Very touching story about trying to find acceptance and love. Two men both trying to come to grips with current situation and at the same time graving companionship. Mason came home at his sisters request to help their bigoted ailing father who kicked him out 10 years ago for being gay. Tanner left home with his boyfriend after a big fight at home the same night he told them he was gay. His boyfriend gets them in serious trouble and abandons him at the hospital. Broke, alone and no place to go he ends up at Mason's ranch. They have an instant attraction and form a friendship. They will have to decide if falling in love is worth the risk of Mason's father finding out and can Tanner make peace with his family. My only disappointment was the attitude of the sister who came across as more mean and hateful than loving and grateful to her brother for giving up his life to come home where he wasn't wanted. It's a decent read but I wasn't blown away by it. Tanner is one of those romance heroes who is constantly described a impossibly beautiful, despite the fact that the scar on his face had been infected just a week or so before (and therefore should have been all gross and nasty). The stuff with his ex-boyfriend and the Russian gangsters were unnessary window-dressing and added pretty much nothing to the story. I kept waiting for either of them to show up but nope, that didn't happen at all. There are some crazies going around and cutting up livestock and slaughtering (cows and sheep mainly) alive so if you're sensitive to animal cruelty this is probably not the story for you. Otherwise this is pretty much a bog-standard ranch story. There's cows and horses and horses used to drive cattle. The mains are sweet with each other, so that's nice I guess.The biggest flaw with this story is the family stuff. First of all characters kept saying that the father was a 'good man', but we literally don't see any of that. He's just hateful constantly. Mason (his son) never gets any kind of break with him. Mason's sister is almost as bad, she blames him for everything despite the fact that he completely dropped his entire career and everything to come home and take care of his father. I wanted to drop them both into the river, or hoped they ran into the cattle-slashers.The story with the livestock slashers seemed kind of tacked on to provide some extra conflict. This isn't a mystery, there's no investigation by anyone other than the sheriff, and the solution is just handed to us. In fact, when the criminals were named I hadn't even remembered who they were and had to be reminded. They basically were not part of the main story at all, so it feels sort of useless to the story. The whole thing with the Russian mobsters had the same problem, they were just an excuse to have Tanner beat up at the start of the story and otherwise had no impact. I guess maybe the author wanted to make it a gay-bashing and then thought it would be too clichéd or something, since the way Tanner reacts to it (freezes up at the first hint of homophobic insults) seems like it was written for a gay-bashing incident. So, that was two things added for dramatic effect that didn't have any effect on the story.This could have been a nice solid four star story but the unneccesary drama and the just plain hateful family with no good payoff for either of those issues cost the story a whole point.
