Anything For You Sir

2.5
This was a short from the Love Has No Boundaries promo which means it was free.
Jerome is a SUPER grumpy iron worker who, years later, is still mourning the death of his boy/husband after Hurricane Katrina. Jason is a ‘boy' sent by Master Sampson to help Jerome with his work and hopefully more. As a premise, the McGrump & the sweet boy is appealing for me but this had one too many issues, soap opera style issues, Mercy Celeste type issues, and this was a short.
Jerome has Dallas/Dynasty calibre of drama, each more unbelievable than the next and he kind of crosses the line from grump to a**hole with Jason. Jason is hot, gorgeous, willing to work under grueling heat for a guy who doesn't even want him there. He's abandoned a career in law, run away to some kind of BDSM camp that churns out ‘boys' and is now doing unpaid physical labor in the Louisiana heat. If I had gone into reading slave fiction I would've been more on-board. Other annoyances were the vernacular rendering of speech for Marie and Ant, a mother & son restaurantuers who are clearly black. There's no need for it. It's distracting. Then there was requisite straight girlfriend, in this case Jason's cousin Ana, who feel free to randomly and inappropriately comment on people's sex lives. I've never been a fan of these friends in fiction or in RL. And did I mention that Jason's surname is Corleone. Yep. Jason Corleone.

I know it seems too much of a review to hang on a free short but ... that's where the chips fell. I did like that Jason and Jerome were manly men who were attracted to manly men: hairy, smelly, sweaty etc. This was clearly written by a man using men he knows and are attractive to him as templates. I wish the story had dialed down the drama. The bones for a good story were here.

[I've been going through shorts that have lived in back corners of my reader but have been in poor mood to review or even update my my GR feed so the read dates will be random.]