Blog Tour ~ The Cub Club by Ardy Kelly (Reviews + Excerpt + Giveaway)
Ardy Kelly has a new MM paranormal mpreg book out:
What would you do if your adopted son shifted into a wolf cub before your eyes?
For single dad Steven the choice was simple - find the boy's family and hope they had the answers.
As the alpha of Lone Wolves Ranch, Mack trusted in humans as much as he trusted in love. Not at all. But he has a soft spot for the brave man searching for his son's relatives. When he discovers Steven is his fated mate, he's stuck between a soft spot and a hard place.
The Cub Club is a gay wolf shifter romance containing Mpreg and knotting. A complete 65,000-word novel - no cliffhanger!
Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon CAN
Giveaway
Ardy is giving away a $20 Amazon gift card with this tour – for a chance to win, enter via Rafflecopter:
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Direct Link: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/b60e8d4739/?
Excerpt
“We got company. There’s a biker at the gate.”
Mack looked up from the paperwork, staring at the walkie-talkie. It was unusual to have visitors. It was even more unusual for Sarge not to handle it on his own. The man was an excellent head of security, but he favored shifting and playing a rabid dog every time someone approached the ranch. It was effective. There wasn’t a repairman within fifty miles who would take their calls.
Mack picked up the radio. “I didn’t hear a motorcycle.”
“He’s on a friggin’ bicycle. Dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt. Who the hell dresses business casual in the Sierra backwoods?”
“Real estate agent?” Mack switched to the security camera feed on his computer. The mystery man stood outside the gate, holding a bicycle. “What’s he want?”
“Won’t say. Says he needs to talk to whoever runs the school here. Says it’s personal.”
Mack took another long look at the screen. If someone wanted to appear non-threatening, this man had it down pat.
“But here’s the weird thing,” Sarge continued. “I can’t smell him. I mean, he had to bicycle three miles down that dirt road, and in this heat I should be able to smell something.”
Sarge was of the old guard. Paranoid about discovery. Distrusting of humans. There was always a perfectly reasonable explanation for any visit, rare as they were. “I’m coming.”
Mack walked out of his office, into the hot afternoon sun. Everybody has a scent, he reasoned. Is Sarge getting a head cold?The gate was less than fifty feet away, and he saw the man waiting patiently.
He locked eyes with the stranger. The gaze he received in return wasn’t threatening or defiant. It held an intense curiosity. Too curious. This wasn’t ranch business.
Mack didn’t need to be any closer to take in the details. His suspicion heightened his senses, and he was on the alert for any potential danger. The man was attractive. Maybe in his mid-thirties, though prematurely gray. He was dressed exactly as Sarge had described, holding a mountain bike.
The only thing odd was what Sarge had already noticed: the man didn’t have a scent. There was something, but no stronger than salty sea air. Considering there wasn’t an ocean for more than a hundred miles, it was the only unique thing about him. Maybe he’s a merman.
Mack amped up his alpha attitude, swaggering the last few steps to the gate, before slapping his hand on the metal bars. “Can I help you?”
The stranger looked exhausted and tense. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his knuckles were white where he gripped the bike. He was covered in dust, much more than was usual. By late summer, the dirt road kicked up thick clouds of the stuff, but this was still June. Where had he bicycled from?
“I need to speak to whoever is in charge,” he said. The voice attempted to sound authoritative but cracked in the middle of the sentence, displaying an undercurrent of fear. Mack thought it strange he couldn’t smell it on him. “It’s about one of your students,” the stranger said.
Great. The man was a local, dressed in his Sunday best. The policy of the ranch was to be respectful but distant from their neighbors. Sometimes it was hard to accomplish that when you had teenagers. “Have they been causing trouble?”
The man shook his head. “No. An old student. Carol Rydell.”
Carol?Mack hadn’t thought of his cousin in years. She had been a rebellious teenager, with an overbearing alpha father. Uncle Jon was the alpha, and the old man didn’t like to be questioned. Carol had been too much like her father and didn’t like to be ordered around. She ran away at sixteen, and no one spoke of her since.
As much as Mack wanted to lie and say, “Never heard of her,” he found himself asking, “What do you want to know?”
The man’s poker face slipped, and worry was written all over it. “Did she have any family?”
“Why?”
He took a breath, and then blurted out, “Because she died thirteen years ago. In childbirth. And I adopted her son.”
If this was a ploy to get Mack to admit the ranch catered to the supernatural, it was a good one. Carol’s son could have come into puberty just in time for the full moon three days ago. And Mack recognized the look in the man’s eyes. Shift-faced.The human had seen the boy change. Or had he? He looked tense. But why can’t I smell his anxiety?
Mack realized he needed to be noncommittal. Get the man to tell him everything, while revealing nothing to him. “What’s your name?”
“Steven.”
Mack didn’t bother introducing himself. He was going to give the stranger the absolute minimum until he knew who he was talking to. “So, you’re raising Carol’s thirteen-year-old boy.” He opened the gate. “I bet you have questions.”
“You have no idea. I mean, I’m hoping you do.”
He wheeled the bike inside, while Sarge closed the gate behind them.
“You can leave that here,” Mack instructed, pointing at the bike.
Sarge stood beside him but Steven hesitated, as if this were his last chance to escape. No one said a word while Mack held his gaze, signaling my turf, my rules. Steven relinquished the handlebars, and Mack’s wolf purred. It’s fun bossing around humans.
