Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Offside Chance
SERIES: Southern Scrimmage #3
AUTHOR: Mercy Celeste
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 265 pages
BLURB: Judah Brody meets William Slater and it’s loathe at first sight.
Jude had spent his whole life in his famous brother’s shadow. Returning to New Orleans seemed like a good idea now that Levi was back home. But Jude couldn’t turn around without something of Levi’s getting in his way. In this case it’s Levi’s best friend, a three hundred pound knuckle-dragger named Slayer, who likes strippers, football, porn and making Jude’s life miserable—not necessarily in that order.
William Slater’s season couldn’t get much worse. He lost his house to fire, his contract was set to expire, and his prospects of getting picked up by another team were slim to none. House sitting for his best friend was the only bright spot in an otherwise bleak New Orleans winter. Until Levi’s stuck up nerd of a brother came to stay.
A freak winter snow storm, deep familial secrets, and a whole lot of male/male bonding wasn’t exactly in the game plan. But bragging rights were on the line and there wasn’t an offside chance in hell of this game going into overtime.
REVIEW:
William Slayter doesn’t know which way is up, anymore. His best friend has turned out to be gay–with a fondness for wearing women’s clothes. His house is now a pile of ash and rubble–thanks to his druggy cousin. His NFL career has a big fat cloud named ‘retirement’ looming over it. And now he has to share a house with the most cold, most picky, most…intensely frustrating man he has ever known.
Judah Brody doesn’t know what to do with his life. After almost unsuccessfully defending his brother against a false rape charge, he has lost all faith in the legal system. Wherever he goes he is constantly being mistaken for his famous (and sometimes infamous) brother–a man who is not only gay, but seems to have an alternate personality named Liv. And now, just when he thinks he can escape the cloud of Levi Brody, he is forced to shack up with a big, loud, messy, gun-toting asshole.
Neither Jude nor Will can stand each other, but when they are in the same room there is no denying that something is sparking between them. Wait…like hell they can’t deny it! They are going to deny it, ignore it, and rest easy in the fact that there is no way two straight men would ever want to do anything with an the other’s ass–other beat it. They’ll just have to ignore the whole bathroom incident. And the stripper joint. And most definitely that whole cuddling episode. They’re so screwed.
Wow…and I thought I couldn’t enjoy this series more. Little did I know what Offside Chance had in store for me. This has to be one of my favorite gay-for-you type stories. Not only because I loved the journey that both Jude and Slayer take, but I am quite in awe at how hot Mercy Celeste made their all-out I-hate-you-but-goddamn-I’m-going-to-fuck-you-into-next-week, angry-sex. And that is saying quite a bit, ‘cause that stuff is steaming to begin with. There is a sharp edge between anger-fueled sex and abuse, and this book treaded it so very well. Mostly because I think they were not truly angry with each other, but with themselves. At how they felt, even when they had no desire to want the other man.
“I never know what he’s thinking. We fight, then we fuck. That’s the extent of it all.”
This is hardly anyone’s shiny example of a truly healthy way to run a relationship, but boy the journey from hate to love is brilliant.
Outside the hot and heavy relationship between Jude and Slayer, we got, once again, a nice glimpse into the lives of Levi, Tracy, Bo, and Dylan. These four, plus William and Jude have a lot going on in their lives, and it was really nice to see the intersections between them all. And once again, no one is safe. One thing about this series that I have come to trust is that you can never trust anything. A lot more is going on in the background with these characters than we ever get the first time around. And while I was not a big fan of finding out that Bo and Levi had been sleeping together after Dylan got back, I loved that I never knew exactly what was coming next. And there are some big secrets coming out in this book. Big secrets. I might not have seen them coming, but it was a lot of fun to be knocked off my comfortable perch.
I think I would have liked a bit more about William’s past in this story, because a lot of the plot seemed to revolve around Jude and his brother Levi. And while I loved them, and where they took us, there was so much about William that I wanted to know. Why does he feel so responsible for his cousin? What was his home life really like? What is going to happen when he comes out to them? We get the bare bones, but there is so much there left to explore, and I think seeing it could have helped explain why he acted the way he did.
“Fuck, Jude. Stop thinking. Just stop. You think everything to death. I went offsides for you, asshole. Me, the misogynist, the womanizer, the party till I drop, stripper on both arms… I went gay for you and only you.”
I did have a bit of a nasty relationship with the formatting in this book (though that could be a result of my review copy just not being up to par) that made it sometimes a little difficult to track what was going on in a given paragraph, but there was not a lot to complain about in this book. It was a great story, told brilliantly, and it is by far my favorite of the series. If there is another book in this series (please, oh please, let it be so!) I can’t wait to see how Mercy Celeste intends to top this. Jude and Slayer, together, are a great example of how hot anger-fueled sex can be. Especially when it becomes doused with love.
RATING: 