An accidental meeting and a misunderstanding lead to a life-altering connection.
A new job, a new city, and hopefully a new life. When chubby gamer Oliver Barnaby receives a job offer from the best boutique game developer in the country, he leaves his family and his less than spectacular existence in Oklahoma without a second’s hesitation. Determined to change more than his career and his geography, Oliver implements a plan to finally land a boyfriend. Step one is improving his skills in the bedroom.
A life that looks perfect on paper, but feels empty in reality. Attractive, successful, charismatic Jaime Snow has a life other people envy. His already booming business is growing. He isn’t lacking in friends. And he has no trouble finding a date. But there’s an emptiness in Jaime’s heart and a hole in his life that only the right man can fill.
An accidental meeting, a misunderstanding, and falling in love. When Oliver and Jaime end up at the same bar at the same time, they each see something they want in the other. Going to bed together that first night is easy. Building the lifetime relationship they both desperately crave will require trust, time, and a little misunderstanding.
Word count: 55,872
Chapter 1
He had chosen the bar because of its name: The Bookstore. It was clever and unusual and he had laughed internally at how happy his mother would be if he told her he was spending time at the Bookstore instead of in front of his computer. Oliver’s entire life, she had mourned the fact he wasn’t a reader, and even though he had now moved two thousand miles away from their home in Oklahoma City, she still sent him books she was sure he’d love. Maybe someday he’d open one of them.
For now, he glanced down at the only book he had read countless times and adjusted it at the edge of his table to make the spine as visible as possible. The title—Coding—wasn’t as clever as the bar name, but the information and the way it was phrased had clicked perfectly in Oliver’s…
Cardeno C is one of my favorite M/M authors and this book shows why....The story is sweet and I was happy to see Jaime make Oliver come out of his shell. There was no conflict in this story but I felt it really didn’t need it since it was really a love story between two men who shouldn’t work together but did.
This was a lovely and sweet story of acceptance and finding the right love
For me, the characters-especially the main characters-are the driving factor in determining if I like a story or not. That's one of the reasons I keep coming back to Cardeno C.'s books...I know I'm going to get wonderful characters who are complex and deep, and with distinct personalities. I'm also going to get characters that are easy to relate to, and that is clearly illustrated here in Not A Game.
Now, this is not your usual sexy alpha man with the hunky-dory body where his head disappears from the breadth of his wide shoulders, pecs bursting out of his tees or arms ripping his sleeves. No. Think the other way around. Think, normal man meets a cuter than normal man and they fall in love. Simple. Madly romantic.