Reveiw: Her Best Friend

Her Best Friend
Sarah Mayberry
Contemporary Romance
Harlequin Super/April 2010
Purchased

From the back cover ~

Will it be friendship or romance?

What's a girl to do when she's secretly in love with a friend and he's married to someone else? She gets over it. That's what Amy Parker has done. Rather than lose her best bud Quinn Whitfield with an ill-timed, crazy confession of affection, she's taken the smart route. She's eased away from him. Just enough to get past the unrequited bits. And you know, it's working.

Until the day Quinn announces he's now single. That's right. He's single. And he wants to hang out. With her. Get reconnected the way they used to be.

Oh, this is so not good for Amy's equilibrium. Daily doses of Quinn remind her of everything she loves about him. But if he's free.and she's free.well, maybe the time has come for one of those crazy confessions.

One of my favorite romance tropes is friends to lovers, especially when they've know each other all their lives. Often one will stay on in the home town and the other will leave for greener pastures. This time around it's the heroine who stayed in the small town and the hero who left. He not only left, he left with the friend of the heroine. Quinn married Lisa who was a good friend of both Amy and Quinn. It was the three of them in their teens, the Three Musketeers. Amy had a crush on Quinn for years but he always treated her as his best friend. Then Lisa came along when they were all fourteen and changed the dynamics.

Quinn and Lisa have married and move to the city to pursue their legal careers. Amy has stayed in the hometown, working in her parents hardware store, saving up for her dream. Years have gone by and at the age of 30, Amy is finally realizing her dream of owning the town theater her great grandfather built. She runs into some legal difficulties and calls Lisa but instead gets Quinn. He not only offers to help but comes home for a visit.

The feelings Amy had for Quinn are still there. She's fighting the attraction, then Quinn drops the bomb - he's separated and getting a divorce. Amy has so many conflicting feelings. She sorry for Quinn, but now he's single! What the heck is she suppose to do? On top of that, she doesn't think she's Quinn's type. She thinks that Quinn only sees her as a friend, not as an attractive and potential girlfriend. She's just his Ames, his buddy, his pal. Drives her crazy! LOL I did like the tension this brought to the story. She's attracted to him, he's attracted to her, but neither thinks the other thinks of them as anything more than friends. So they both hide their feelings until... the kiss.

Quinn is really messed up. This is not where he thought he would end up when he said "I do" six years ago. You really can't help but feel sorry for him. He's a genuinely nice guy who's now trying to put his life back together. He decides to take some time off work and return to his home town. Seeing Amy again gives him a kick in the pants and makes him realize she's far more than just his best friend from childhood. The problem is that he doesn't know what to do. He wants her but his life is really screwed up. I think going home was the best thing Quinn could have done at this point. Going back to that small town where he grew up really gave him the perspective he need to see where he wanted his life to go. Mayberry does a good job showing how Quinn comes to terms with the choices he's made and the choices he now has to make. The way she had Quinn seeing Amy in a different light - she's still his best friend but he begins to see her as something/someone more. Quinn's biggest fear is losing Amy's friendship. Which is understandable since he's recently lost his wife and marriage.

It was fun seeing Quinn getting hot and bothered over his best friend. One minute he's thinking of her as Ames, his childhood friend, the next minute he sees her as this hot, sexy woman that he's dying to get naked. It's like Quinn had an angel and a devil on his shoulders, trying to be good but desperately wanting to be so bad!

Amy for her part had a crush on Quinn for years. It nearly broke her heart when he and Lisa married. You could feel Amy's sadness when she thought back to when she, Quinn and Lisa were teens and she realized that Quinn was attracted to Lisa. Then when Quinn was about to marry Lisa, Amy felt she had to be there for her friends even though it was tearing her apart. Now it's years later, Quinn is free and they've come full-circle. It's that fear of failure that holds Quinn back and fear of rejection that holds Amy back. As they wind there way back to each other we get to see snippets of their growing up years and how close they once were. I'm not a fan of big, long flashbacks but these worked to show Amy and Quinn's strong history.

Once again Ms. Mayberry has written another fulfilling love story. There were outside forces causing more friction and tension between Amy and Quinn but the focus never ventured far from their story. There were a few parts that moved a bit slow for me. I got a little tired of Amy's self doubt when it came to Quinn's attraction to her but it still proved to be an enjoyable story.

Rating: B+