Reviewed by Roberta
TITLE: Conflicted
AUTHOR: Louise Lyons
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 300 pages
BLURB:
Two competing gangs of car and drag racing enthusiasts with a shared history of pain and rivalry leading to outright hatred. Two men from opposite sides of the tracks, yet with more in common than they’d like to admit.
Paul Appleton is a troubled man who has never been in a relationship, having lost everyone he cared for in his life. His mother died when he was very young and subsequently, he lost his brother and his best friend. Now Paul is convinced love will always end in tears.
Greg was living on the streets after his parents died and was stabbed by a junkie, ending up in hospital. The Buchanans took Greg under their wing while doing charity work, and Greg joined their loving family when he was adopted. He and his siblings are also car enthusiasts with much more money and therefore better cars than Paul Appleton’s gang.
When they eventually find a connection, Paul fights his feelings and tries to convince himself his lover is only a temporary bit of fun, but Greg has other ideas.
REVIEW:
I was intrigued by this storyline. It’s one that I’m not really familiar with. I thought I’d take a chance and read a new author regarding a subject matter that I wasn’t really familiar with.
Paul Appleton is this young man who has had such a shitty start at life. He was born to an abusive father, a beaten mother and a big brother who meant the world to him. He lost his mother and brother both and those losses have harmed him in that he won’t allow himself to love for fear that it’ll be taken away from him. Paul has been arrested multiple times and works in a warehouse as that’s the only place that would take a kid who didn’t graduate high school. Paul is the character that you really wonder about. However, the more I read about Paul, the more he drew me in. That he has this amazing group of friends that love and support him. He’s feisty, sarcastic, blunt and yet, he’s this really good guy. He’s just so angry and hurt and scared. I really just felt for him. Paul is also gay. Something that he’s known for years. He travels a distance from his town in order to sated that his desire for men.
Greg Buchanan is the adopted son of Duncan and Abby Buchanan. He’s got two siblings, twins Jamie and Janice. He’s loved and supported by his family. Greg’s life hasn’t been a ball of fun either. His parents were killed when he was 16 and he was left homeless. He got stabbed and was in the hospital when Abby found him and took him home. Greg is very humble and such a great guy. He works for what he has and tries not to let the fact that his family has money overrides his own humble beginnings. Greg is gay as well and hasn’t come out because he knows how his parents feel about that. So, he also goes a far away from his family in order to fulfill his desires.
These two young men love cars and they race them. They aren’t friends in the beginning. In fact there is a rivalry between the two groups that no one is sure how it started. The guys even fight at the beginning. I liked how these two guys start out. They were both in the closest and even the first couple of times that they got together, it was purely out of lust and not affection. I liked that they were both so scared of the other and what they were feeling. How even then, they couldn’t stay away from each other.
The secondary characters in this story were really great. They loved and supported our MC’s throughout this entire process. They were the voice of reason and helped them truly find their way to each other. They showed that our MC’s that they were so loved and cared for. That they shouldn’t have doubted that they’d been loved and cared for.
Overall, this was a really sweet story. I will say that the reading was a bit dry. I worked a bit to get into our MC’s head. The other issue that plagued me during this story was the timing. You’d be reading and it’d say a week past or the next time he saw him was the following week. I had no sense of time in this book. How long were they dating? What’s the timetable of this book? Was it 6 months? A year? I couldn’t get a grasp of the timing.
There was a fair bit of sex in this book, but know that the sex was non-explicit. The sex that was in the book was to show the growing affection between the guys and it did that. However, I just found that it didn’t work for me. I wanted more than the sex for them then the sex that they seemed to always be having.
RATING: 
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