Playing For Her Heart by Megan Erickson

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Title: Playing For Her Heart
Author: Megan Erickson
Series: Gamers #2
Published by: Entangled: Brazen
Release Date: August 11th 2015
Format: Kindle Book
Pages: 192
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2018 Beat the Backlist Challenge, Lenoreo's COYER Winter Switch 2017/18
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks ✩ IndieBound
My rating:

Blurb:

A sexy category romance from Entangled's Brazen imprint...She wanted fantasy. He's about to make it a reality...

Grant Osprey just had the hottest sex of his life. Sure, they were both in costume, and yes, it was anonymous, but he never expected her to bolt in the middle of the night without so much as a good bye, let alone exchanging numbers. Or names. All he's left with are her panties and some seriously X-rated memories...until he meets his business partner's little sister.

Only Chloe Talley isn't the bold, sexy vixen he remembers. And she wants nothing to do with him.

Cosplay is Chloe's only chance to leave her boring, socially awkward world behind. To forget that she's failing at life and can't be with anyone, let alone a single-father like Grant. But the raw hunger between them is undeniable. With him, she can be a misbehaving maid. A sexy call girl for hire. Each scene pushes Chloe beyond her strict boundaries, until Grant demands the one character she can't play.

Herself

My Review:

3.5 stars — I still loved the nerdiness of this one, but I really noticed the lack of depth in this story.  I get that there isn’t a lot of time to get into things in these short formats, but then I guess I wish that the back stories weren’t screaming out for depth…because then I just leave feeling unsatisfied.

Most of this comes into play with Chloe.  So I’ll get to her in a minute.  Grant was everything I was hoping for from the hints of his character in the first book.  He was adorable, and I pretty much loved him.  His story was a bit more on the surface…I think because I enjoyed him so much, I almost wish we could have learned a bit more about his past, but I was more willing to accept his lack of depth in this one.  He was seriously like a puppy dog, just so sweet and lovable.  I loved how persistent he was with Chloe, how once he figured out that this relationship and his feelings were different, he didn’t shy away from them.  I also enjoyed his very bizarre and sometimes hilarious relationship with his daughter…it was sweet, if occasionally hard to believe.  Perhaps that’s where I would have wanted to know more if this had been a longer novel.

Chloe was a bit more of a struggle.  I felt for her shyness, but honestly?  The whole introvertedness felt kind of…like a schtick.  A bit stereotype-ish, like perhaps the author isn’t an introvert and doesn’t quite understand it, so just followed what a lot of those articles talk about.  Now that could be just me, I might be totally off the mark there, it just felt…shallow?  Clinical?  Something.  Or else I’m just particularly sensitive to it.  And honestly it just didn’t feel like we got a lot of time with Chloe to really figure out why she was so freaking hard on herself.  Like, we’re told why (what with the whole survivor’s guilt thing), but I just didn’t *feel* it if that makes sense.  It was just too big and deep of a side story for this short of a novel.  And then holy cow, her turnaround at the end was super abrupt and rushed!!  She resisted and resisted and resisted, and then all of a sudden BAM, change.  It just didn’t work for me.

I did love Grant and Chloe together, they had great sexual chemistry, and it was fun to explore role play kink, as I don’t think that’s as common in the books I’ve read.  And even though I didn’t believe Chloe’s turnaround, I really loved what happened with their relationship after that.  So, like, if I just accepted that, then I felt all of their emotions when they reached out to each other.  It was very affecting.

So yeah.  I adored the playfulness of Grant and what he brought out of Chloe…I just felt like it tackled too much and then there wasn’t enough time to give the subjects appropriate attention.