Runner by Parker Williams | Cat's Release day Review & #giveaway @Dreamspinners @ParkerWAuthor

Matt Bowers’s life ended at sixteen, when a vicious betrayal by someone who he should have been able to trust left him a shell of himself, fighting OCD and PTSD, living in constant fear and always running. When he buys a remote tract of land, he thinks he’s found the perfect place to hide from the world and attempt to establish some peace. For ten years he believes he’s found a measure of comfort, until the day a stranger begins to run on Matt’s road.

He returns every day, an unwelcome intrusion into Matt’s carefully structured life. Matt appeals to the local sheriff, who cannot help him since the jogger is doing nothing wrong. Gradually, after tentatively breaking the ice, Matt begins to accept the man’s presence—

But when the runner doesn’t show up one day, it throws Matt’s world into chaos and he must make the hardest decision of his life.

Buy links: Dreamspinner | Amazon US | Amazon UK

Cat gives this one 10 Meows! with a 3 Purr heat index...

Oh wow! There are not many books that move me so much I would read over and over but this is one.  It is very close if not the top in my favorites list of this year. I loved both Matt and Charlie and even Clay Matt's brother. 

Matt has had a bad experience in high school that wrecked his life. Now he lives way out in the country alone.  He has a bad case of  OCD and PTSD.  He doesn't deal with people at all, lives off his land, growing his own food, canning, freezing, etc. I admire Matt a lot. and yet my heart goes out to him.

A Runner beings running on his road and disrupt his schedule.  He calls his brother Clay the local sheriff to get him to get the runner off his property. Clay makes a deal that he would talk to the man if Matt gets his name forcing Matt to go out and talk to him.

Charley is a writer and has gotten out of a bad relationship.  He and Matt become friends.

This story is very heart-wrenching. I was sucked in from the beginning and couldn't  put it down! I loved all the characters; I loved Matt and my heart went out to him. I could relate to him and wanted to hug him. I admired Charley but there was a twist that shocked me and I cried for Matt. The storyline is beautiful, the story well written and I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone that loves M/M  contemporary romance!

Excerpt...

THERE WERE 376 steps from one end of my property to the other. Not that I’d walked them, mind you, but I counted them as the man who jogged past every day, rain or shine, made his way down the road. I’d begun to accept his presence in my world, but it didn’t start out that way. At first I found him to be a terrifying intrusion. I hated people anywhere near my house. I’d moved to the outskirts of my hometown of Fall Harbor, Maine, for just that reason. After what happened, I needed to be alone. And now this guy seemed intent on destroying my peace.
My place wasn’t on the beaten path. Hell, if truth be told, you had to actively come out this way to find it, because it took almost thirty minutes by car to reach the town square twenty miles away. I valued my privacy, and I paid a great deal to ensure I kept it.
Then he came along.
The first several days after I spotted him, I cowered in my home, because seeing him so close disturbed me. It had been better than a month since the last time I’d seen someone on my road, which really went nowhere. After you made the turn down the way, it became a dead end that forced you to turn around and come back the same path. Which meant I saw him twice a day. And twice a day I went into a near meltdown.
Because of him, gone were the days I saw no one, interacted with not a single soul. I had it arranged so my lawyer took care of any bills, I grew most of my own food, and what I couldn’t grow was delivered to the edge of my lot, where, after much inspection, it could be brought into the house, sorted, and put away in its proper place. All that changed the day he huffed past my house and turned my world upside down.
He couldn’t be more than thirty, with brown hair that came down to his collar and slapped him in the face when it dripped with sweat as he ran. His toned body seemed to be acres of golden skin, dusted with a light coating of soft brown fur. Yes, I looked. In fact, I studied him in detail, this threat to my sanity.

It seemed as though his existence altered the feng shui of the place. Not that I believed in that, of course. But everything had to be just so, and any deviation left me out of sorts. I knew the deer that crossed my land every day, stopping to nibble on the tender shoots in the spring, then huddled against the cold in the deepest of winter. There had been a family of lark sparrows nesting in one of my trees every year since I’d gotten here, and I woke to their song in the morning. The black and bright yellow sunflowers I planted every eighteen inches in front of the house bloomed together, a product of water and sunshine. It all had to be just so.

Happily Ever After Comes With A Pricetag Parker Williams began to write as a teen, but never showed his work to anyone. As he grew older, he drifted away from writing, but his love of the written word moved him to reading. A chance encounter with an author changed the course of his life as she encouraged him to never give up on a dream. With the help of some amazing friends, he rediscovered the joy of writing, thanks to a community of writers who have become his family. Parker firmly believes in love, but is also of the opinion that anything worth having requires work and sacrifice (plus a little hurt and angst, too). The course of love is never a smooth one, and Happily Ever After always has a price tag.

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