Single Dads #1
Summary:
Reeling from the painful rejection of a man he thought he loved, Asher is left holding the baby.
Ash wants a family, and is determined to continue with a surrogacy he'd begun with his ex. Bringing baby Mia home, he vows that he will be the best father he can be. Nothing in this world matters more to him than caring for his daughter, not even accidentally falling in lust with the doctor next door. Challenged by his growing attraction to Sean, and confronted by painful memories of his family, Ash has to learn that love is all that matters.
When ER doctor Sean moves in with his friends next door to sexy, single-father Ash, he falls so quickly it takes his breath away. The sex they have is hot, but Ash is adamant his heart is too full with love for his daughter to let anyone else in. Why is Sean the only one who sees how scared Ash is, and how can he prove to his new lover that he desperately wants the three of them to become a family?
Original ebook Review June 2019:
I love it when my favorite author starts a new series. Single Dads has so much potential I can't wait to see what is yet to come. Personally I think there is nothing sexier than a man caring for a child. I was 16 when I saw a boy in our class carrying his little sister into the stands at a basketball game and I've been a goner ever since for men caring for kids, so to have Single Dads be the series focus and title, I was all kinds of "YAY!"
I'm not going to say Asher and Sean have a "cutesy meet" but it definitely fits the overall stress levels of said characters. "Collecting your bestie off the front steps of the next door neighbor because he was so drunk he went to the wrong home while said neighbor is trying to keep his baby girl sleeping" may not be rom-com gold but it definitely screams "yep, they are destined for romance".
I think Asher is pretty indicative of most single parents, perhaps his stress levels are a little higher than they need to be but considering how his ex behaved leading up to the surrogacy, his behavior really isn't all that unrealistic. There were moments where I would have liked to see Ash let Sean in a bit more but again his past mixed with new fatherhood, its understandable and there is no doubt whatsoever that he loves his little girl. The scenes with Mia are beyond adorable, his inner fears and imaginations not only made me smile(not so much at the fear part as the imagination, hey I like to see characters suffer but I'm not sadistic😉😉) but they made him more real.
As for Sean and his fellow roomies. Well, I do love a man in uniform and what better uniforms than a doc, a cop, and a firefighter? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke but its who the boys are both in occupation and spirit. Sean may be the star of Single from that house but the others factor in too. Eric is the drunk friend who instigates the introduction between Ash and Sean and Leo is like a baby whisperer with Mia, or as I believe a character at one point calls him "the baby wrangler".
Sometimes I think Ash should have been doing a bit more pursuing to level out the playing field but at the end of the book I was more than satisified with how RJ Scott wrote Ash and Sean's journey. Single isn't just a romance between a single father and his next door neighbor, its also a tale of friendship, fatherhood, and finding a way to balance all of it together. If you're looking for loads of angst then this might not be up your alley right now, I wouldn't label Single all unicorns and roses but there really isn't any of what I call "high-end level drama" either. Nope, RJ Scott's Single is a lovely romantic read that will put a smile on your face and fill your heart with warmth, so its a win-win in my book.
Reeling from the painful rejection of a man he thought he loved, Asher is left holding the baby.
Ash wants a family, and is determined to continue with a surrogacy he'd begun with his ex. Bringing baby Mia home, he vows that he will be the best father he can be. Nothing in this world matters more to him than caring for his daughter, not even accidentally falling in lust with the doctor next door. Challenged by his growing attraction to Sean, and confronted by painful memories of his family, Ash has to learn that love is all that matters.
When ER doctor Sean moves in with his friends next door to sexy, single-father Ash, he falls so quickly it takes his breath away. The sex they have is hot, but Ash is adamant his heart is too full with love for his daughter to let anyone else in. Why is Sean the only one who sees how scared Ash is, and how can he prove to his new lover that he desperately wants the three of them to become a family?
I love it when my favorite author starts a new series. Single Dads has so much potential I can't wait to see what is yet to come. Personally I think there is nothing sexier than a man caring for a child. I was 16 when I saw a boy in our class carrying his little sister into the stands at a basketball game and I've been a goner ever since for men caring for kids, so to have Single Dads be the series focus and title, I was all kinds of "YAY!"
