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Book Title: Him Improvement
Author: Tanya Chris
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Cover Artist: Alexandria Corza
Release Date: September 3, 2019
Genre/s: Contemporary M/M Romance
Trope/s: enemies to lovers, opposites attract, millionaire, age gap
Themes: gentrification, compromise
Length: 60 000 words/ 161 pages
Blurb
The course of true love runs through every neighborhood….
Only one thing stands between Gregory MacPherson II and his dream revitalization project for the gritty neighborhood of Ball’s End: a rinky-dink, run-down used bookstore called Hailey’s Comic. But when master negotiator Mac shows up to make a deal with the owner, he comes face-to-face with quirky, colorful Hailey—unexpectedly good-humored about Mac’s attempted eviction and, also unexpectedly, a hot guy.
Hailey won’t give up his lease, no matter how much money Mac offers. When it comes to consummating their mutual attraction, though, he’s a lot more flexible. Soon Mac has as hard a time prying himself out of Hailey’s bed as he does prying Hailey out of the building. But Hailey doubts Mac’s plans serve Ball’s End’s best interests, and he insists Mac give him a chance to prove his case. If they’re going to build a happy ever after, one of them will have to be remade….
Buy Links
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Men Who Love to Hate
an enemies-to-lovers roundup by Tanya Chris
Mac and Hailey, the two main characters in Him Improvement, have good reason to dislike each other, but as enemies go, they start out pretty close to lovers. Their circumstances position them as adversaries, but they’re quick to find ways to make their mutual attraction work.
That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good tooth-and-nail enemies-to-lovers though, because I do, especially if there’s lots of attitude and witty snark. So here are some of my favorite stories about men who love to hate.
Coach’s Challenge by Avon Gale
Troy and Shane have a bad attitude for each other from the moment they meet. Unlike Mac and Hailey, they have every reason to get along. They both want the same thing, after all, which is for the hockey team Troy coaches and Shane plays on to win. They’re both gay, and they’re both interested. Seems like they should be instant buddies, right?
Not when it turns out that the fun is in the fight. These guys make fighting their feelings into a physical act, and you get the sense they’re never going to learn to play nice together, not even when they’re eighty and tottering around the rink with those walker things they use for kids. But Troy and Shane were obviously made for each other, and no one else would be willing to put up with either of them.
Fighting Chances, an enemies-to-lovers anthology
This charity anthology features a wealth of shorter enemies-to-lovers stories. If you can’t get enough of men who love to hate, this is the collection for you. Ten stories by well-loved M/M authors (including yours truly) amount to almost two hundred thousand words of men bridging the gap that divides them for one low cost. And every penny goes to benefit Project Children Alcoy, which brings food and educational supplies to the children of the Philippines.
Just a Bit Wrong by Alessandra Hazard
Just a Bit Wrong is probably my favorite of the Straight Guys series and a great example of how there’s someone for everyone, even for hopelessly flawed someones. Tristan, an injured soccer star, is a manipulative, self-centered egoist. Zach, the physiotherapist hired to rehab him, may look better on the outside, but he has a hot temper, an excessive need to control, and an ego as big as Tristan’s.
Angry sparks fly immediately as Tristan’s bratty maneuverings and Zach’s domineering orders butt up against each other. Zach is straight-ish and in an open relationship with his female fiancé while Tristan is gay but not out due to his profession. The sparks that fly are unwelcome to both of them, and much reluctantly angry sex is had before any softening occurs.
Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid
Reid really commits to the enemies-to-lovers trope in Heated Rivalry. The book details a rivalry that goes back ten years, to before the start of Ilya and Shane’s pro hockey careers, when the two young players are taken first and second in the draft. What no one knows is that their romance goes back just as far.
In public, Ilya and Shane put on a show of strict animosity. In private, they grapple with their growing affection as convenient hate-sex morphs into something they’d both like to hold onto longer than the fleeting moments they’re able to grab. The two have a great opposites-attract vibe too, with Ilya being a reckless playboy and Shane a wholesome example of success through hard work.
Among Heroes by Tanya Chris
Okay, it’s a bit of a self-rec, but I mentioned above that I love snark, and Among Heroes is full of it. Bryce is such a brat, you’re going to want to smack him. He’s tough, sarcastic, full-of-himself, and a staunch defender of the underdog. But anyone who’s not an underdog had better watch out.
Rook is a pilot who’s just crashed his plane onto the uninhabited side of a tropical island. You’d think he’d have a little humility. But does he? No. What he has is a mild concussion and a major case of the hots for the smart-mouthed YouTube star trying to run the show. Somebody has to coordinate their rescue, but the most qualified person isn’t either one of these alpha males. Lots of humor, low angst, and some hot fight-me-for-it sex.
If the Seas Catch Fire by L.A. Witt
When the bad guy’s not so bad and the good guy’s not so good… This has got some of the hottest sex I’ve ever read, in between scenes where they’re literally trying to kill each other. They’ve both got secrets—Domenico from his mob family and Sergei from Domenico—and it feels like there’s no way out without someone dying. In the meantime, oops, feelings.
There’s a heartbreaking scene before they figure out that they’re stuck with each other, and there were moments when I didn’t believe it could ever work out, but of course there’s a happy ending. Lots of good action and deception in this book in addition to the sex.
