Crushed Ice Hockey Ever After Book 4
Contemporary, Gay Romance, Sports Romance
Independent
Feb 6th, 2024
Kindle
426
Amazon
When was the right time to tell someone that silver flames were shooting from their hair? And that your own tranquil green desired nothing more than to tangle with them, if only it could escape a malevolent orange flare hounding your every move?
Over-stressed businessman Charles Heyer is not like most people. With a rare medical condition that scrambles the senses, he experiences emotions as flashes of colour, giving them the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. Alone in his over-vivid world, a devastating bereavement leaves him mentally scarred and recuperating on the picturesque French island of Ré where, through a chance encounter and a good deed, he is introduced to Florian, a flirty local salt farmer.
What with trying to protect the island salt cooperative from a corporate takeover and keeping a watchful eye on his errant grandfather, handsome Florian is not as carefree as he appears. Falling in love with this odd Englishman is as unexpected as it is welcome. Both exploring new feelings, the lazy days of summer stretch out for miles until a visitor from Charles’s London life throws their peaceful idyll into a kaleidoscope of chaos. And, all of a sudden, the island’s glorious palette of colour turns several shades darker.
Review By Ulysses Dietz
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
I am not a hockey fan, but Kane and James have taught me to appreciate the elegance and nuance of the game. As much fun as it might be to see two hockey players engage privately in hot ways, I am more impressed by my new understanding of the amazing athletic skill these guys bring to the game. Without hockey, this book just wouldn’t be any fun.
That said, I can’t praise Kane and James enough for their careful presentation of their central characters: the French Canadian rookie, Liam Bellanger, and his Anglo-Canadian mentor/friend/more Russell Lyons.
In each of the four books of this series the authors have set up a dynamic that offers us emotional complications—well, of course!—but also presents family and friendship dynamics that create a rich backdrop against which they play out the action. Both Liam and Russ have great families—but we all know that great families don’t mean problem-free families. Even though the authors have long since laid out the complexities of being a gay professional hockey player in the other books in the series, that reality is not just a given. Liam is young and cocky, and out and proud. Russ is a decade older, Black, and justifiably cautious about who he’s out to. The road to love is never completely smooth. What would be the fun in that?
All of the supporting characters—from Russ’s lovingly pushy mother, to Liam’s rocket-scientist lesbian sister (really!)—are well drawn and add to this romantic fantasy’s realistic texture. The entire plot, while familiar in its many tropes, is unique and engaging in the details conjured by the gifted authors. Each of the four books in the series has given us very different narratives built from similar themes. It is great to have Dante Baltieri (aka Baller) and his husband in this book, forming a nice continuity within the series that also knits all the stories into one universe. Even though it is a universe that doesn’t exist, it feels like it could. I love to think that these books will help manifest that reality in the pro hockey world.