I'm not going to say Asher and Sean have a "cutesy meet" but it definitely fits the overall stress levels of said characters. "Collecting your bestie off the front steps of the next door neighbor because he was so drunk he went to the wrong home while said neighbor is trying to keep his baby girl sleeping" may not be rom-com gold but it definitely screams "yep, they are destined for romance".
I think Asher is pretty indicative of most single parents, perhaps his stress levels are a little higher than they need to be but considering how his ex behaved leading up to the surrogacy, his behavior really isn't all that unrealistic. There were moments where I would have liked to see Ash let Sean in a bit more but again his past mixed with new fatherhood, its understandable and there is no doubt whatsoever that he loves his little girl. The scenes with Mia are beyond adorable, his inner fears and imaginations not only made me smile(not so much at the fear part as the imagination, hey I like to see characters suffer but I'm not sadistic😉😉) but they made him more real.
As for Sean and his fellow roomies. Well, I do love a man in uniform and what better uniforms than a doc, a cop, and a firefighter? I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke but its who the boys are both in occupation and spirit. Sean may be the star of Single from that house but the others factor in too. Eric is the drunk friend who instigates the introduction between Ash and Sean and Leo is like a baby whisperer with Mia, or as I believe a character at one point calls him "the baby wrangler".
Sometimes I think Ash should have been doing a bit more pursuing to level out the playing field but at the end of the book I was more than satisified with how RJ Scott wrote Ash and Sean's journey. Single isn't just a romance between a single father and his next door neighbor, its also a tale of friendship, fatherhood, and finding a way to balance all of it together. If you're looking for loads of angst then this might not be up your alley right now, I wouldn't label Single all unicorns and roses but there really isn't any of what I call "high-end level drama" either. Nope, RJ Scott's Single is a lovely romantic read that will put a smile on your face and fill your heart with warmth, so its a win-win in my book.
Original Audiobook Review September 2019:
Honestly I don't think there's much I can add to my original ebook review back in June that would fully express how much I love Ash, Sean, Mia, and the whole gang. Sean Crisden once again brings RJ's words and characters to life in a way that almost reminds me of the old radio shows from the 30s & 40s that I collect. There's no sound effects but he puts so much into the individual characters that sometimes I swear I'm hearing the background noise, the footsteps, the door knocking and creaking open, the cars on the street.
Now I don't normally listen to a book this close to having first read it but the opportunity arose and you know what? Single is just as good in audio as it was on my kindle.
RATING:
RJ Scott
Honestly I don't think there's much I can add to my original ebook review back in June that would fully express how much I love Ash, Sean, Mia, and the whole gang. Sean Crisden once again brings RJ's words and characters to life in a way that almost reminds me of the old radio shows from the 30s & 40s that I collect. There's no sound effects but he puts so much into the individual characters that sometimes I swear I'm hearing the background noise, the footsteps, the door knocking and creaking open, the cars on the street.
Now I don't normally listen to a book this close to having first read it but the opportunity arose and you know what? Single is just as good in audio as it was on my kindle.
RATING:
Asher
Vin Diesel is outside my house.
It’s two a.m., Mia is asleep, and I’m hallucinating that a Hollywood actor is outside my house in the San Diego suburbs.
“Open the door!” the big man bellowed, banging on the wood. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find to use as a weapon, then switched on the porch light that illuminated the area with the light of a hundred suns, and wrenched open the door. My attempt at acting like a hard-ass was undermined by the fact that my weapon was a citrus-yellow bowl my twin sister had made. It didn’t help that I was wearing pajama bottoms that barely sat on my hips and a T-shirt emblazoned with a farting unicorn, but still I growled.
And there stood Vin Diesel himself.
Now that I was up close I could see it wasn’t the real actor. Just someone who, in my state of exhaustion, appeared a hell of a lot like him. In my defense, my vision was blurry. This was my first night being completely and utterly alone with my brand-new baby daughter. No more sister backing me up, no more getting a few hours’ sleep. Actually, I’d had no more than an hour’s sleep at a time in the past three days. Too late to do anything about it, I wondered if this behemoth might have a weapon, because it was two a.m., he was swaying, and he was obviously off his head on something. Drugs. This had to be something to do with drugs.
Why didn’t I pick up my cell phone first?
I’d forgotten my damn phone, and I’d only opened the door so the banging wouldn’t wake Mia up, and I hadn’t even considered this guy could be an armed intruder.
