Rating: 3 Stars

Publisher: Kelly Fox

Genre: Gay Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Age Gap, Bi-Awakening?* GFY?*, Grumpy/sunshine, Opposites Attract, Romance, Series

Length: 298 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

*Asterisks because I genuinely don’t know.

This review has spoilers.

Blurb –

I kissed a man. While drunk on mezcal. This is fine.

You don’t hafta tell me how lucky I am—I’ve got a thriving dude ranch, a growing empire, and a son who keeps me grounded. Sure, my land manager and my ex-wife won’t stop nagging me about my busted knee, but I can handle a little pain.

What I can’t handle? This inconvenient attraction to my new friend. My new male friend.

Skylar—who, thankfully, left his sugar baby days behind—is launching a mobile orthopedic practice out here in the Texas Hill Country. I offered to help because I’m a good guy and a sharp businessman. Not because he’s gorgeous, funny, and the only person who can get me to admit my knee is an absolute disaster.

It gets a whole lot harder to lie to myself after I kiss him. Because that wasn’t just the mezcal talkin’.

Now, I can’t stop thinking about him—or wishing we’d gone further—and my “straight” identity is looking more questionable by the second.

I can handle multiple businesses, interfering employees, and the occasional runaway giraffe. But falling for a man? That might just be the thing that cracks my once rigid exterior.

Gone Country is a friends-to-lovers, existential crisis romance featuring a stubborn cowboy with a failing grip on his “straight” identity, the flirty nurse practitioner he can’t stop thinking about, and a well-meaning friend who picks the worst possible moment to walk in.

Review –

I’m having a hard time reviewing this book. I read and enjoyed the first two of the series, Rough Country and Pure Country. I was eager for this one to be published. I ended it feeling a little let down, to be honest. I did read it the day it came out, and I typed the review the next day; the review that I’ve sat on. I’ve sat on it because I kept hoping I’d remember something in the story that might warrant a higher rating. Unfortunately, that did not happen.

I simply did not like Kit. Like… at all. There’s grumpy and then there’s this guy. He has a lot of pain in his knee that he refuses to get treated, but he wasn’t just grumpy because of the pain. He was an outright bastard to Sky more than once.

Sky didn’t deserve it.

Sky and Kit were introduced in Pure Country. I’d already fallen in love with Sky, so I was eager to see him get his HEA. Hell, I was eager to see him and Kit together because so much was made about the age gap – I think it was 10 years? – and we know how much I love a good age gap book. 😉 I also automatically assumed – because of how Kit was described – that Kit was this MUCH older man. He was described as old.

You know how old he was? Late thirties.

Seriously.

Dear God, I must be ancient.

Moving on.

Skylar is an orthopedic nurse practitioner. Kit is kind of bullied into letting Sky look at his knee. This begins a friendship of sorts that turns into much more later. Skylar is also a sugar baby, and he’s not the least bit ashamed of it. He loves nice things and he has a good little nest egg for when he walks away from it, something he does not long into the book. His latest sugar daddy turns out to be trouble, but all that wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.

The not so very straight Kit is seeing Sky in a different light. He’s shocked that he’s actually attracted to him. He chalks that up to Skylar being more than a little flamboyant and feminine with his long nails, high heels, and makeup. He always did like a very feminine woman – his words, not mine. He’d been married to Cynthia who later came out as a lesbian. Cynthia and her wife Brandy now live on the same property as Kit. I liked them both.

To make a very long story short, there’s a drunken kiss that Kit totally plays off with, ‘Well, it wouldn’t have happened had I been sober’ even if he never came right out and said it. Later, they play around some when Kit is totally sober, only to be interrupted by Rowdy as Kit is having a massive meltdown over the ‘am I gay?’ and ‘what will people think?’ and ‘my God, what if somebody finds out I’ve been with a man?’

What.

A.

Jerk.

Skylar was much too good for him.

Kit’s existential crisis goes on for way too long. One thing I did love is that Skylar didn’t put up with his nonsense. If Kit was being a jerk, Sky was coming right back at him, putting him in his place.

“You see, Kit, I don’t need you to do anything for me. I don’t need you, period. Do you get that?”

“I do.”

He started off again, then turned on his heel and got back up in my face.

“And I tell you what, Kit Baker. I am tired. Tired. Of men dismissing me, ignoring me, or thinking they know what’s best for me. I can’t fucking stand it a second longer.”

~~~

“Get in the fucking car, Kit. And shut the fuck up,” he said, angrily gesturing to the passenger side. “I don’t want to hear another word come out of your country-fried mouth, or I swear to God, I will leave you on the side of the road.”

He should’ve left him on the side of the road. Just sayin’.

I just could not find it in me to like Kit even a little bit. Honestly, the only good things I can say about him is that he’s a great father to his twenty-one year old autistic son, Reed, and he’s a good businessman.

Reed was a blast. He’s nonverbal, but he can sign and he can communicate via an app on his iPad.

By the time Kit got his head out of his ass about Skylar, I was over him, and I was over the story as a whole. The only reason I’m rating the book as high as I am is because of Skylar, Reed, and some secondary characters that are in the Rebel Sky Ranch series that I’ve read two of so far. <— I read those in between the second book of this series and when this one was released on the 16th of April.

I loved seeing Sam again, who is as perfect of a character as Sky is. I’ll be finishing up that series at some point, but I did know who most of the characters were when I started Gone Country, unlike when I read the two before it.

In the other books by this author I’ve read, including those in this series, I’ve been a bit iffy about the southern speak. In the first two it wasn’t so bad. In Gone Country, it was major overkill. Hafta instead of have to throughout the entire book was the main annoyance for me. Yes, I know it’s set in Texas, and yes, I know the author lives in Texas. I get what she was trying to do, but I feel it didn’t come across as it should have. I’m from lower Alabama (before anybody @ me for commenting on the southern speak), and I’ve always said that it’s good to hear but doesn’t usually carry over in print. That’s my opinion. Also, Sky’s nickname of Cowboy for Kit was used so many times I lost count in only a few pages.

One thing I did like was how this book wasn’t just sex, sex, and even more sex. I’m not knocking sex scenes in books (hello! look at my reading history), but there can be too much of a good thing. It took a little while for Kit and Sky to get there. When they did, it wasn’t a constant thing. They did actually take time to have conversations; conversations when Kit was mostly being an ass, but hey, they did talk. 😉

Overall, the book was an okay addition to the series. Unfortunately, when I find myself seriously disliking one of the main characters, I can rarely come back from that. That was totally the case here. Other readers obviously see something I didn’t if the great reviews and ratings are to go by. You know the saying about how no two people read the same book. That definitely applies here.