Luke By Con Riley
Genre: Contemporary Romance, GLBTQ, MM
Tropes: Second chance, friends-to-lovers
Released: February 24, 2022
Publisher: Self-Published
Series: Learning to Love, Book 3
Length: 300 pages
Cover Design: Natasha Snow
Can Luke learn to love the man who left him?
Headmaster Luke Lawson is committed to saving his boarding school before a cash crisis sinks it. He’ll do anything to keep it afloat, even if that means accepting help from the man who broke his heart at uni.
Nathan’s offer to teach for free could be a blessing as long as Luke can harden his bruised heart. That’s tough when they’ll need to share living quarters and have a history of hook-ups. But Luke knows being compatible in bed isn’t enough to build trust. It can’t be when Nathan has always left him before morning.
This time around, it feels different. Nathan’s work overseas has changed him. Touched him. Opened a locked chamber in his heart that Luke is beginning to think must have been bruised in the past too.
As pressure mounts, can Luke trust that Nathan’s committed this time—not only to his school but to a shared future with him long term?
♥ Featuring a second chance at first love in close proximity, Luke is the third standalone novel in the Learning to Love series. Set in England’s glorious county of Cornwall, each book has a fulfilling happily ever after. ♥
CW: Non-explicit mentions of childhood anxieties.
Reviewed by ButtonsMom2003
I’ve loved Luke since the first book in this series.
When I got to the end of Sol, book 2 in this series, I couldn’t wait for Luke’s book. I just knew I was going to love his story and I also knew that it would likely break my heart in places. Well, I did love it, and it did bring on the tears more than once – but it was so worth it.
Luke and Nathan were at university together and they shared a house, along with Hugo (from book one, Charles). Luke’s book gives us insight into a lot of things about him and Nathan and why they’ve done certain things in their lives. I loved the way Con Riley delivered some of this information – via career talks at Luke’s school.
She also did a wonderful job of weaving together all of the nuances of the story and the characters in this book. When certain things were revealed, I was surprised that I didn’t see them coming because she did leave little clues along the way (which I realized later).
I could go on and on with more detail about the story but I really just want to say you need to read this if you like a book that will get you emotionally involved with the characters. When we learned the details of Luke’s childhood, I just wanted to wrap him up and hug him tight. Nathan didn’t have it easy either and I wanted to punch one of the characters from his past.
One of my favorite things in books is when a “bad” character gets redeemed and Austin, a secondary character in Luke, is a perfect candidate. I was so happy to learn that the next book in this series will be his book. Another of my favorite things in a book is the epilogue and the one for Luke is so wonderful. It’s rather long, which I loved, and it wraps up a couple of things that weren’t fully concluded in the main chapters – and it brought more tears, really happy ones.
If you haven’t read the first two books in this series, you could jump in here and I don’t think you’d feel lost. But you would be missing a lot of the history of the secondary characters and I think you would have a better reading experience if you read Charles and Sol first.
I don’t normally do this but I highly recommend reading this review as it is so much better than what I’ve written: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4286014672
♥♥♥♥♥
O Factor: Spicy
Available to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
CON RILEY lives on the wild and wonderful Welsh coast, with her head in the clouds and her feet in the ocean.
Injury curtailed her enjoyment of outdoor pursuits, so writing fiction now fills her free time. Love, loss, and redemption shape her romance stories, and her characters are flawed in ways that make them live and breathe.
When not people-watching or reading, she spends time staring at the sea from her kitchen window. If you see her, don’t disturb her — she’s probably thinking up new plots.
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