After unexpectedly getting temporary custody of her sister’s twin children, burlesque club owner Eve is struggling to make ends meet. But her long-time friend, new professional baseball catcher Madden, has the perfect solution: marry him for six months and be able to access to his healthcare plan. Madden has made his feelings for Eve clear and Eve has secretly reciprocated those feelings, but never voiced them. Meanwhile, Eve’s best friend Skylar had held a torch for Madden up until recently and Eve refuses to let her family’s bad reputation tarnish Madden’s up-and-coming baseball career. However, after one of the twins develops asthma, Eve decides to take Madden up on his proposal, so long as it remains temporary and secret, and the pair decide to explore their mutual attraction.
Catch Her If You Can is a spicy baseball romance featuring the marriage of convenience and boy obsessed tropes. Catch Her If You Can explores themes and topics like sexuality, reputation, abuse and harassment, wealth, familial estrangement, addiction, friendship, identity, loneliness and isolation, and kidney disease.
This is the perfect read for fans of steamy romances like Game Changer by Rachel Reid, The Mating Game by Lana Ferguson, Good Spirits by B.K. Borison, Deep End by Ali Hazelwood, or Wild Side by Elsie Silver. As the fifth book in Tessa Bailey’s Big Shots series, Catch Her If You Can could be read as a standalone, but Eve and Madden’s story is introduced in Pitcher Perfect (book 4), so I would recommend reading that book first for an optimal reading experience.
Tessa Bailey is one of my auto-buy authors and I have especially been enjoying her Big Shots series of steamy sports romances! Eve and Madden’s story was one of my favourites in the series as all of their secret mutual pining and their spicy tension was phenomenal. Since Eve and Madden’s story was set-up in the last book, Pitcher Perfect, I felt like the plot of Catch Her If You Can was really fast-paced and engaging, so you’ll find it hard to put this one down! There were a few flashback chapters in Catch Her If You Can, which I’m usually not a big fan of, but they were well done in that they were short, interspersed, and relevant to Eve and Madden’s story.
The only downsides were that I personally found that some of the burlesque club scenes to be a little raunchy for my taste and, even though we get a few brief cameos, I would have loved to see more of Skylar and Robbie in this book as I adored them in Pitcher Perfect.
If you’re a fan of spicy yet swoony marriage of convenience romances, then I highly recommend picking up a copy of Catch Her If You Can. My copy of Pitcher Perfect had a bonus epilogue that hinted at a potential romance for Mailer (Robbie’s teammate) and Catch Her If You Can sets up a potential romance for Elton (Skylar’s brother), so I definitely hope that we get one (or preferably both) of these books in the future!
Catch Her If You Can is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of January 202th 2026.
Will you be picking up Catch Her If You Can? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis
#1 New York Times bestselling author Tessa Bailey is back with an all-new marriage of convenience, friends-to-lovers sports romance about a baseball catcher and the burlesque club owner he can’t get out of his head.
Madden Donahue, the newest catcher for the Yankees, has been in love with Eve Mitchell since high school, but for some mysterious reason, the burlesque club owner always turns him down. That never stopped him from being her self-appointed protector. Case in point, now that Eve’s sister has left Eve with her two children indefinitely, Madden steps in with a proposition—marry him for the much needed health benefits.
Eve has secretly harbored feelings for Madden all along, but there’s one problem—her best friend Skylar called dibs on him when they were fourteen. Eve has always put their friendship above all else, and she’s not willing to risk losing Skylar over a man. Raised by the local strip club owner, Eve is woefully short on friends and treasures the ones she has. But with Skylar happily paired off, Eve finds herself accepting Madden’s proposal—on the condition that their marriage remains strictly private. She’s not about to let her unique profession and maligned reputation destroy Madden’s shiny new career.
Madden won’t let Eve get away that easily, though. What starts as a marriage of convenience soon ignites into something much hotter, and now it’s up to Madden to convince Eve that their connection is far more than a business arrangement. As the passion builds, can their fake marriage become the real deal?
