Deborah Grace Staley, $1.93, ISBN 978-0463296523
Contemporary Romance, 2022

In Deborah Grace Staley’s Played, Jade and Matteo meet one night in a club and hit it off so well that they are soon sizzling up the sheets.

Naturally, everything becomes less exciting when morning comes and everyone has to come back down to Earth.

Jade is Jaye Baxter. She knows baseball. She is, after all, the Director of Latin American Scouting for the Reds, and she aims to move even higher up the totem pole.

Then there’s Matteo. He’s Matt Ruiz, and unlike Jaye, he offered her his real name during their initial here’re-my-privates encounter. He’s the top pitcher of the very club she has arrived to scout for, and this is a complicated situation because she can be fired if word gets out that she’s scouting the boys in a way not listed on her contract.

Oh, the dilemma they face. Will it be high-scoring balls, or just blue balls?

Played is an unevenly executed story.

For one, Jaye’s protests of “Oh, we must act professional, not profess hormonal!” may be more convincing if she didn’t drop her pants almost immediately after for Matt. I’m all for job professionalism, but I’d take our heroine more seriously if she didn’t get more unprofessional the more she squeals about professionalism.

I also suspect that some readers may feel a bit uneasy at how Matt keeps pushing Jaye for sex each time they meet up, despite her protests. Oh, who am I kidding? He’s hot, so he can’t be creepy!

I’m not as disturbed by Matt’s antics as I normally would be, because this is one fellow that is willing to give up baseball, with no hesitation and no regrets, if this meant that Jaye and he could be together. In this, at least, he comes off as someone that knows what he wants, unlike Jaye who comes off as a lady with poor impulse control.

Also, later on, he points out reasonably that she wants to have her cake and eat it too. She wants Matt to be in the team in order to elevate her own career, even if he would be increasingly miserable because being close to her but never really having any meaningful relationship with her is eating away at him. Our heroine is quite the user, and really, I’d respect her more if she would just commit to either being with him or breaking it off for good, instead of putting out to him over and over while squealing that they shouldn’t be having sex in the first place.

The story on the whole feels very contrived. Even as Jaye keeps saying that they can’t be together together, before and after she puts out to him anyway, the author transparently creates situations to keep her from fully breaking it off with Matt.

Finally, the author has the heroine attributing to her possibly getting fired for her sleeping with a baseball player to be an act of sexism, when it’s actually more of a breach of professional conduct than anything else.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: calling people “misogynist” and what have you when female characters are held accountable by these people only cheapen the spirit and meaning of feminism.

Not to mention: if Jaye’s haters were to be held up as sexist in this instance, then there is this unfortunate implication that it is feminist to behave unprofessionally at work!

So, what here actually works for me? The sexual tension and the actual sexy moments are all well done. These two characters have some red hot chemistry when they are doing that ooh ahh thing, and fortunately, they do that thing a lot here. In that, at least, there are ample diversions from the more annoying antics of the hero and the heroine in other parts of the story.

In the end, it’s a shame that Played features a couple that generate ample sexual heat, but their personalities and the story are all on the ugh side. This is one story that would have been vastly improved if the author had ditched more of the plot and added in more gratuitous sex scenes instead.