Rating: 4.5 Stars

Publisher: Self-Published

Tags: Bisexual/OFY Romance, Dark, Psychological, Gritty, Age Gap. TW: Death, Graphic Murder, Drug Trade, Substance Abuse by a Secondary Character, Family of Origin Issues, MC Power Imbalance

Lenght: 430 Kindle Pages

Reviewer: Karen

Purchase At: author’s page, amazon 

Blurb:

A deal made to survive turns into a dangerous obsession.

Knox Wolfe learned early on how to survive: keep your guard high, your debts low, and never bow to anyone. But above all—trust no one. It’s a rule that’s saved his life more than once. For years, it worked, until Stockton’s streets stopped playing fair. When he witnesses something he was never meant to see, survival means facing an impossible choice: run or make a deal with the devil himself.

Dominic Rivera owns Stockton. He’s rich, powerful, and used to getting exactly what he wants. When he offers Knox a deal in exchange for silence and loyalty, refusal isn’t an option. Now, Knox finds himself answering to the city’s most ruthless man.

What starts as control twists into something darker—hungrier. Dominic doesn’t just crave Knox’s compliance; he wants complete surrender.

Knox tells himself it’s still about survival, but every glance and dangerous touch says otherwise. He’s not gay. Neither is Dominic. But obsession doesn’t play by the rules, and what began as a bargain turns into something neither of them saw coming.

HARD BARGAIN is a dark, high-heat MM romance packed with dangerous attraction, raw obsession, and a love story that blurs every line.

Tropes & Themes: Double Bi Awakening ∣ Age Gap ∣ Power Imbalance ∣ Hate to Lovers ∣ Morally Gray MC ∣ Medium Burn ∣ HEA

Review:

Knox Wolfe is twenty-two and lives in Stockton. He also works at a local service station, has a couple of good friends, Miguel and Logan. Then there’s Tara who is his reliable friend with benefits. He can lean on her and she doesn’t judge. His mother has substance and alcohol abuse problems, mental health concerns, although it isn’t called that in the book. Knox always tries to be forgiving about his mother, passing her behaviour off as ‘she’s unwell.’ He’s been parenting her for years. His now deceased father’s emotional poison still impacts him. One night on his way home, Knox accidently stumbles across a man being executed. The man who pulled the trigger is Dominic Rivera, a powerful crime figure in Stockton and surrounds. Knox initially doesn’t know this but what he’s smart enough to know is his life is now in the balance. 

Dominic would usually kill someone like Knox because he’s now a loose thread. However, Knox doesn’t show he’s squeamish. He doesn’t bargain or promise things he can’t give. Dominic likes that. He wants to see if he can use this ‘kid’ in some way. That’s their meet-cute, folks.

“You walk out of here alive only because I allow it. Not a word to anyone,” he said, each syllable measured. “One of my men will take you home so we know exactly where to find you.”

Then, with the same awful calm, he said, “And Knox… you owe me now.”

Where Knox’s life is rundown, just like the apartment he shares with his mother, Dominic has nice accommodation, clearly crime pays, but he still lives a life on the edge: Rule the streets. Supply drugs. Launder money. Own clubs, including strip joints. Have people within local authorities on your payroll to sign off on illegalities. Be ruthless – kill or be killed. When you’re at the top of a violent underworld food chain, nearly everyone can be your opposition. He doesn’t allow for any weakness. What Dominic notices very quickly about Knox is that he’s fairly street smart. He passes a couple of tests without getting killed. He also proves to have a way of reading people’s tells. Like whether they’re lying or not. If there’s a subtext to their words Dominic should know about. He also claps back at Dominic on occasion, and not many people do that to the thirty-eight-year-old and live.

Long story shorter, along the way lines get blurred between work and sex and Dominic and Knox. Knox hasn’t been allowed to have any thoughts about men. They’ve been well and truly expunged from his mind via his father’s overt homophobia as he grew up. He’s always believed he was straight because anything else was unacceptable. Dominic brings out desire and obsession in him, though, and initially he’s not sure what to do with that. Dominic tells Knox he’s straight. It’s reinforced on a number of occasions. When things start to heat up with Knox, Dominic still believes that he’s straight as a die. Dominic can keep thinking that way, but the truth is the sexual tension between himself and Knox is a palpable, living, breathing thing.

