Wanted: Bad Boyfriend (Island Classifieds Book One) by TA Moore | Cat’s Audio Review & #giveaway @Dreamspinners @MichaelMola @TTCBooksandmore

Wanted - Bad Boyfriend

By: TA Moore

Narrated by Michael Mola

Length: 6 hrs. and 20 mins

Unabridged Audiobook

Release date: 02-28-19

Language: English

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

     4 out of 5 stars 4.2 (22 ratings)

 Whispersync  Whisper sync for Voice-ready

His mother. His best friend. The barmaid at the local pub. Everyone is determined to find Nathan Moffatt a boyfriend. It’s the last thing Nathan wants. After spending every day making sure his clients experience nothing but romantic magic, the Granshire Hotel’s wedding organizer just wants to go home, binge-watch crime dramas, and eat pizza in his underwear. 

Unfortunately, no one believes him, and he’s stuck with lectures about dying alone. Then inspiration strikes. He needs the people in his life to want him to stay single as much as he does. He needs a bad boyfriend. There’s only one man for the job. 

Flynn Delaney is used to people on the island of Ceremony thinking the worst of him. But he isn’t sure he wants the dubious honor of worst boyfriend on the entire island. On the other hand, if he plays along, he gets to hang out with the gorgeous Nathan and piss off the owners of the Granshire Hotel. It’s a win-win. 

There’s only one problem - Flynn’s actually quite a good boyfriend, and now Nathan’s wondering if getting off the sofa occasionally is really the worst thing in the world.

©2019 Dreamspinner Press (P)2019 Dreamspinner Press

Buy links: Dreamspinner Audible  Amazon

Cat gives this one 3 Meows...

Wanted: Bad Boyfriend was a fun story. I liked the characters even the bride to be, she held a very important role in the story. The storyline was sweet, fun with a couple of twists and an allover good romance with a touch of heat.

Where I liked the story a lot, I was not fond of the narration at all.  The pacing was good but the voices? They would have been better off leaving it just a simple narration without the voice changes. Where Nate and Flynn's voices were Ok and I liked the accent, Max sounded like a girl, he also sounded like the mom and I couldn't tell them apart from getting confused at who was speaking, and the headlines at the top of each chapter like gossip were really fun but lost in the narration.  

This was one I would have rather read myself. Now having said that, if you are short on time and really want to read the story but just don't have time, it's always good to listen while doing chores or sitting at appointments or driving and the story is good.

Excerpt…

“You know, my nephew’s gay. Maybe if you hire him to do some work in the garden, they could… run into each other?”

Chapter One

THE GRANSHIRE Hotel brooded elegantly over some of Ceremony Island’s most stunning vistas. At the back the cliffs dropped down to the deep, white-sand crescent of the bay, where brightly colored boats rocked at anchor a few miles out. At the front the moorland rolled down, all heather and wildflowers, until it reached the straight, stone-built walls that fenced off the farmland. A small herd of deer sometimes roamed across the land.

The Tatler had named it one of the top ten destination-wedding locations in the UK. Wedding parties arrived from around the world. It wasn’t cheap, and it wasn’t easy to reach. Even UK couples had a long drive over rutted coastal roads and had to take a ferry over the stretch of Irish sea. But couples in search of the perfect wedding seemed to think it was worth it.

It wasn’t just the aged stone hall or posing on the elegant stairway with its black oak railings carved to look like twisted briars. They wanted the trip down to the fairy caves on the beach, the congratulatory pint of Guinness in the traditional country pub with the brasses behind the bar, and the “something old” picked out of the trinket shop in the hollowed-out fisherman’s cottage on the beach—or any number of the other Instagrammable moments the island could provide.

Couples who came to Ceremony wanted a well-chronicled fairy tale or a rom-com, and as the Granshire’s wedding planner, it was Nate Moffatt’s job to make sure they got it—even on days when the last thing he wanted to think about was anybody’s happily ever after.

“Shoes?” he asked as he leaned in through the doors to the Granshire’s bar.

The bar was an expanse of sea-bleached wood and polished metal surfaces that usually looked like it was ready for a magazine spread. It was covered in the detritus of the previous evening’s wedding party, with crumpled confetti swept into multicolored drifts in the corners and glasses sticky with the dregs of fruity cocktails on every flat surface.

A skeleton staff of the bar crew were already making inroads on the cleanup, yawning as they dragged bags of rubbish behind them. They paused long enough to shrug their “no ideas” Nate’s way. He made a mental note to up the usual “thanks for a good job” gratuity he’d send down.

Technically he didn’t need to. Some couples wanted to hire a marquee or get married in the old distillery, which meant hiring on extra staff, but the newly minted Sanders had just gone with the hotel package. So the staff were included. Still, in Nate’s experience it was always better to have a reputation as a good person to work for—for that one event when you had to ask them to dress up like the Mad Hatter and serve Long Island iced teas into the a.m.