An armed intruder isn’t likely to knock or shout so loud the whole neighborhood is probably peering out of their windows.
Also, I lived in a small house in a peaceful San Diego suburb, in a quiet cul-de-sac, where excitement was what happened last month when the guy at number six lost his garage remote.
Fake-Diesel stumbled back a little and winced up at the porch light, shielding his eyes and cursing.
“My keys,” he mumbled and patted his pockets, pulling out a bunch of keys with a joyful whoop, then immediately dropping them on the ground.
“Who are you?” I stood right in the doorway and kept my voice low; anything not to wake Mia. I’d just gotten her to sleep, and if this Diesel wannabe woke her up with his asshole banging on my freaking door, then I would shove a dirty diaper in his face before calling the entire police department down on him. Or maybe a SWAT team consisting of parents who knew what it was to have a new baby who refused to sleep. An entire armed force of sleep-deprived adults would end up killing him.
Now, that would get him the fuck off my porch.
He straightened and blinked. Then he cruised me. Or at least it seemed as if he might have. Right here on my property, clearly stoned, he raked his gaze from my head to my toes and lingered in the middle for way too long.
“You’re not them.”
Oh, so he wasn’t cruising me unless he identified his friends by staring at their crotches.
He swayed toward me, his eyes glassy, his hand outstretched.
“You have the wrong house,” I shoved the hand away and stepped outside, before pulling the door half closed behind me.
The guy was big, way bigger than me but he was so unbalanced I thought I could take him down if he tried anything.
Fake-Diesel spaced out in an instant, and for a brief shining moment, I genuinely thought that he understood what I was saying. Then he began to cry, great rivers of silent tears running down his face.
“Jesus,” I said, unsure what to do next. Should I comfort the complete stranger crying on my doorstep or call the cops or what?
“Sean!” the stranger yelled through the open part of the door. “Leo!”
What the fuck? You’ll wake the baby.
“Shut up!” I snapped as loudly as I dared, and hoped to hell his shouting hadn’t reached through the house and up to the very light sleeper that was my daughter.
“GUYS!” he yelled again, and this time, he pushed it too far. So I did what every sleep-deprived adult would do in my situation. I lost my cool and snapped.
Luckily, for him, the extent of my snapping was thrusting the fruit bowl toward him in the most threatening way I could imagine.
“You. Stop. Go. Away. Or I’m calling the cops.”
He took a step back. Wide-eyed. “What? Who? Where’s Sean? Is Leo home yet?”
“My name is Asher,” I snapped.
“Why are you in our house?” The guy looked so confused. “Are you Sean’s latest hookup? He likes pretty boys…” He stopped, blinking back tears. Should I be offended? At thirty-one, I was a long way past a boy or being called pretty, for fuck’s sake. One more step back and my visitor would be tumbling down the steps from my wraparound porch. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out an old flip phone, and stared at the screen before punching at buttons with his big fingers.
“Sean? Leo? Guys?” he pleaded and then took that one fatal step back, tumbling down the steps and into a chaparral broom so overgrown it gave him a soft landing. I toed off one of my fuzzy duck slippers, a gift from Siobhan last Christmas, and wedged my front door open before going toward the idiot. Before I reached him, he’d jumped up, swayed, and then was violently sick in the same bush he’d landed in. His cell was on the grass, still lit up, and a tinny voice was calling loudly for someone called Eric.
I assumed the guy decorating my chaparral broom was Eric, and I picked up the phone. “I don’t know who the fuck you are or who Eric is, but I’m at 23 Birds View Court, La Jolla, and you need to get your ass over here now to get him before I call the damned police.”
“Sorry? What was the address?” the man at the other end of the call asked.
What the hell?
“San Diego, La Jolla, 23 Birds View Court.” He’d better not be living hundreds of miles away.
“I’ll be there in… shit… will you look at that?”
I held the phone away from my ear, some kind of weird echo made it sound like the voice was coming from right behind me. Then, with a flurry of movement, someone walked past, scaring the shit out of me, and went straight to fake-Diesel-Eric.
“Eric?”
“I couldn’t help any of them,” the big guy said, and then, in my front yard, with puke down his shirt, he started to cry again. “We tried, but the doors…”
The man who’d appeared from the darkness gripped his shoulder. “Jesus. I’m sorry.”
