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.
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.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
sounds like a good read...enjoyed the review and excerpt
ReplyDeleteAwesome book
ReplyDeleteThank you for the review. I read this and was thinking of giving the audio a try but I think I might have to giving it a sample listen just to see what your talking about. Sorry to hear it didn't totally work out for you.
ReplyDelete