Book Title: Caught Off Guard
Author: Beth Laycock
Publisher: Rainbow Romance Press
Cover Artist: Free to be creative
Release Date: June 15, 2022
Genre: Contemporary M/M Romance, Military Romance
Tropes: Forced proximity, friends to lovers, brat MC
Themes: Hurt/comfort
Length: approx 40 000 words
It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.
Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited
He’d risk his life to find his brother. But he never expected to risk his heart.
Blurb
Three months since his brother went MIA, and Lane Matthews is tired of waiting for answers from overseas. Calling in a favour from his CO, he gets a posting to Jeddah—his first overseas deployment and where his brother was stationed—and the opportunity to try to find him.
Life in a foreign land isn’t quite as he imagined, and neither are his duties. And while his first encounter with his housemate, Tristan, may be memorable, it’s for all the wrong reasons.
Tristan catches him off guard but falling for the hot—straight?—soldier is definitely not in his future. Tensions rise as Lane gets closer to discovering the truth behind his brother’s disappearance, but even the best-laid plans can get swept off course and lost like a grain of sand in the desert.
This MM military romance from Beth Laycock features an age gap, a bratty MC, forced proximity, hurt/comfort, and of course a HEA.
As I drifted back towards home most of the weight of my anger had lifted. By the time I closed the door behind me, the fantasy of spending an evening at the consulate surrounded by soldiers and finding answers to my brother’s whereabouts filled my thoughts, and I ended up in the kitchen without noticing.
“Oh, so you do still live here, then? Not just using it as a café.”
I jumped, Tristan’s voice so loud it startled me out of my imagination. My gaze dropped to the dirty plate he thrust in my direction. The dish I’d used for breakfast. Jeez, Mum! I lifted my eyes and glared at him as the anger I thought I’d stomped off flared back into life.
“The least you can do is clean up after yourself. I am not your maid.”
The slosh of water punctuated his last words as he dunked the plate into the sink. Why didn’t he put it in the bloody dishwasher when it finished? It was one fucking plate. And something inside me snapped. “Oh, fuck off.”
Tristan whirled around to face me, his hands dripping sudsy water onto the floor, eyebrows arched as if to ask how I dared to speak to him that way.
Oh, I dared. I took a step closer. “It’s one bloody dirty plate. It’s not like I, oh, I don’t know, took the piss out of you. Had a good laugh at the expense of the newbie recruit. Well, fuck you. You don’t get to tell me what the hell to do.”
His eyes widened before his forehead crinkled, and his eyes narrowed. A flash of something lit up his eyes, but then he stalked across the kitchen. He didn’t stop when he reached me, just kept going until he backed me up against the breakfast bar, his chest pressed flush against mine, and suddenly that flare of anger burst into flames of lust licking across my skin from where we touched. I sucked in a breath that tasted of Tristan—warm with a hint of danger—then tipped my chin up to stare into the dark depths of his eyes. But he didn’t utter a word.
My gaze dropped to his mouth, and my mouth watered like some kind of Pavlovian response.
“Oh, I bet I could, though.”
My eyes snapped back up to his at the rough edge to his voice. He grabbed hold of my biceps, his fingertips digging in through the thin cotton of my uniform before he smashed his mouth to mine. The force of his lips pushed my mouth open, and our teeth clashed together. The slight edge of pain went straight to my dick, and I moaned as I grabbed his hips to anchor myself against him. But then he wrenched away from me, his breath heaving in and out of his chest.
“God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have forced myself on you.”
Was that why he’d run off after our first kiss? But I’d initiated it so that made no sense. And I wasn’t sorry. Not in the slightest. Tristan hadn’t said he shouldn’t have kissed me, just not without my consent. Pressing my fingers into the muscles along his hips, I turned us around until I could shove him against the breakfast bar. “I’m not sorry,” I said before I kissed him. I thrust my tongue between his parted lips and tasted the warmth of his mouth, and swallowed down the moan that tried to escape from between us.
Beth Laycock’s books are influenced by her time living overseas as well as the gritty, urban landscape of the north of England where she grew up. She has been reading romance since she was old enough to tell herself that line every book lover does—just one more chapter.
As a teenager, she attempted to write her first novel, and many more since then are still gathering dust on her bookshelf. It wasn’t until she discovered the M/M genre that her muse showed up and refused to quit telling her stories about beautiful men finding love together. She hasn’t stopped scribbling them down since. Beth’s muse usually shows up when she is in the shower, is allergic to cleaning, rarely lets her watch TV, and insists she drinks copious amounts of coffee so she can turn caffeine into words.
Beth’s books range from sweet to sexy, long to short, contemporary to paranormal, but a HEA is always guaranteed.
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