Savour the Moment, by Nora Roberts

TITLE: Savour the Moment
AUTHOR: Nora Roberts

COPYRIGHT: 2010
PAGES: 352
PUBLISHER: Berkley Trade

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: 3rd in the Bride Quartet

REASON FOR READING: Autobuy author.

Wedding baker Laurel McBane is surrounded by romance working at Vows wedding planning company with her best friends Parker, Emma, and Mac. But she's too low-key to appreciate all the luxuries that their clients seem to long for. What she does appreciate is a strong, intelligent man, a man just like Parker's older brother Delaney, on whom she's had a mega-crush since childhood.

But some infatuations last longer than others, and Laurel is convinced that the Ivy League lawyer is still out of her reach. Plus, Del is too protective of Laurel to ever cross the line with her-or so she thinks. When Laurel's quicksilver moods get the better of her-leading to an angry, hot, all-together mind-blowing kiss with Del-she'll have to quiet the doubts in her mind to turn a moment of passion into forever...

Ah, this is more like it. Savour the Moment felt a bit like take 2 of the plot of Bed of Roses. Like her business partner Emma, baker Lauren also gets involved with one of the men in their little group of friends. Again like Emma, Lauren's fancied her man forever, but hesitated to risk their friendship. And like Jack in Bed of Roses with Emma, Del (brother of Emma and Lauren's friend and also business partner, Parker) had occasionally had flashes of looking at Lauren and being shocked by seeing her as a woman, not just a friend.

So as Emma and Jack, Lauren and Del embark on an affair, with the understanding that they won't allow their friendship to be ruined if the affair goes nowhere. But of course, they both soon want a lot more.

Such a close similarity between the plots might have made STM feel unsatisfying, if it hadn't been for the fact that I thought the romance in BOR hadn't worked at all. I've gone on about it in my review, but to summarise, I never felt the love between Jack and Emma (nor their friendship, really) and the Big Drama at the end pissed me off, because I felt Emma and her friends were being terribly unfair to Jack.

So really, STM didn't really feel like reading the same thing all over again. It was reading something finally done the way it should have been done in the first place.

Lauren and Del clicked for me. I understood them individually and I understood why they felt as they did about each other. I felt the romance and I felt the friendship, too, even before anything happened. I also felt that the people around them were being a lot more mature about these two hooking up, and that helped. It wasn't the best romance I've ever read, but I enjoyed it.

The wedding stuff and the friendship between the women, the men and all eight of them as a group are as wonderfully done as they have been since the beginning of the series, so I won't say much about that beyond that this really enriches the romance for me and is the kind of thing that makes me enjoy NR's romances even when the romance itself isn't great (fortunately, not the case here).

Now to await the final installment. It's quite clear by now who Parker's love interest is going to be. I found him a bit brash and annoying when we first met him, but he grew on me during parts of this book (there's a scene near the end, in the beach house, which hinted at quite interesting depths), so I'm anticipating their book.

MY GRADE: A B.