Title: Dirty Sexy Player
Author:  Laurelin Paige
Publisher/Year:  Paige Press 7/2/18
Length:  226 Pages
Series:  Dirty Games Duet #1

Overview

Weston King knows how to play. But wild nights and owning an extensive collection of women’s panties don’t carry the thrill they once did, so when his business partner Donovan suggests an outrageous plan to allow them to take over their competition, Wes takes him up on the offer. The crazy idea? Marry the competitor.

Elizabeth Dyson, the bride-to-be in question, is on board with the plan. She wants access to her trust fund and can only get it once she marries. Each has something the other wants – all they have to do is pretend to like each other well enough to tie the knot.

Only trouble is, playing fiancé to Elizabeth isn’t quite that simple. Wes finds her sexy and brilliant…and soon wishes their engagement wasn’t fake at all. Not that he’d ever tell her that.

But a lover boy like Wes can only stand an empty bed for so long…and even the best of players has to put down his cards eventually.

My Thoughts

We saw this story play out in bits and pieces throughout the other series when we were on the edge of our seat watching Sabrina and Donovan dance around each other, so it’s nice to see the true story of how this faux marriage played itself out. We knew that it started as a shame, and we know that it potentially ended as a real wedding, but what we didn’t know was all the ‘stuff’ in the middle, and the drama that would ensue at the wedding.

The story itself was simple enough to follow – Weston was put in as the role of fiance and groom to Elizabeth – heiress to Dyson Media which is a business that Reach had interest in. Elizabeth could’t get control on the company now that her father had died until she was married (a clause that her father wrote into his will) so marrying someone was a necessary evil. Donovan proposed a solve to this in the form of a husband to be, yet didn’t quite spell out who that would be initially.

We watch Weston and Elizabeth meet, and while we knew that there was a lot of tension between them, and not always the sexual kind from the other series, we really got under the hood here and saw that there was something deeper here….yet neither would succumb to those feelings since they both thought the other was just in it for the end game.

We watch event after event where Weston and Lizzie have to play a role – how they have to keep up appearances so that Elizabeth’s family could truly believe that they were a real couple. While they act the best roles of their lives, they also begin to fall for each other and that’s the sweet stuff that we really need to keep this story going. We know that there’s something in each of their pasts that make them into the characters that we live with now, yet we never quite get deep enough under the surface to find out what the catalyst was. Instead, we watch the chemistry and magnetism between them grow and as it pulls them closer and closer together, the story passes faster and faster.

Our author makes sure to weave in enough angst to keep things interesting. Sabrina is brought up from time to time as a means to keep us on our toes as well as to put Elizabeth in her place. Darrell, Elizabeth’s cousin who’s playing CEO interjects himself fro time to time since he’s clearly got a fear that he’ll lose the one thing of power that he has with the company. There’s the hint that somethings nagging at Weston from his past that we don’t know about and well….it comes to a head at the wedding when a bomb is dropped on him. He copes with that when another one explodes in front of him as well and that’s where we are left at the end of this first book. 3 life changing things have happened in a matter of pages, and there are such major implications to the trajectory of this story that i’m happy i’m reading it now v. when it first came out since I don’t know that i’d want to wait very long to jump back into this one. Enjoy!