Nate left the staff to get on with clearing the glasses and picked his way through the tables to the bar. He leaned over the bar and whistled sharply between his teeth to catch the bar manager’s attention.

“Bride’s shoes?” he asked. “One of a kind. Designer. Look like every other pair of sparkly silver Cinderella slippers you’ve ever seen?”

Max tossed two empty bottles of prosecco into the recycling and raised his eyebrows at Nate. “Somebody woke up pissy,” he said. The short, stylishly scruffy man was the son of the hotel’s owner and Nate’s best friend since they were two awkward gay kids trying to work out why more girls seemed to like them than boys did. It turned out that if you were best mates with the other queer kid in your small, islander class of twenty… that could be your gay quota until you graduated. “I haven’t seen any shoes. I found one of the bridesmaids sleeping it off in the toilet, though, if that helps.”

It was hard to resist Max’s smirk. Despite his sour mood, Nate caught the corners of his mouth twitching up in a return grin.

No matter how Grimm’s-fairy-tale pretty the weddings looked, the aftermaths were always a bit more like something out of the original stories—full of regrets, secrets to keep, and sometimes blood on the floor. Mostly vomit, but sometimes blood.

“As of midnight yesterday, the bridesmaids were back on their own time and not my problem,” Nate said.

“You could check the gardens,” Max suggested as he lifted the pot of coffee from the machine and poured Nate a cup. He didn’t need to ask if Nate wanted it. The answer was always yes. “I saw some of the wedding party dancing out there.”

Nate lifted the cup and took a scalding sip. There were bottles of syrup lined up on the wall, everything from basic bitch vanilla to cheesecake, but those were for people who drank coffee to enjoy it. This was maintenance coffee—hot, strong, and thick enough to stand a spoon upright in.

When he looked up, Max had taken a break from clearing the bar and was leaning on it instead. His arms were crossed, and he raised his eyebrows expectantly. “So? Long night why you’re such a cranky git this morning?”

It had been, but Nate didn’t think Max was wasting a suggestive leer on a 3:00 a.m. escort to her suite for the groom’s tiddly and depressed mother. That left….

Nate hissed out a sigh through clenched teeth. The morning seemed determined to just get on his last nerve. “I take it you’re the one who gave the groom’s brother my number?”

Max’s leer deepened. “Yeah, you owe me one. He still back at yours?”

“No.”

The leer collapsed. “Didn’t he call you?” Max asked. He sounded genuinely surprised. “I can’t believe it. He seemed really into you, said you were a silver fox.”

Nate glanced past Max into the mirror behind the bar and self-consciously brushed gray-streaked brown curls back from his forehead. He was thirty-seven. That was too young to be a silver fox, even if he had been going gray since before he was twenty.

“He called.”

Texted actually. Nate wondered dryly if his mild offense at that meant he should accept that he was older than he felt.

Max looked at him quizzically. “And? He thought you were hot. He called. You hooked up—”

“I didn’t answer him,” Nate said flatly. “I was in the middle of running a wedding. I didn’t have time to hook up with a random stranger.”

Instead of picking up on the prickle of irritation underlying Nate’s voice and backing off, Max made a rude noise. “It never stopped you before. I remember back in Durham, when you were volunteering at the book festival. One night you hooked up with three different blokes between talks and readings, including one of the authors. Still got everyone to fill in your satisfaction survey at the end.”

Nate had to admit, that had been a good night. Of course his years in Durham had been full of good nights. Even if he ended up never using that English Lit degree for anything but impressing boys who liked sonnets. Ceremony wasn’t Durham, though, and Nate wasn’t twenty anymore.

“That was over a decade ago,” Nate said. “And I was a horny idiot.”

“Happy, though,” Max pointed out. He flashed the grin that had gotten more than a few men to follow him for a quick tumble. And the numbers had increased recently. Max wasn’t handsome. There was too much nose and too much jaw, and his hair was too thick for styling, but he had that gloss of growing up wealthy and sure of himself. It had gotten Nate into more trouble than he could easily list over the years, since the first time a ten-year-old Maxwell had poked him in the ribs, grinned, and suggested they do something stupid. “C’mon, Nate. I know your ex did a number on you, but—”

It was the wrong thing to say. It was pretty much always the wrong thing to say.

“Fuck you, Max.”

TA Moore is a Northern Irish writer of romantic suspense, urban fantasy, and contemporary romance novels. A childhood in a rural, seaside town fostered in her a suspicious nature, a love of mystery, and a streak of black humour a mile wide. As her grandmother always said, ‘she’d laugh at a bad thing that one’, mind you, that was the pot calling the kettle black. TA Moore studied History, Irish mythology, English at University, mostly because she has always loved a good story. She has worked as a journalist, a finance manager, and in the arts sectors before she finally gave in to a lifelong desire to write.

Coffee, Doc Marten boots, and good friends are the essential things in life. Spiders, mayo, and heels are to be avoided.

Website Twitter

a Rafflecopter giveaway