The two walked the short distance to Sarge’s shack. It was half-jokingly called the guard house because all business with outsiders was handled here. No strangers got farther than this point without Mack’s approval, and few even made it that far. However, thisconversation needed four walls around it.
Once inside, Mack sat behind the desk. He needed to be intimidating and distant. “So, Carol’s son…” Mack waited to see whether Steven would supply the name of the boy. The long pause let him know he wouldn’t. “Has he recently come into puberty?”
When Steven nodded, Mack gave him a guarded smile. “I assume you’re not here because you caught him masturbating during the full moon.”
4 Stars!
Steven and his adopted son need some help. Steven searches for a place for Peter to safely learn about himself, leading Steven to visit the Lone Wolves Ranch. Mack, the alpha there, is suspicious of humans for a number of reasons. He also feels the need to protect his pack.
Not surprisingly, Steven and Mack get off on the wrong foot with each other. Once Steven returns with Peter, things get better in some ways for the pair.
Steven is a protector and a teacher. He manages to reach some of the shifter children who wouldn't talk to anyone. He loves his son and wants the best for him. I liked that while he was willing to go along with Mack's suggestions, he gave some of them the right amount of disbelief. I liked Mack, but wished that one of his pack would have smacked some good sense into him. They tried telling him, but he really dug a hole with his half-truths and lies. He was trying to protect himself, but he was also so far in denial that I wasn't sure anything was going to shake him free. Mack should have been able to see how different Jack was from Steven even before Jack decided to reappear like a bad penny.
There were some great secondary characters like the town's sheriff and Mack's second in command. While I could see that Helen was supposed to add humor, she just came off as too blunt for me to find funny most of the time. I loved the baking soda incidents; they were fun. I hope that we see a book with the sheriff in the future; his character was quite intriguing. If you like shifter books with Mpreg in them, this book is probably a good fit for you.
*** Copy provided to Bayou Book Junkie for my reading pleasure, a review wasn't a requirement. ***
4.5 Stars
I loved Steven, his character was really cute and everything about him was likable. I really loved that he was the “Mama/Papa Bear” for his adopted son and would literally do anything and everything he could to protect him. How he confronted the Alpha was funny and totally impressive, not backing down even when he was scared out of his mind. Mack was a pretty good character, too. I know he’s Alpha and everything, but he is basically wrapped around Steven’s finger from day one of them meeting, you could tell that he would do anything that Steven wanted him to. It was fun to watch their chemistry and relationship unfold.
Now, the bad guy of the story… I know he was kept alive and around to create extra drama and strife in the book, but I seriously think they should have just offed the guy at their first chance, with some of the stuff he pulled in the past, he was obviously not going to just slink away and let them live their best lives.
But, I really liked how this book played out. I liked the characters, their personalities and the storyline for them all. I really just liked this whole book in general. The only thing I can add at this point is that I would really like another book with these characters, can we please get a book two?
*** Copy provided to Bayou Book Junkie for my reading pleasure, a review wasn't a requirement. ***
3.75 Stars
The Cub Club is a shifter novel with a new plot point - the recessive shifter. Recessives are like half-bloods in Harry Potter. One of their parents is a shifter and the other is a human. They don’t shift unless bitten by a shifter and then they transform into a full shifter.
In the Cub Club, we’re first introduced to widower Steven who comes to Lone Wolves Ranch after he is surprised when his adoptive son shifts into a wolf. He had no idea his son is a shifter. And, he has no idea that he is a recessive. When he arrives at the ranch, he meets pack alpha Mack and the sparks fly. Kind of…
I want to say this story had so much promise, but the story was a bit too complex for me with too many plot points, like:
1 - Mack and Steven are fated mates, but they both fight the attraction for various reasons. Steven is still grieving his dead husband. Mack had a past relationship with a recessive that ended quite badly.
2 - Mack constantly lies and keeps secrets from Steven through most of the book. It makes it really hard to like Mack and it makes you lose a little respect for Steven.
3 - Steven is attracted to a local human (we think) sheriff through a good bit of the book...
4 - What happened to Steven’s first husband?
5 - What happens with all the orphaned shifters on the ranch? The ranch has become a safe haven for abandoned/orphaned shifters of varies species - wolf, bear, etc.
The world building in this book is fantastic. The author does a tremendous job setting the scene for the Lone Wolves Ranch - both the beauty of the property and the sense of pack/family amongst the wolves.
I hope this is the beginning of a series and we see more of the pack and get some answers to the open questions.
*** Copy provided to Bayou Book Junkie for my reading pleasure, a review wasn't a requirement. ***
Author Bio
Ardy Kelly is my paranormal pen name. I work for one of the top boutique event planning companies in San Francisco, and I can't risk having our clientele (or my boss) discover my passion for aggressive, sexual, alpha men.
I started writing steamy contemporary romance in 2015 under the name Robyn Kelly. At that time, only virgins seemed to be nabbing troubled billionaires, and I thought it was time to write a book where experience counted for something. When I discovered the Omegaverse last year, I noticed a lot of stories where Omegas were weak little victims, and decided to tackle that issue as well.
Much as I love writing all types of romance I don’t mind poking fun at the genre, too. My books always have a lot of humor, and usually one character is reading or writing a particularly silly romance book.
Author Website: www.robynkellyauthor.comm/ardykellyauthor
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