Title:  Playing Dirty
Author: C.L. Parker
Publisher/Year: Random House Publishing 5/12/15
Length: 336 pages
Series: Monkey Business #1

Overview

Shaw Matthews plays to win, and he intends to snag a coveted partnership at San Diego’s hottest sports agency by signing America’s top athlete. Only one woman stands in his way: rival agent Cassidy Whalen. But eliminating the competition will be Shaw’s pleasure when he concocts an ingenious plan to seduce Cassidy and show the beautiful ballbreaker who’s the better man for the job. That is, until Cassidy turns the tables—and their steamy encounters start breaking all the rules.

Cassidy has worked hard to make it in a man’s cutthroat arena, and she isn’t going down without a fight, not even against the six-two alpha hunk whose rock-hard body awakens desires she’s never known before. As Cassidy shares night after night of unending passion with Shaw, the game begins to change. Now Cassidy stands to lose everything—unless a fiery contest of wills can become a winning proposition for two people who keep raising the stakes.

My Thoughts

I’m a fan of this author and figured that if nothing else, i’d get something great to enjoy – with a mix of powerful characters and really great passion and heat.  That’s exactly what we get here, with Shaw and Cassidy who are in complete competition with each other and yet find themselves drawn sooo tightly to one another as well.

Being told to play off each other in the hopes of signing the BEST free agent athlete in the business, they find that they are not being told to necessarily go solo on this, but to figure out a way to woo him to SSE – their agency.  The end game here of course is that who ever gets the athlete gets a promotion and that’s something that they are both dying for.

Of course – where there’s heat in competition, there’s going to be heat in the personalities, and what starts off as a fantasy of sorts – both are dreaming about what they want to do to the other, we see that it quickly moves from there into something that’s raw and passionate and really really hot.  Think alley way in the rain, with inhibitions and all that good stuff.  Shaw knows how to please a woman, and since Cassidy is a powerful woman in her own right, she knows how to control things just a bit too much for Shaw’s liking.

Throughout the story, what we get is the constant back and forth of break up sex of sorts, but at least it’s hot.  While we don’t know who’s going to win the athlete/promotion, we know that there will be a constant battle between these 2 bringing them together as often as possible.  Will that mean that they’ll actually get together at some point?  doubtful, but it’s nice to see the path that they go to in order to force the other to admit weakness.

The other nice thing about what our author does is create this great sub story – in the sense that there are amazing supporting characters that have their own story lines that really keep you invested.  we have a few other romances within the group that aren’t quite at the point of happening, yet you know they are on the edge.  that screams spin off series and i love that.  We see Quinn (Cassidy’s roommate) with an in the closet / out of the closet romance, we see Sasha and Landon finally sorting themselves out, we see Demi and Chaz still in the dark, so it’s all good stuff.

So on that note, i can’t wait for book 2, and i hope that you guys have a nice week ahead!