Icing On The Cake

Title: Icing On The Cake
Author: Shayla Kersten
Publisher: Ellora’s Cave
Genre: Contemporary M/M,
Length: Novella (74 pages)
Rating: 4.25 stars out of 5
     

THE BLURB    

Jeff Morgan’s life is all about career. Relationships aren’t on his radar. His friendships are limited to a very few and his sex life consists of wham-bam-thank-you-man sexual encounters. He doesn’t do long term. He doesn’t even do breakfast.    

Then the fate of a cake brings Ollie Cranford into his life. Shaved head, tats and piercings, the baker is far from Jeff’s type, but Ollie is as luscious as the treats he whips up in his bakery.    

Now if only Jeff can relax long enough to enjoy the icing on the beefcake.
     

THE REVIEW    

Jeff Morgan’s best friend Clarissa was getting married at short notice and she not only wanted him to be the maid (man) of honour but she also asked him to order the cake since she was going to be out of town. Jeff was horrified because he knew nothing about wedding cakes, but he manfully agreed to his assigned duty. When he visited Cranford Designs, the bakery that Clarissa suggested because of its reputation of being the best, he was more than pleasantly surprised by the owner of the bakery, Ollie Cranford. Ollie was definitely not what Jeff expected a typical baker would look like, he was drool worthy with tats and piercings more suited to a biker, and Jeff felt his much vaunted control fast slipping away when they got up close and personal. Their first sexual encounter almost took place in the walk-in refrigerator because they were so hot for each other, however the difference in the way they lived their lives could be a deal breaker for future rendezvous.   

Jeff was very focused on his high stress career with 80 hour work weeks which satisfied his need for total control in his life. At 30 years old he was such an A type personality that he didn’t have time for anything else; his job filled his every waking moment. He wasn’t accustomed to letting go and having someone else call the shots. He recognized that with Ollie he would have to become a different person, someone who was more accommodating, and he didn’t know if he was ready to make a 180 degree turn in his lifestyle. His childhood with an alcoholic mother and no father had a lot to do with the way he lived and he had never let anyone control or touch him emotionally except his good friend Clarissa.  When Ollie took him into his bedroom it was the stuff of nightmares because it looked like a dungeon with all the BDSM paraphernalia and he wanted to leave immediately because this was so not his scene as he wasn’t a submissive.    

Ollie was very interested in Jeff but realized that his philosophy was totally opposite to what he was looking for. He had done the one nighter scene when he was much younger and did not want someone who lived his life going from one man to another to satisfy his need to get off. After a year of being alone he needed a man to come home to. His ex partner was a similar personality type to Jeff. He wanted Ollie to expand his bakery business and make it a global franchise but all he wanted was someone he cared for and who loved him and was around to celebrate small accomplishments in both their lives, someone to wake up with and have fabulous morning sex. He and his ex parted ways when they recognized that their goals in life were completely different.  Both men had not had a partner in their lives for a while and Jeff’s dry spell had been much longer than Ollie’s – they had a lot of work to do if they wanted to have more than one night together.    

The one area where they were compatible was in bed and I never knew that there were so many erotic ways in which you could use icing. I thought its use was a touch of genius in their initial makeout scene and I’ll never look at this sweet stuff that melts in your mouth the same way again. 🙂 Ollie was a master at his art and Jeff was a quick study. The scenes in bed were highly erotic as the characters negotiated their sex play and found out that they were not that different after all. I loved this line which represented Ollie’s attitude to life and love    

“Sex may be great by itself but it’s just icing on the cake when it’s with someone who cares.”    

Ollie wanted a more substantial relationship than Jeff was offering. Jeff had never thought of himself as “substantial” material but Ollie gave him a taste of what that could be like. I loved the gentleness that Ollie showed Jeff at times who had difficulty receiving pleasure which was such a foreign construct to him.   

 Shayla Kirsten usually does a good job on her characterizations and with these protagonists the whole ‘opposites attract’ theme worked very well. Ollie was a sweet but complex character who was totally opposite to the way he looked, and his vulnerability and need for something more than one nighters gave him unexpected layers which added to his appeal, but that vulnerability didn’t mean that he was a pushover for anyone. The sex between the characters really moved the plot along by demonstrating how these two strong personalities accommodated each other in bed because they wanted so much to make the fledgling relationship work, and even though there might have been a little too much sex for such a short story it wasn’t overwhelming.   

 Overall I thought this story was very appealing with credible characters, and Ollie was so warm I couldn’t help but fall in love with him, but there was one thing that took me out of the story – Jeff’s amazement at his extreme pleasure when Ollie touched his prostate –  

 Prostate. He’d heard enough stories about prostate massage. He just didn’t believe them. His body had never responded like that before.  

  

 
 
While three days is not enough to predict whether two people could establish a lasting relationship it was certainly a good indicator that these two had something positive going for them and the author avoided the trap of an HEA and ended the story with a HFN. I definitely recommend Icing on the Cake and I think you will enjoy it and the characters.