Knox would stand there with his pulse hammering and think: You feel it too. You absolute bastard. You feel it too and you’re pretending you don’t. He never said it.
He didn’t need to.
The air between them said it constantly.

Dominic’s experience is that if the hard men in his line of work, the ones he does business with, know he’s fucking another man, let alone having feelings for him, it will be a huge weakness to be leveraged. So, of course, Dominic decides that he’ll fool around and he’ll get this thing, whatever it is, that would be Knox, out of his system. I laughed. It never works. Snaps for trying, guys. I mean, Cassian, Dominic’s cousin and 2IC, clocks what’s going on between Dominic and Knox not too far along the line. Hell, a woman Dominic has been with before asks if she’s interrupting something when he and Knox are having a broody, jealous moment. 

Extra Bits: 

Both of the books in this series are well priced. You get bang for your buck.  

The reason this isn’t a full 5 stars is because there is repetition of a few words. 

The story is told via a dual POV. 

There is a power imbalance with the age gap that well and truly makes its relational presence felt, and that’s atop their socio-economic variance. I’m not going to say that Knox has daddy issues, all right, he has daddy issues. 

He hated Dominic for trapping him in this, for the brutal reminder of who held the leash. And yet some twisted part of him still craved his approval, still felt that sick relief at being seen.

For all Dominic’s keeps insisting ‘I’m straight,’ he is so, soooo into Knox. No other men. This truly is an old school OFY. Memories…. However, Dominic pushes it aside for a while. He’s merely getting a blow-job or sex to assert his dominance. Period! But after awhile, the fear about what it means to be with another man starts getting drowned out by the overwhelming sexual desire between them both. The dark romance obsession is real and delicious. And Dominic is possessive as fuck to add to the mix.

I loved that there is sexual tension for freaking days. Complete with the not so clandestine eye-fucking glances while they have lap dances by female strippers or they’re engaging with a woman. Like Dominic fucking another woman only to seek Knox out immediately after. 

He’d told himself it worked, right up until it was over and his feet had carried him straight to where Knox was sitting, like fucking her had accomplished nothing at all. He hadn’t even managed to keep his hands to himself, touching the boy within minutes of sitting down.

Hard Bargain is unapologetically raw. The world that this book is set in is tangible. It feels monochromatic. Especially for Knox. You can see why Knox is drawn into Dominic’s world. There’s power there. Dominic is magnetic, dangerous, and something Knox wants. There is on-page violence. People are killed and owe their life off the back of Dominic Rivera’s whim. Also, no one fucks around with Dominic, with what’s his, because if they do, they find out. Someone did FAFO. The more Dominic shows Knox his life, the more Knox falls into the darkness, takes to Dominic’s work, the more Dominic is rapt. 

He wanted to see it—the shift in Knox’s eyes when things turned darker. Whether he’d step back or whether he’d step closer. He wanted to know what Knox would become when the illusion dropped. And for reasons he didn’t examine too closely, he wanted to be the one who showed him.

I was beyond happy to see moments of Jacob and Liam in this book – book #1, Off Script. Thank goodness the sunshine vibe that is Liam was an intermediary so these two men of few words, these half-brothers, could talk to one another. I’m also glad that Knox knows he isn’t alone.

The setting for the first two books is different. Where they both have intensity, Stockton is far removed from the showbusiness world Jacob Wolfe inhabits. Stockton doesn’t lie about what it is, it’s a raw urban landscape. Hollywood has appearances of being glittery.  

After the consuming sexual intensity of the fabulous Off Script, I wanted the author to go dark and she did not disappoint with her second book. Gray went dark and gritty and psychological. I am beyond looking forward to Cassian’s book but I know it won’t be the next one. That will be back in Jacob and Liam’s world with Mason. It’s a therapeutic – doctor/patient – relationship and that’s such a personal hard limit for me. I have to think on it. In the meantime, I love the boundaries Ivy Vera Gray continues to unapologetically trample over. It’s been exciting finding a new author who writes grittier books. Thanks for not only the intensity but the darker setting in Stockton this time, Ivy Vera Gray. 4.5 Stars!