This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Elise - I'mHereForTheRomance. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is Elise - I'mHereForTheRomance's review:

I am a big fan of regency romance, so I thought I would step out of my comfort zone a little for the RITA© Reader Challenge and read a contemporary. Well, that and I am apparently not the only fan of Regency romance so they were pretty much all spoken for by the time I got around to signing up- but I digress! I don’t usually gravitate towards contemporary romance and I have never read a “Western.” I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was not disappointed!

I was pretty much sucked in from the opening scene, where our hero is experiencing an anxiety attack. Connor Garrett, Oregon Ranch Owner and Grump Extraordinaire, lost his wife three years prior to our story’s beginning and he just cannot bring himself to move on. To top it off, just before our story starts the barn on Connor’s farm burned to the ground. Every night, whether he wakes from a panic attack or just can’t sleep, he drinks himself into a stupor and every morning one of his friends or family members come by to make sure he isn’t dead. Connor’s grief felt like a real living thing to me, it certainly was for him, and I found myself sympathizing with his inability to move on, even after it started impacting his relationship with our heroine.

Our heroine, Felicity Foster, who is none other than Connor’s very-best-friend-since-childhood, has been half in love with Connor since she was a teenager. Over the years Liss has become quite the expert at pushing those feelings wayyyyyy down, especially when Connor marries one of her closest friends and then even more so when that same friend dies in a tragic accident and Connor needs Liss in a very different way than he ever did before. Like a true friend she pushes it all aside and takes on a kind of caregiving role – buying Connor groceries and making him dinner, things like that. But then Liss’ boyfriend leaves her with a mountain of debt and no credit and then her landlord decides to sell the house she rents and it is Connor’s turn to take care of Liss by offering her a place to stay.

Liss is of course a little weary about living in such close proximity to the man of her literal and metaphorical dreams, but she convinces herself that maybe living with him will wear down some of the effect he has on her (yeah, right). Now I will admit at first I was like, “You’re telling me that you’ve been in love with this guy for nearly your entire life and you think living with him is going to solve that problem?” But as the story progresses, something that Yates does really well is show how important their friendship is to both Connor and Liss. They have been through a helluvalot together and they truly value that friendship- Connor especially, who has already faced loss and cannot fathom the idea of losing Liss as a friend. But this is a romance novel, not a friendship novel, and as such their friendship is tested and shit. gets. awkward.

That is something I really appreciated about this story: Yates does not romanticize what it is like to explore a sexual relationship with your best platonic friend of 20+ years. She emphasizes how uncomfortable it is and I loved that! Connor and Liss share years of memories and baggage and that stuff doesn’t just go away just because you (sarcasm commencing) “see your best friend in a brand new light for the very first time ever” (sarcasm complete). After years of friendship Connor and Liss have feelings for each other, and it’s weird. Then they decided to act on those feelings, thinking they can somehow separate it all, and it’s weird. But they are at least trying to figure it all out and I feel that message is really important.

Something else I loved about this story was the rare treat of a sexually inexperienced hero. So, fans of the aforementioned – I know you are out there, pick this one up. I won’t say much more because I don’t want to spoil, but if that is a trope you enjoy then Connor is your man. I also really, really liked Liss. She seems to have been pushed around and guilt-tripped a lot in her young life and now that she is in her thirties she ain’t takin’ no shit. She is funny and brazen, with a slightly inappropriate sense of humor at times.

While I’m on “things I loved about this novel” I will also touch briefly on the secondary characters and the theme of friendship. I really enjoyed the secondary characters of this novel, Connor and Liss have an inner circle of four other friends whose chemistry was all very natural and very enjoyable to read. Clearly one of Yates’ strong suits is convincing the readers that the characters have been around for years and that’s a pretty strong suit in my opinion.

My (pretty minor) qualms with this novel were a) the conflict and b) the ending. The conflict of Connor moving on from his grief and the conflict of “friends to lovers” were basically so tightly interwoven here that I am considering them the same conflict. It was really the only conflict and, unfortunately, it wasn’t always quite enough to hold the story together. I can only listen to you whine about how you don’t want to lose your best friend so many times before it gets old. Also, I felt the ending was rushed and that really took a quite a bit away from the story for me. Again I don’t want to spoil so I won’t say much but I will say that Connor’s voice and character do a complete 180, and not in the redemptive way, and I do not feel that it did his character justice. I could have made peace with the conflict, or lack of, if the ending had justified allllllll the struggling they did but it just didn’t work for me.

That being said I still enjoyed this novel, my first contemporary Western, and am quite surprised to say that I will indeed be picking up others in the series.