Funny how life can be so full yet so empty, how a life can be crowded with sycophants and drugs and parties and random one-offs but can be entirely devoid of anything that might make you feel like you’ve experienced anything close to a human connection. Nick Ventura has it all—fame, fortune, fast cars and faster women (and more than a few guys too), but it takes a car accident and a stint in rehab for Nick to learn that a full life and a fulfilling life are two very different things.
Big brother Shane and his husband Jesse are busy living their happily-ever-after, so what’s Nicky to do when the one and only person he’s ever been able to depend on has moved on to a new chapter in life that doesn’t include being Nick’s one and only constant? Nick goes into a tailspin of overindulgence and self-neglect that could very well have proven fatal for him, and it sends him spiraling back down to earth to face the harsh reality that his celebrity status doesn’t make him immune to having to pay for his rock star proclivities.
Nicky meets Luka Novak in rehab. Luka’s not a patient, though. Luka’s the facility’s nutritionist and he’s not at all the kind of man someone like Nick Ventura has ever been attracted to. Luka is brightness and confidence, not to mention a bit more obviously gay than the men Nick’s been with in the past. But then again, attraction for Nick doesn’t mean much more than his target being ready, willing, and able, and while Luka is able, he’s neither ready nor willing to admit he’s maybe a little bit attracted to Nick.
Nick is all attitude and bitterness and hard exterior that masks the hurt of a painful childhood and a hollow existence, and it’s that pain that calls to Luka. Nick doesn’t want to need anyone because wanting and needing means letting someone in; letting someone in means that when they leave that void becomes just another dark spot on an already bruised and battered heart. But Luka can see through Nick’s armor to what’s beneath, and it doesn’t take long before Luka has taken Nick on as his own personal project. And for Nick, well, it doesn’t take too terribly long before he realizes that Luka’s the one person in the world he’d like to lean on just a little bit, first as a friend, but then as so very much more.
The Luckiest is an exceedingly romantic and turbulent love story. It’s both the roses and the thorns, if that’s your cup of tea, as Nicky time and time again betrays himself so completely and, in turn, ends up betraying Luka, if for nothing more than the simple fact that Nick hasn’t the first idea what love feels like. He knows what love looks like because he’s rejected and scorned what Shane and Jesse have; until, that is, what they have begins to look and feel a whole lot like what he has with Luka.
Fear of failing leads to fear of trying, which, in all its bitter irony, leads to absolute failure on Nick’s part to try to capture and hold onto what he has with Luka. Nick can’t seem to give up the persona the public has come to expect of him—the wild, narcissistic, egotistical rocker-boy—in spite of how much he’s changed, and that’s the Nick that keeps hurting Luka and is ultimately that which ends up costing Nick the man he loves, a love that’s so painfully obvious and so obviously painful.
Atonement, redemption, second, third, and fourth chances, and finally the grandest of all grand gestures brings forgiveness and affirmation and promises, not that there will never be hurt, but that there will never again be the purposeful denial of the thing that means so much more than happy for now, but means for better or for worse for many years to come.
Buy The Luckiest HERE.
And if you’d like an erotic sneak peek into a day in the life of the Lucky Moon boys, check out Beyond Moonlight, three FREE vignettes the authors have offered HERE.