BOOK REVIEW: Secret

Ever since I finished this book, I haven’t stopped smiling. Smiling because stories like these fill me with an indescribable sense of hope and positivity. Smiling because some stories are just so wonderful in every single way—inspiring, brave, honest, relevant—that they fill my heart to bursting. Smiling because some love stories touch us so deeply that we never want them to end. And this is a book I wanted to grow old reading.

“…he was a gay man buried so deep in the closet he questioned if he would ever find his way out.”

Dylan Reeves is a married man in his late thirties—a man married to the same wonderful woman for the past nineteen years, a father to three well-adjusted kids, a successful businessman on the verge of the greatest professional accomplishment of his career—and yet he has been living a lie all his life. Dylan’s marriage, as supportive and loving as it is, has been a sham from the start, an arrangement between two best friends who agreed on living separate lives while raising together the three people they love the most in the world. But while his wife has given herself permission to find true love outside their marriage, Dylan has denied himself the same, putting his children’s happiness before his own, and living by a strict moral code of always doing the right thing, at all costs.

“…they didn’t ask to be born. It wasn’t their fault I didn’t have the balls to be me.”

While on a weekend business trip, as part of his company’s merger negotiations with one of the most successful technology companies in the world, the last thing Dylan expects to find on the other side of the negotiating table is a man who suddenly makes him forget all he’s pretended to be for so long, awakening all his suppressed yearnings, and igniting the very sexual man he was born to be.

“I’m in trouble…”
“That you are. I think we both are.”

Tristan Wilder is a man at the top of his professional game, a self-made computer mogul who has the world at his fingertips, but his success has also cost him his personal life, rarely finding the time to engage in anything more than commitment-free trysts with men who never ask more of him. Until a closeted man walks into his life, and ends up turning it upside down. Never one to have to pursue his conquests, Tristan finds himself in uncharted territory as he romances a man struggling to let his desires consume him. But the more time they spend in each other’s arms, exploring each other’s bodies and stealing each other’s hearts, the more it becomes apparent to them both that their weekend together would end up changing their lives forever.

“There’s no way this will end well for me, but not taking the few moments you’re willing to give me seems like a far worse fate.”

And this is all I will tell you about the storyline because even a peep about what comes next would deprive you of the very special way this story unfolds and eventually comes together, of the way these characters react in certain pivotal moments in the story, of the way their unique bonds are attested, because it is those unexpected actions and reactions that make this book so extraordinary in its approach. This is not a story that trivialises the vows of marriage, or validates infidelity—this is a truly inspiring story about living one’s truth, about the kind of selfless love and devotion that puts most of us to shame, about finding the courage to show’s one’s most vulnerable side to those we love the most. Love does not always mean an easy road ahead, but stories like these make us believe that there might be a happily-ever-after for us all. There is something truly uplifting about tales like these, tales that show us how life should be, the life we should all have the right to live, and I am always astonished by the sheer beauty of these authors’ stories, consistently inspiring but inexorably sexy. Whether a seasoned m/m reader or new to the genre, this story should be on top of your reading list.

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