Mine — Riley Hart 3 stars
JT has known what he wants for a long time — submission, the real kind, with a Dom who actually understands the dynamic and isn’t just performing it. He finds that person online, in a man who goes by Sir, and the connection is immediate and electric. They talk, they explore, they build something genuine through anonymous sessions that feel more honest than anything either of them has found before. When they finally agree to meet in person, JT discovers that Sir is Marshall — his dad’s lifelong best friend, the man his father considers a brother.
That setup is genuinely good. The anonymous online connection that turns out to be someone already in your orbit is one of the most satisfying slow-burn devices in romance, and Riley Hart earns the reveal. The foundation of Marshall and John’s friendship is also established with real care — this isn’t a throwaway backstory, it’s the emotional core of the conflict, and the scene where Marshall walks into his best friend’s house and essentially confesses to sleeping with his son is one of the most uncomfortably human moments you’ll read in a book like this. It’s awkward and painful and hard to witness in exactly the way it should be. Real friendships are at stake and you feel it.
The spice is also genuinely impressive. Riley Hart writes MM sex with an authenticity that is rare coming from women authors in this genre — the dynamics feel lived in and real, not performed for an outside gaze.
So why three stars? A few things.
The honorific didn’t work for me. JT calls Marshall Sir throughout, and that particular form of address never landed — it kept pulling me out of the dynamic rather than deepening it. This is a personal preference — “Sir” and “Master” have always felt more clinical to me than warm — but it affected how I experienced nearly every scene between them, and that’s a lot of the book.
The bigger issue is JT as a brat who isn’t really bratty. He’s described as having that energy but in practice he’s mostly agreeable, affirming, and compliant. The banter I was waiting for never quite arrived. A sub can absolutely be sweet and eager — that’s a whole dynamic in itself — but if the book is selling him as a brat, that’s a different promise, and it didn’t deliver on it.
And then there’s the main conflict. Watching Marshall sit down with his best friend of decades and explain that he’s been sleeping with his son is genuinely excruciating to read. Some readers will love that — the messiness is the point, and it delivers the fallout the trope promises. For me personally it was hard to get through, and not in a satisfying way. Your mileage will vary significantly depending on how much secondhand cringe you can tolerate.
All the tropes I love are here, and the bones of this book are solid. It just didn’t fully become what it could have been.