When the TBR challenge is something like “friend squad”, that’s both easy and difficult for me to manage. On the one hand, I love a romance with a good friendship or friend group woven into it, so I’ve definitely bought plenty of those. On the flip side, I do tend to read those right away, so I wasn’t sure what I’d find in the TBR stash. I knew I wanted something contemporary, so I dipped into my box o’Harlequins.

The novel I came up with, Stealing Her Best Friend’s Heart, filled the bill several times over. Not only are the hero and heroine childhood friends, but the heroine has a solid friend group. And then there’s the hero’s grandmother. Not only does she have good friends, but they’ve started their own little matchmaking group.

Normally I’m not a fan of the stories involving groups of matchmakers meddling to manipulate the leads into getting together. In this case, it didn’t bother me as much. This is probably because the matchmakers in question definitely have their agenda and they’re certainly going to find excuses for their target audience to cross paths with each other. However, they also had a sense of boundaries and their actions didn’t cross that line into feeling manipulative, overbearing, or downright icky. It all came from a place of love and the relationship that ends up developing is all Heidi and Reid.

In this book, Tara Randel takes readers to the small town of Golden, Georgia, for the first in a series of books set in this north Georgia mountain town. The heroine, Heidi Welch, isn’t originally from Golden but when she was fourteen, she claimed it as home. After years of bouncing around with her dysfunctional mother, Heidi drummed up the courage to come back to the one place where she had ever felt safe. And there she found home and comfort with Alveda Richards, who was like a mother to her.

After finishing school, Heidi now lives in Golden. She is building up her own accounting business, while also working on the side at a friend’s store in town. She has saved for a down payment and after  a rather unsettled life, she longs for a place to call home. However, after finding the perfect place and drumming up the courage to make an offer, the house gets scooped up by a flipper.

It turns out that the flipper in question is Reid Masterson, a high school friend of Heidi’s and son of a prominent local businessman. As the book opens, we see Heidi asking for a favor from her friend. She convinces Reid to let her put in some sweat equity on the property in return for being able to buy it when it’s ready.

As the two work on their project, they rekindle their old friendship and find that they genuinely enjoy hanging out together. This one is a slow burn romance as attraction gradually turns into a crush which turns into something a bit more promising than unrequited love. I enjoyed the story, though the romance did develop a little too slowly for me.

I think one reason that I liked the characters was that they seemed like actual adults most of the time. Both of them have some old family issues that they are working through, and we see how this colors their interactions with each other. We also get to see them (eventually) figuring out how to talk about things with each other. I love a grand romantic gesture, but I also love seeing couples develop that habit of turning to each other for support and comfort. It colors the story with a lasting warmth.

Even though this isn’t a plot device that normally works for me, I even enjoyed the little sidebars with Reid’s matchmaking grandmother avidly watching Heidi and Reid getting together. She clearly enjoyed this turn of events even if much of it happened on its own without her orchestration. There are also hints of a budding secondary romance for the widowed Mrs. Masterson, and I enjoyed that as well.

While the romance developed a bit too slowly and the ultimate resolution of the home renovations plot felt both unnecessary and frustrating, I did enjoy this book. I’d read more by this author, though I do hope her other books meander around the plot a little less than this one.