I still couldn’t get a good look at the second man or understand why either of them was hugging it out in my yard, Eric deadly quiet, and the other man holding him upright.
“Sean, I couldn’t do a thing…”
Evidently, the guy holding Eric up was the Sean who he’d had been calling for, the one who seemed to live in my yard somewhere and liked pretty boys.
Maybe this is a dream? Maybe I’m still asleep. This is a whopping Alice in Wonderland kind of nightmare.
“Let’s get you home, okay?” Sean said.
Eric pulled back, swayed a little, and Sean grabbed him. Then he turned to face me.
“Sean Roberts,” he said and attempted to extend a hand to me but realized at the last moment he couldn’t let go of Eric. “We moved next door last week.”
“Go away.” I’d had enough of people on my doorstep. So far, Mia hadn’t woken up, and I might just get away with it. “Take your friend and go.”
“We’re sorry. Eric’s not had a good night.”
Mia’s piercing cry split the night, and I closed my eyes and counted down from ten. “You morons have woken up my baby, for fuc— for goodness sake.”
I left Sean and this Eric guy and slammed the door in their faces. No point in trying to stay quiet when Mia was awake. I stopped outside her room, calmed my temper, cooled my stress, and pasted a happy smile on my face. All the books said that with Mia only six weeks old, I was probably a blur to her, but I never wanted her to see me unhappy. If there was the smallest chance she understood complex layers of loneliness, fear, and anger, then I would keep working on pushing them behind a smile.
I placed the bowl on the hall table and headed straight for the crying. The scent in my room was that of the small, scrappy human who had taken over my life. It was a new baby smell, talc and cream, and warmth. I scooped her from her cot, feeling every tiny molecule of my stress vanish in an instant. Snuggled with her head up and under my chin, my hand supporting her tiny diapered rear, she mewled unhappily.
“Aww, Mia, I bet you’re just as sad not to be sleeping as I am,” I murmured to my sweet, precious baby girl. She couldn’t have been hungry, or at least she shouldn’t have been. She’d finished her last bottle a little while back, and I went through my emergency checklist, which was fuzzy and unfocused and lodged in the back of my mind somewhere under a desperate need to sleep. One thing the nurses had drummed into me, followed by my sister, was that routine was everything and I needed to learn all the checklists until they became second nature.
Second nature they weren’t, not yet, but I could work through them step by step.
The room was warm, but not too warm, and Mia’s crib was right up against my bed. She didn’t feel hot to the touch, and with the sniff test carried out, I didn’t need to change her diaper after I’d done so an hour earlier. Or thirty minutes. I couldn’t quite recall the time. Only that it was dark and past midnight. Her crying lessened, and she wasn’t hunting for a bottle like a baby bird. She lay against my chest, all soft and sweet and wanting her daddy to fix it all.
“It’s okay, Mia. The shouting men have gone. I made sure of it.”
She hiccupped, and I rubbed her back before picking up the embroidered pink blanket, a gift from our surrogate, and taking her out to the living room. We snuggled on the sofa, me and my girl, and she sprawled over my chest as I pulled the soft blanket over her. Within minutes she was slumbering again, and I fought napping myself long enough to get her back to her crib. My phone showed it was three a.m., Mia was asleep, and I climbed into my bed, scooting next to the open-sided crib, and for a little while I stared at the miracle that had changed my life forever.
Familiar fears rose inside me, the ones that had plagued me ever since I’d received the email about the successful implantation. Was I good enough? Was she okay? Why couldn’t I have stopped a drunk man from shouting and waking her? She shouldn’t know fear or anxiety. She should never be pulled from innocent sleep.
I was her dad, and she was my daughter, and I had never loved anyone or anything the same as I did Mia Francesca Haynes.
Writing love stories with a happy ever after – cowboys, heroes, family, hockey, single dads, bodyguards
USA Today bestselling author RJ Scott has written over one hundred romance books. Emotional stories of complicated characters, cowboys, single dads, hockey players, millionaires, princes, bodyguards, Navy SEALs, soldiers, doctors, paramedics, firefighters, cops, and the men who get mixed up in their lives, always with a happy ever after.
She lives just outside London and spends every waking minute she isn’t with family either reading or writing. The last time she had a week’s break from writing, she didn’t like it one little bit, and she has yet to meet a box of chocolates she couldn’t defeat.
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