Reviewed by Sadonna
TITLE: Somebody 2 Love
AUTHOR: Maria Vickers
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 194 pages
RELEASE DATE: March 22, 2021
BLURB:
Will the past come back to destroy everything they are building? Two strangers meeting by chance, searching for somebody to love, and finding each other.
Rhys had it all…for the most part. He didn’t mind leaving people or dreams in the past because he was determined to carve out a new future with his fiancé, Nick. But like a house of cards, it all came crashing down around him. Nick found someone else to love, and Rhys suddenly found himself with nothing. Will Rhys open his heart again or keep it sealed shut?
Declan experienced a lot as an Army doctor, but once he was able, he got out, tired of war and suffering. When he meets Rhys, Declan sees a brokenness in the other man’s eyes and wants to do anything he can to drive away Rhys’s ghosts. Even if it means risking his own heart.
REVIEW:
Rhys is a young guy from Montana who leaves college, his family and his friends behind in Missoula to move to Austin Texas. He meets a guy online, Nick, that makes him feel things he’s never felt before and so he follow the guy back to Texas when he’s 19 and has finished only a year of college working toward his nursing degree. His family and friends are absolutely unhappy about the situation. Rhys has been isolated by his shy personality and social anxiety in Austin and hasn’t made many friends or tried to pursue school any more. Which is fine with Nick – he’s happy to have Rhys at his beck and call. Since they are engaged, Rhys believes whole heartedly in their future together. Rhys has a job at a successful brewery, but he tries to be available for Nick whenever he wants. But then Nick gets very busy – working a lot of overtime and sometimes not even coming home at night. Turns out Nick has not really been working overtime, and those niggling doubts that Rhys are realized when Nick tells him he’s found someone else and Rhys needs to find somewhere else to live – with no prelude, notice, nothing.
Rhys is devastated by Nick’s betrayal. He’s all alone in a city that he’s lived in for nearly three years, with the exception of this boss, Baker. Baker can see that something is very very wrong with Rhys. He decides he needs to act to get Rhys out of this untenable situation. So he offers his guest room, no strings, until Rhys can get his feet under him. But Rhys is absolutely reeling. When Baker tells his best friend Declan about Rhys, Declan assumes the worst and thinks Rhys is out to take advantage of Baker’s generous nature. Then he meets Rhys at a friend’s barbecue and he realizes he’s been all wrong. He kind of terrorizes Rhys at their first meeting, but then tries to make up for it. And when Baker has to go out of town, he looks after Rhys and they come to a tentative truce. Rhys confides some things to Declan that he’s not shared with anyone else. Not even Nick. For some reason he feels like he can trust Declan.
Declan befriends Rhys and wants to help him get his life on track. But he’s quite a bit older than Rhys and he perceives that as an obstacle. His feeling is that Rhys needs to heal and recover from the devastation of Nick’s terrible treatment and that he needs to find somebody who will really appreciate him to build a life with. But he is definitely attracted to Rhys and cares a lot about him and for him. He is trying to give him space to figure out his path and determine what he really wants to do with his life. Along the way they build a solid friendship. But Rhys thinks he’s ready for more, but Declan doesn’t seem to be picking up his clues. But when a crisis unfolds and some meddling ensues, Rhys and Declan have to come clean about their feelings.
So I think this might be a case of it’s me, not necessarily the book. While the overall story was fine, there were a few things that detracted from my full enjoyment. I wanted a lot more details about Declan and his decision to step away from being a full-time doctor. It seems to me that there was a lot more to that story and the bare minimum was shared with the reader. I didn’t really feel like I got to know Declan, even though the story is told from alternating POVs. He was still a mystery to me. My biggest issue, however, was that while the first eighty percent of the book tell Rhys’s story of leaving his family and Montana and moving to Texas for Nick and their subsequent breakup and his downward spiral, just when he starts to open up to Declan, we have a time-jump that skips over how close they become as friends. We miss whatever signals Rhys thinks he’s giving Declan that he’s ready for more. We miss Declan’s holding himself back, even though he wants Rhys as more than a friend. We just get a lot of Declan’s reminiscence about how many erotic dreams he’s had about Rhys. This is the part of the story I was most interested and wanted to see! I wanted to be inspired by how Rhys had forged a new path forward after his terrible treatment by Nick. I wanted to understand how he had come to the place where he was ready to put his heart out there again. Instead the last fifteen percent of the book is a sort of crazy push comes to shove engineered confrontation that apparently was the culmination of months of tapdancing around each other. So I feel like I missed a lot of the natural progression of Rhys and Declan coming together as a couple. That was the fundamental change that takes place and I didn’t get to see it 🙁 I also found the writing style a little choppy for my taste, but again, this could be a me thing. As usual, YMMV.
RATING: 
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