxwell coughs, wiping his mouth. “You? Preston, you finished a Business degree by 19 just so you wouldn’t have to take a math class on a Friday. You hate effort.”

He got into medical school, and now he’s a resident under Chief Resident Lucas (Luke) Silva. He may have done it all out of spite, but now he’s a good doctor, though he doesn’t always dress the part. Gucci shoes don’t exactly belong in a busy emergency room.

Luke is not just the Chief Resident, he’s also the son of Mama Ortiz, the charge nurse. I don’t think I mentioned Mama Ortiz in my review of the last book, but I should have. She was the one and only person in the hospital that Alistair, Preston’s father, was terrified of. Hell, everybody was terrified of her. While Preston came from wealth, Luke had been a scholarship student. His mother had worked her fingers to the bone, so to speak, to ensure he got his education and became the doctor he is now.

“I am Dr. Silva. This is Nurse Ortiz. She runs this floor. If you annoy me, I will make you do rectal exams until your fingers prune. If you annoy her, your body will never be found. Do you understand?”

Preston, 23, and Luke, 29, clash from day one. Luke is convinced that Preston is the little rich kid who doesn’t actually want to put in the work. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Preston may not be a fan of blood and gore, but he’s very good at his job. He can talk down patients unlike anybody else in the hospital. Growing up with Catherine and Alistair as his parents, he learned the art of b.s. from birth. It was a skill that worked wonders in his job as a resident.

“You’re a natural. You’re a Sociopath Whisperer.”

It’s a really slow burn with these guys. They work together, spend time together, and Luke discovers that Preston isn’t at all like he expected. There’s not much more than a heated kiss during the first half of the book, but they do hook up not long after. There’s a gala that Preston talks Luke into attending with him, not unlike the Christmas Eve Eve dinner party that Max and Jax were forced to attend in the first book. Each involved buying a suit or tux and having to spend time with the crazy and eccentric York family and the other so-called elite of society. There was also a golf tournament when Preston hated golf and Luke had never played in his life.

I liked Luke and Preston together, but there simply wasn’t enough relationship time. There’s a lot of working together at the hospital, but very little emotional stuff. With Maxwell and Jax, it was almost immediate. Granted, their emotional stuff was mostly mutual hate in the beginning, but it was still something. I needed more with Luke and Preston. It was nice when they finally did come together as a couple, but it just took too long for it to happen, in my opinion.

Alistair was a little more out there in this book than in the first one. In Bedside Manner he was funny. In Conflict of Interest, he was mostly just silly. Catherine was the typical bitchy mother that she was before. I will admit that she was funny at one point when she tried to get Luke to treat her dog that she brought into the hospital. More family members were introduced toward the end, but there wasn’t a whole lot of time dedicated to them.

Other parts were funny as well. There was Mr. Bromley, who showed up often with things shoved where they were definitely NOT supposed to be, most notably his Magic 8 Ball. Mama Ortiz had a few funny moments, and thankfully she wasn’t the overbearing mother that I expected her to be. Don’t get me wrong, she had her moments, but they didn’t last long.

One thing bugged me to no end. The word tourist. It was said so many times in the book that I lost count. Also, the series is set in New York City, but there’s a lot of non-American English spelling, much more than in the first book. To me, it was just odd seeing ‘chequebook’ and other similar words when parts of the book were set in Queens.

I don’t have a problem with the different spelling in the real world – my best friend and blog partner is from Australia – but I do when a book is set in America but written as if it’s not.

Overall, I liked it. Not as much as the first one, but it was still a nice book. I still loved Preston, but I never could get a good feel for Luke.

The next book is Wedding Manner. It’s about Jax and Maxwell’s wedding and all the craziness leading up to it. I will read it, just not right now. As much as I love Maxwell and Jax, I need a break from the York family shenanigans for a while. The Twin Clause, another book with Preston and Luke, will be out in October, according to Amazon. As with Wedding Manner, I know I’ll read it at some point.

4 stars.