Reviewed by Donna
TITLE: Nowhere Ranch – Audible
AUTHOR: Heidi Cullinan
NARRATOR: Iggy Toma
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 6 Hours 3 Minutes
BLURB:
Love will grow through the cracks you leave open.
Ranch hand Roe Davis absolutely never mixes business with pleasure – until he runs into his boss, Travis Loving, at the only gay bar within 200 miles.
Getting involved with the ranch owner is a bad idea, but Roe’s and Travis’s bedroom kinks line up against one another like a pair of custom-cut rails. As long as they’re both clear this is sex on the side, no relationship, no interfering with the job, they could make it work.
Shut out by his family years ago, Roe survived by steadfastly refusing to settle into so much as a post office box. As his affair with Travis grows into more than just sex, Roe’s past catches up with him, threatening the thin ray of happiness he’s found, reminding him it’s well past time he went on his way.
Even a loner gets lonely, and at this point, there’s nowhere left to run. The shame and sorrow of what he’s lost will stay with Roe wherever he goes – until he’s ready to let love lead him home.
REVIEW:
I swear, I love this book more every single time I read it, or in this case listen to it. Usually I’m not a fan of audio books, I’ve had a bad narrator or two, so volunteering to review this could have been a stupid move. Luckily, everything turned out just fine. In fact, this experience may have prompted me to give audio books another go.
Roe Davis barely has control of his life, though he doesn’t seem to recognize that fact. After being kicked from the family farm after his formerly loving parents discover his gay porn stash, Roe’s life has become a series of bad choices, no strings sex and running away. Nowhere Ranch is a place where he actually feels that he fits, so when he meets his boss at a gay bar, the very last thing he intends to do is have sex with him. Despite the fact that Travis Loving is just his type. Of course the night ends in a full weekend of the kinkiest, hottest sex that Roe has ever had. But it’s just one weekend, Roe won’t allow it to happen again. Well, maybe just once more, but that’s definitely it. Except for that third time, but it’s absolutely not a relationship, just fucking. Okay, perhaps he likes Travis and they’re kind of friends…you know how this story goes, right?
What I love most about this story is the clear progression from random fuck, to regular hookups, to friends with benefits, right through to the point where they’re madly obsessively in love with one another. There’s no rush, it really does take the whole story to get there and I loved that both men were conscious of the changing relationship between them every step of the way. And it wasn’t just about their “romantic feelings”. Sorry, that sounds corny but I couldn’t figure out a better way to say it! It was also reflected in the friendship that developed and also in their sexual interactions.
And since I mentioned sexual interactions – Holy shit! This book starts out at a ten and never drops that intensity. At first I was worried that there was going to be too much sex, to the detriment of the story, but I was wrong. The sex in this story is actually very important to the plot and although the intensity between Roe and Travis remains, the emotion that begins to weave into their encounters shows us the changes in their relationship that Roe, who is the narrator, isn’t necessarily aware of. For those who aren’t big on kink, in case you miss it in the tags, this book includes pony play and fisting.
As for the narrator, Iggy Toma has restored my faith in audio books. He has a voice that you are happy to listen to for six hours, and did a great job of differentiating the characters from each other. Except for one. If I had any complaint it would be that the voice of Roe was very similar to the narration so it was sometimes difficult to know if Roe was speaking out loud or thinking to himself.
Having read Nowhere Ranch as an eBook and listened to the audio version, I think that I actually recommend the audible. In parts, this is a dirty, dirty book and it sounds absolutely filthy when read by this narrator.
RATING: 
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