Reviewed by Carissa

 

TITLE:  No Flag

 

AUTHOR:  Liz Borino

 

PUBLISHER:  Lazy Day Publishing

 

LENGTH:  255 pages

 

BLURB:  

 

For Mike and Will, “No Flag” meant “come home alive”, but will their love survive what happens next?

 

Captain Mike Kelley does not ignore his intuition, so when sexy bartender Will Hayes captures his heart, Mike embarks on a mission to win him over to a Domestic Discipline relationship. Will accepts with one caveat: Mike must promise not to renew his Army contract. Mike agrees, and they spend a year building a life together, getting married, and starting a business.

 

Only days before their café’s grand opening, Mike receives news that threatens everything he and Will have built. The Army invokes the Stop Loss military policy to involuntarily extend his commission and send him back overseas. Will, left alone to cope with the café, must rely on the support of old friends who may no longer be trustworthy. Through emails and Skype calls, Mike and Will keep their love and structure alive…until the day a horrific terrorist attack occurs on Mike’s outpost.

 

Mike awakens in a hospital with a devastating injury and no memory of the attack. As the only survivor, Mike’s memory may be the key to national security. Mike struggles to cope with his injury and Will struggles to support the man who always held him up. Both fear they have lost their previous relationship. Will has Mike back rather than a folded flag, but in the aftermath of war, can they rebuild the life they had before? Especially when those closest to them may not have their best interests at heart?

 

REVIEW:  

 

Mike Kelley and Will Hayes don’t have the most conventionally normal relationship.  State secrets, army business, and a rather strict case of OCD means that Mike was never bringing a whole lotta normal to the table.  Add in a desire to be in a Domestic Discipline relationship with Will, and normal practically rolls off the table and out the door.  But Will doesn’t mind, much, and while learning the perfect way to fold a towel wasn’t exactly on his bucket list, he’s come to find that what he has with Mike is worth breaking away from the boring normal.  Will loves Mike, is happy in his relationship–no matter how odd his friends think it is–and is counting down the days till he can stop sharing Mike with Uncle Sam.

 

Then Mike is Stop-Lossed and re-upped for another year, only weeks from his decommissioning.  To say Will is unhappy would be like calling Mike a little bit neat.  But you can’t really say a polite No thanks to the military, especially when your commanding officer is a bit of a homophobic dick.  So Mike ships out to Afghanistan, and Will tries to keep his life from crumbling around him.  All Will has to do is keep his new business afloat, keep his grades from plummeting, deal with two highly unhelpful friends, and figure out how the hell he is going to keep his cute little ass nice and pink when his husband is on the other side of the world.  Thank god for skype.  And rather inventive husbands.

 

But love and loyalty won’t stop bullets.  Honor can’t stop bombs.  And no matter what they engrave their promises on, No Flag won’t keep a soldier safe, not when there are so many who want to see him fall.

 

It may have taken me a bit to get there, but I really did love Mike and Will together.  Mike’s OCD was a really nice touch, if a bit anal–in a good ways, of course.  It seemed to work so nicely into the Domestic Discipline relationship that they worked out for themselves.  Granted there were times I really wished Mike would chill, not freak out about the folding of a single towel, but stones and glass houses, and all that–though I am not nearly as bad as Mike, thank god.  I never really got a good idea, though, what Will was getting out of the whole DD relationship.  He loves Mike, and sure he adores a right good spanking, but sometimes it felt like he was part of the DD because that was what Mike needed, not him.

 

There were a lot of times in this book that I didn’t get enough of the meat of the relationship.  Too many times it felt we were only getting surface emotions and that really hindered the connection between me and the two MCs.  This is one of the reasons I am not a big fan of books that span long stretches of time.  Some scenes happen months apart, and while the two characters may have been building their relationship during that time, I didn’t get to see it, so I have to take it as read, and I have a hard time doing that.  I need to see the relationship grow for me to feel a better connection.  I didn’t get a lot of that here, and it made what the two MCs share feel a little hollow at times.  When the passions flared, when they were angry or almost swallowed in lust it felt more real, but the downtimes felt like the just stepped back into their little boxes and became forgettable.

 

I did like how there didn’t seem to be one overreaching problem, but instead they kept getting bashed about on all sides, at the most random times.  I like how it kept them, and consequently me, off kilter, not knowing what was going to happen next.  It did cause problems because there didn’t seem to be one overreaching climax to end the story, but for a majority of the time it was enjoyable.  And personally, I would have slapped Casey into next year for what she did.  I didn’t quite get why she did it–Will is like gay, and married, and not likely to hook up with a psychotic bitch–but it was a nice twist.

 

Do wish there had been more tension with the whole arm thing, though.  Will accepted it way too easily, for my taste.  Wasn’t looking for Will to be a douche and dump Mike, but when traumatic things happen to those you love you tend to freak the fuck out–for more than just a few days.  And because what happened, because of the amount of changes having to be made to their relationship and their lives, I think Will should have been having a bit more trouble adjusting to this new world view.

 

This book was really a mix of good and bad for me.  There were some things I would definitely change, but it was also a nice story to read.  I liked how the separation between them played out, how stressful it can be to try and split your life into parts and still keep it vaguely whole.  I also am a big fan of spanking, so that was fun.  I do wish the sex scenes didn’t feel so bloody rushed.  It really started to feel like a wham-bam-thank-you-man kind of sexual relationship.  I don’t necessarily need the down-and-dirty details–though far be it for me to turn them down–but a little more tension and build up would have been nice.  Overall, though, this story was good and it is always nice to see a little more kink on my Kindle.

 

RATING:

 

BUY LINKS: Lazy Day , Amazon , ARE