Little Squirrels Can Climb Tall Trees by Michael Murphy

Synopsis From Publisher:

Kyle Miller is a rare breed.  Though born to conservative parents and raised in small-town Oklahoma, Kyle realized young that he had to escape rural America.  Now he's living in New York City, working as an ER doctor, and paying off his massive student loans.  He's never been on a plane and never seen a movie, but he is worldly enough to recognize attraction when it smacks him in the forehead.  Not that he knows how he managed to crack heads with Joseph, who's a good foot shorter than Kyle's six and a half feet.

Joseph is Kyle's polar opposite in other ways too, well-off where Kyle is poor, and self-assured while Kyle is insecure.  He's also determined to show Kyle what a great guy he is and bring the confidence Kyle shows in the ER out in her everyday life.  But Kyle's hectic work schedule and inexperience with relationships won't make for an easy romance.

I really don't know what my problem is, but I'm ridiculously addicted to romance right now.  I can't seem to get enough of it.  I'm not sure if my brain is trying to tell me to get my toes back into the dating game, after years and years of purposefully being single.  Maybe I just like reading about sex, which is something I'm not all that familiar with anymore.  And truthfully, I end up skimming through most of the sex scenes, so I'm all most positive that it's not the second explanation.  I'm not even all that sure about the first, while I have thought about it, and maybe even talking again with someone I dated 19 years ago, I'm not sure that explains it either.  I do know that, to a small or even large degree, it's the fact that I'm discovering so many new to me authors, some of whom are pretty frickin good.  I'm not familiar with the ebook publishing world to know what portion of these authors also get paper books published as well, but I do think a lot of them would be if they were writing in another genre.  So many of them are brilliant, that it's their writing I'm addicted to, not necessarily the romance aspect.  Though I'm not skimming through ALL the sex scenes.

When it comes to Kyle and Joseph, they were adorable.  They were the typical odd couple, a couple that on paper, does not belong together, but they click.  Kyle, in all his innocence, gives Joseph a new lease on life.  Allowing him to dive back into a relationship with someone who isn't jaded or bitter by past relationships.  Kyle on the other hand, allows himself to really explore life and all it has to offer with Joseph, something he's never done before.  The relationships also allows both of them to truly trust in each other, an idea that's foreign to both of them.

Kyle is the surprise standout for me.  He is the character that grows the most, and truly comes into his own person. He comes out to his very fundamentalist mother, something he thought he would never do, in front of an entire room full of religiously conservative women.  When the guest speaker starts rallying against the evils of "the gays", he eventually breaks down and confronts the man.  He isn't afraid, he isn't hesitant, he's amazing in that moment, and if he was real, I would have proposed to the man.  From that moment on, he is a man who is fully comfortable in his own skin, which allows him to be completely comfortable with Joseph.