For The Win by Sara Rider Review
4.5 Smooches
Synopsis
What happens when you fall for your biggest competition? Sara Rider scores with this charming romance about soccer stars battling their tough opponents and playing the field of love.
Lainey Lukas has sacrificed everything—sleep, family, carbs, a life—to earn her spot as the top player and captain of the Seattle Falcons women’s soccer team. She’s determined to lead her team to a national championship and finally earn the sport the respect it deserves—and nothing will throw her off her game. When Lainey’s hero Gabe Havelak, star of the Seattle Surge, crashes her team’s first press conference—making the Falcons look like a joke to the local media and humiliating Lainey in the process—she’s hell-bent on revenge.
Charming, confident Gabe is practically a god to Seattle soccer fans, but he doesn’t mind a little friendly competition from tough-as-nails Lainey, with her top-notch athletic skills, her mile-long legs, and her girl-next-door freckles. But when he learns the Falcons are booting the Surge from their coveted practice space to the notoriously cursed Cricket Field, those warm feelings give way to crippling superstition. With his contract up for renewal and his thirty-fourth birthday just weeks away, Gabe will risk anything to protect his position with the Surge.
The rivals agree to settle their differences in a Battle of the Sexes competition—a test of skills, fitness, and willpower. At first the situation seems win-win: Gabe gets the chance to earn back the Surge’s practice space, and Lainey’s team will finally get some much-deserved media attention. But as the friction between them becomes hot enough to spark and smolder, Lainey and Gabe are entering new territory—and with both of their careers on the line, love might just be the toughest opponent of all.
Review
“Then what? You think that just because you have some magical penis that you’re automatically better than us?” . . . “Oh my god. You really believe that, don’t you? That’s what this is all about. You think men are better athletes than women.”
For The Win was a surprisingly good find from a new author for me. I love me a sports romance especially one with a sport that gets less attention, like soccer. So the cover had me eager to jump in. Now this story is told in third person which I usually don’t enjoy but the writing is so clean and well down that I honestly had to go double check because I couldn’t even remember if it really was in third person. Sara Rider is a fantastic writer and her story was a wonderful slow burn romance that has me giddy for more from her.
‘He’d expected sex with Lainey to be explosive and angry, based on the kind of chemistry they’d had leading up to this weekend. He hadn’t expected to feel like his heart had been scrubbed raw afterward. This was more intimate, addictive and mind-blowing than he could have ever imagined.’
Gabe and Lainey have a bit of a rivalry going and in the process of constantly trying to one up the other and prove a point they end up spending more and more time together and what was at first a small spark grows to a full on inferno. Gabe and Lainey constantly bump heads. In the beginning of the book Gabe came across as a playboy with a laid back personality and Lainey comes off overly stick and regimented. She is very very serious and takes soccer more seriously than anyone else. But as the book progresses we find out there is so much more to these two and watching them discover this about one another makes for a great story. Sara Rider is definitely a romance author to watch and I for one am excited for the next book in this series.
~miranda
