One Night In Santiago

One Night In Santiago
by Audra North
Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

My Review:
This book was really sexy and fun. It's pretty short at about 80 pages, so it give us a specific moment in time for these characters. It was a great love-at-first-sight story and captured the perfect amount of feeling. The attraction was off the charts and gave me all sorts of good feelings.

Lily and Bruno both get stuck in Santiago from a freak winter storm and need rooms for the night. With the storm, there's only one room available. They fight over it and eventually decide to share. Mother Nature is at work here throwing these two together and they find out how great they are together. It's an original take on a fun premise and these two fought as equals in the game of attraction.

I loved how Lily was strong and self-sufficient. She's rich and powerful in her own right and didn't ever feel intimidated by Bruno. She's got a lot going for her and mostly already figured out how she needs to grow from her last relationship. All she needed was to meet the right sort of guy. She's comfortable with herself and unapologetic about being attracted to Bruno. She's a bit shy at first, but man can she be aggressive in her fantasies.

It's not often you find a Spanish-speaking, Russian-Chilean, born in the US. Bruno was quite exotic, but definitely secure in who he was. He's also rich with an entire “empire” of his own, but he's a great guy. He wasn't domineering or full of himself. Neither character had any major hangups or insecurities. These were two well-grounded individuals who you can believe had just the right amount of destiny thrown at them to find each other.

The sex in this book is pretty explicit, but vanilla and romance-based. It was fun and believable in a romance movie sort of way. No one is ashamed of their attraction or uncomfortable with their (or their partner's) sexuality and that's always really hot to me. I got a couple good laughs from the prose too: “A veritable hurricane of hotness” and “...flinging loose change at her butt”.

It ended with a believable happy-for-now versus an epilogue-worthy happily-ever-after. I was a little surprised and frustrated when the end just happened – turn the page, aaahhh!! where's the rest of the story?! But afterwards I realized it was perfect for a romantic movie-style ending and just didn't follow the script of recent romance novels where they're married with kids on the way by the end of the story. I was really glad that these characters didn't push things into a forced, tidy “everything is perfect and complete now” ending. It also feels like there could definitely be a couple sequels to this book to show the characters romance continue to bloom.

I felt happy and satisfied while reading this book and I enjoyed the writing. When you're looking for a little bit of love-at-first-sight magic with some well-matched characters, this is a good book to choose. I know it'll go onto my keeper shelf and I'll re-read it soon.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.