Title: Suspiciously Sweet
Author: Samantha SoRelle
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 137 Pages
Category: Contemporary Romance
Rating: 4 Stars
At a Glance: Suspiciously Sweet lives up to its title in every way. It’s one of those stories that exists, seemingly, for no other reason than to make my heart happy, and it succeeded.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Trevor Hill has a secret.
By day he’s a mild-mannered journalist, but by night he’s the hottest—and most hated—food critic in town. When he walks into Nana O’Neill’s Bakery looking for his next scathing review, the last thing he expects is someone like Owen behind the counter. The scowling man looks more like a bouncer than a baker, but after one bite, Trevor is in love—with Owen’s baking at least.
Owen O’Neill has secrets of his own.
Scarred, tattooed Owen would rather be in the kitchen whipping up pastries than dealing with actual people. But with the business failing, he can’t bring himself to kick out any repeat customers, even ones as annoying, dismissive, sarcastic, funny, and gorgeous as Trevor.
All Owen wants is to be left to run his little bakery in peace—a task made more difficult not only by Trevor’s distracting presence, but also by the legions of fans that show up following a review by a famous yet secretive critic…
Review: Just in time for Valentine’s Day, author Samantha SoRelle has written a lovely confection of a story that’s not long on pages but is as full of sweetness and warmth as the pastries Owen O’Neill creates in his outdated kitchen with his broken down appliances at his rundown little bakery.
Owen is a prodigy with an unexpectedly touching backstory. He is not a classically trained pastry chef, he simply follows his Nana O’Neill’s time-honored recipes to create the pastries and breads he sells, but the truth is his dream isn’t thriving, and if he’s being honest with himself, he’d like to branch out and create some of his own delicacies. The one thing that’s stopping him is that he’s not altogether sure he can trust his instincts to craft his own recipes, and he can’t afford to make mistakes. The aptly named Nana O’Neill’s bakery is a two person operation, which means Owen feels responsible for Yvonne, his customer-facing employee, and he often exists on only a few hours of shut-eye between the time he closes up shop and cleans and does the books and takes inventory, and then starts all over again at whatever unholy hour he drags himself out of bed to do his prep work.
Owen works himself to the bone, and takes immense pride in his skills, only to see a mere few customers come through the door each day. The word isn’t getting out that his baked goods are incomparably sublime, but that changes one fateful morning when a roundly despised but well-known food critic stumbles upon Nana O’Neill’s and decides to sample the goods for no other reason than to load up on ammunition for what is guaranteed to be his next scathing review. Unbeknownst to Trevor Hill, he was about to stumble upon a little slice of heaven.
Trevor is underwhelmed by what he determines to be a grubby, unremarkable shop owned by a surly, tattooed pastry chef who looks more like a bouncer at a club than a master of exquisite creations in the kitchen. Then Trevor takes his first bite of one of Owen’s croissants. While Mr. Tasty—Trevor’s pseudonym—gives Nana O’Neill’s sweets an almost unheard of stellar review, he couldn’t help making it a backhanded compliment all the same. The result, however, is lines of customers wrapped around the block waiting to sample Owen’s pastries, which sounds like an ideal outcome, but it proves to create its own set of problems as well.
Trevor makes himself a regular at Nana O’Neill’s and becomes something like a friend, something like an advisor to Owen in the process. Neither Owen nor Yvonne have a single inkling Trevor is the man behind Mr. Tasty, though, and as Trevor’s attraction to Owen and his feelings grow, it becomes inevitable that he is going to have to either own up to his alter ego, or pull away and leave Owen alone. Trevor’s secret causes an expected smidge of conflict in this otherwise delightful morsel of a romance, and the moment of truth came as yet another layer of sweet added to the mix.
Suspiciously Sweet lives up to its title in every way. It’s one of those stories that exists, seemingly, for no other reason than to make my heart happy, and it succeeded.
You can buy Suspiciously Sweet here:
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