Back to Him Improvement
On the other hand, if you’d like to see two guys use their words instead of their fists, check out Him Improvement. As documented above, I do love me some snark and a good helping of hate sex, but I also appreciate men who act like grownups. Him Improvement started with me asking myself how I could write an enemies-to-lovers situation in which nobody was the bad guy. What if there are good arguments to be made on both sides of a question? Can two people work through their differences to improve each other and the world around them?
Mac and Hailey do exactly that. Through their disagreements, their differences, and a little bit of subterfuge, they find ways to love each other. And isn’t that what it’s all about?
Chapter One
GREGORY MacPherson II didn’t have the time or the patience to make a personal trip to a bookstore, but here he was. Alone.
No patrons roamed the narrow aisles formed byoverstuffed bookshelves. No clerk waited at the vintagecash register sitting on top of a linoleum-covered counter barely capable of holding its weight. No one rushed to greet him from behind the tawdry multicolored curtain hanging at the back of the store.
From where he stood only a few feet inside the doorway, leery of allowing anything in the dusty hodgepodge to brush against his suit, he could see straight down the center aisle all the way to the back of the store. It was a thirty- foot-by-sixty-foot shoebox, longer than it was wide, oneof four retail spaces on the ground floor of the six-story brick building and the only one still open. Which was whyGregory MacPherson II, commonly referred to as Mac, had personally dragged himself down here.
How the place could stay in business without any workers, never mind customers, was a mystery he didn’t intend to solve. He was there to shut the place down, not rescue it, though in the few short minutes he’d been exposed to Hailey’s Comic, he could already list a half-dozen ways to improve its profitability.
That sign out front, for instance. It was a purple whirlwind of planets, well done if you were going for an acid-trip vibe, but the name implied there’d be comics, and the sign implied there’d be comets. Or drugs. And from what he could see, there were neither. If an establishment wanted to bring in customers, it needed to make clear theservices it provided and establish confidence that it wouldprovide them well.
Then there was the matter of actually waiting on the customers you did bring in. A bell had tinkled as he’d entered, but apparently only for its own enjoyment.
“Hello?” He raised his voice to a level that couldn’t be ignored and had a brief moment to wonder if he really was completely alone before a head and a hand appeared around the edge of the curtain.
“Mercy, you scared me,” the head said. It belonged to a young man and had a mop of brown hair piled on top of it, a few shades lighter than Mac’s own reddish brown.“Sorry, I didn’t hear the bell. Give me a minute. I’m sort of in flagrante delicto.” The head disappeared.
“In flagrante delicto doesn’t mean naked, you know,” Mac told the air where the head had been. “It means you were caught doing something you shouldn’t have been.Something sexual.”
“Now, now. It’s never wrong to masturbate. There.” The head reappeared, this time attached to a body that gave Mac a startlingly clear vision of how it would look masturbating. The man was stringy, taller than Mac’s six- foot frame, but lean and underdeveloped—the body of aperson who spent a lot of time reading. Or jerking off.
“What can I help you with?” He was in his midtwenties,so perhaps ten years younger than Mac, dressed in jeans laddered with intentional rips, each the same two inches wide, running down his thighs like claw marks. His face was clean-shaven, fresh with his youth, and Mac wondered how his skin would react to having Mac’s tightly trimmed beard rubbed all over it.
“You’re free to browse around, even if I’m not out here.”
Mac added lax security to the mental list he was pointlessly compiling. “I need to speak to the owner.”
Hailey Green, owner of Hailey’s Comic, was the only thing standing in the way of his plans to revitalize this misbegotten section of Ballhaven, which plan started with this very brick building and would ultimately lead to Ball’s End—as everyone called it; he’d have to do something about the branding—becoming the newest hot spot for millennials to eat, drink, shop, and live. Urban revitalization was Mac’s business, and Hailey Green was Mac’s problem.
“Still me,” the man said, tilting his head to the side asif to take in Mac’s appearance more carefully.
Mac hadn’t changed clothes before driving down to Ball’s End, though he could’ve guessed the place would bedirty. He’d been reading a report on the effort to clear 502 Main Street of its tenants and had made an abrupt decisionto come down and take care of ridding the building of its final holdout himself.
Tanya Chris writes feminist-friendly romance in a variety of sub-genres and pairings–most especially M/M. Born on the West Coast and raised on the East Coast, she’s fact-based but thirsty for justice, and her books often include an examination of a current social issue, even when they’re set in the past. As a lifelong genre-hopping reader herself, she admires character-driven work with a message, regardless of the form it takes.
Tanya is an avid rock climber, a long-distance runner, and a participant in her local community theater where she has tackled most roles, including playwright, actor, director, producer, and stage manager. Her travels, both for climbing trips and for cultural exploration, have brought her to places as fascinating as Egypt and as beautiful as the Dolomites, though there’s no place like home.
Tanya is best known to readers for having written Aftercare and to writers for the quote “Writer culture is researching what degree is needed to be a paleontologist so your shapeshifting vampire dinosaur erotica will be authentic.” Her website features dozens of free stories, including the aforementioned (and highly authentic) shapeshifting vampire dinosaur erotica.
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