When love teeters on silence
Hearts bound by unspoken truths
Will courage speak first?
The fifth installment of Tessa Bailey’s Big Shots series arrives with the emotional weight of a lifetime’s worth of longing, wrapped in the glittering facade of New York’s baseball elite. Catch Her If You Can by Tessa Bailey doesn’t simply conclude this beloved sports romance series—it excavates the deepest layers of what it means to love someone while believing you’re unworthy of being loved in return.
The Architecture of Yearning
Eve Mitchell has spent eight years perfecting the art of avoidance. As the owner of Cumberland’s Gilded Garden burlesque club—a legacy inherited from her late father’s more controversial establishment—she’s intimately acquainted with judgment. The town’s collective disdain has taught her to expect nothing and protect everything, particularly her heart. When her sister Ruth disappears into rehab, leaving behind five-year-old twins Lark and Landon, Eve’s carefully constructed world threatens to collapse under the weight of medical bills, school expenses, and the crushing responsibility of sudden parenthood.
Enter Madden Donahue, the Irish-born Yankees catcher who has carried a torch for Eve since their high school years. Bailey crafts Madden as a study in contrasts: a man who found belonging through baseball yet never quite shed the outsider’s wariness that follows him like a shadow. His proposal is practical, almost businesslike—marry him for six months, access his health insurance, give the kids stability. What unfolds is anything but simple.
The marriage of convenience trope gets a sophisticated treatment in Catch Her If You Can by Tessa Bailey, elevated by the author’s signature ability to layer emotional complexity beneath steamy romance. This isn’t just about two people falling in love; it’s about dismantling the fortress of shame and self-protection that society builds around women like Eve.
Secrets That Simmer and Scald
Bailey structures the narrative around revelation, each chapter peeling back another layer of history between Eve and Madden. The central secret—that Eve was Madden’s anonymous kidney donor years ago—becomes the novel’s emotional fulcrum. When this truth finally surfaces during a charged burlesque performance, the scene crackles with vulnerability and raw emotion that feels earned rather than manufactured.
The author demonstrates considerable skill in portraying how past trauma shapes present choices. Eve’s reluctance stems not just from her best friend Skylar’s longtime crush on Madden (addressed early and handled with refreshing maturity), but from a lifetime of being Cumberland’s resident pariah. The daughter of a strip club owner, Eve learned young that respectability would forever remain beyond her reach. Bailey captures this internalized shame with nuance, showing how it manifests in Eve’s determination to keep her marriage secret, to protect Madden’s reputation at the cost of her own happiness.
Madden’s perspective offers necessary counterpoint—his Irish working-class background and complicated family history create parallel wounds. His journey from feeling like an imposter in baseball to finding his voice both on and off the field mirrors Eve’s own path toward self-acceptance. Their chemistry ignites not despite their damage but because they recognize it in each other.
The Supporting Cast That Elevates
The Big Shots series has always excelled at interconnected narratives, and Catch Her If You Can by Tessa Bailey benefits immensely from the foundation laid in Fangirl Down, The Au Pair Affair, Dream Girl Drama, and Pitcher Perfect. Skylar, now happily paired with hockey player Robbie, provides both comic relief and emotional wisdom. Her evolution from the girl who “called dibs” on Madden in high school to a woman secure enough to champion Eve’s happiness demonstrates Bailey’s commitment to character growth across the series.
Veda, the rockabilly musician with big dreams, emerges as the story’s unexpected heart. Her subplot involving the Gilded Garden’s renovation and her complicated dynamic with Elton (Skylar’s stepbrother) adds texture without overwhelming the central romance. Bailey uses Veda as a mirror for Eve’s younger self—full of potential but constrained by others’ expectations. Their friendship, built on mutual recognition and respect, offers Eve something she’s rarely experienced: unconditional support.
The twins, Lark and Landon, avoid the precocious child trap that often plagues romance novels. They’re realistically chaotic, occasionally manipulative (Landon’s “haunted desk” excuse to skip school is pitch-perfect), and deeply affected by their mother’s abandonment. Eve’s fierce protectiveness toward them reveals her capacity for love even as she struggles to claim it for herself.
Bailey’s Signature Sensuality Meets Deeper Stakes
Readers familiar with Tessa Bailey’s work know to expect heat, and Catch Her If You Can by Tessa Bailey delivers with characteristic boldness. The parking lot scene alone will generate fan art for years. But what distinguishes this novel is how Bailey uses physical intimacy to reveal emotional truth. Eve’s exhibitionist streak, her complicated relationship with performance and desire, becomes less about titillation and more about reclaiming agency over her own narrative.
The burlesque club setting provides rich metaphorical ground. Eve’s reluctant decision to perform onstage—to claim the “scandal” everyone already attributes to her—represents a turning point. Madden’s unexpected participation in that performance, his willingness to stand beside her in vulnerability rather than protect his pristine reputation, marks the moment their marriage shifts from contractual to irrevocable.
Bailey’s prose sparkles with specificity. She captures the peculiar intimacy of late-night conversations, the way Madden’s “sides puffed in and out as if he’d run a long distance at a very fast pace” after training, Eve’s observation that boys “smelled like goat cheese” before Madden rewrote that assessment. These details accumulate into something that feels authentic rather than constructed.
Where the Novel Stumbles
Despite its considerable strengths, Catch Her If You Can by Tessa Bailey occasionally struggles under the weight of its own ambitions. The media attention subplot—while thematically relevant to Eve’s struggles with public perception—sometimes feels underdeveloped. The transition from local gossip to national sports coverage happens with whiplash speed, and the resolution arrives with convenient efficiency.
The pacing in the middle section drags slightly as Bailey cycles through similar emotional beats: Eve tries to leave, Madden refuses to let her go, they have explosive chemistry, Eve’s shame reasserts itself. While these cycles reflect realistic relationship patterns, they occasionally test reader patience. A tighter edit might have sharpened the narrative momentum.
Some secondary conflicts resolve too neatly. Veda’s takeover of the Gilded Garden, while emotionally satisfying, happens with remarkable ease given the financial complexities established earlier. The twins’ mother Ruth remains a somewhat sketchy presence—more plot device than fully realized character—though this may be intentional given Eve’s perspective.
The novel’s treatment of class dynamics deserves both praise and critique. Bailey clearly understands how economic insecurity shapes romantic decisions, but some readers may find Eve’s willingness to sacrifice her happiness for Madden’s career advancement frustrating rather than noble. The narrative occasionally flirts with reinforcing the very shame it seeks to dismantle, though it ultimately lands on the right side of that line.
The Epilogue That Satisfies
Bailey grants her couples genuine happy endings, and the seven-year jump reveals Eve and Madden thriving in Wisconsin (Madden’s career trajectory taking them away from New York’s scrutiny). The purple Christmas lights callback, the found family gathered in their home, the twins now twelve and thriving—these details reward invested readers. The choice not to give Eve and Madden biological children feels deliberate and right, honoring their complete contentment with the family they’ve built.
The series arc, from Wells (Fangirl Down) and Josephine’s initial spark through the various couples finding their matches, culminates in Eve and Madden’s story with particular poignancy. They’ve been present since the beginning, their unresolved tension simmering through earlier books. Catch Her If You Can by Tessa Bailey delivers the payoff that tension deserves.
Final Verdict: A Romance That Resonates
Catch Her If You Can by Tessa Bailey succeeds as both standalone romance and series conclusion. New readers can enter without confusion, while longtime fans receive emotional callbacks and character growth that justify their investment. The novel tackles shame, class divide, and the courage required to claim joy with more nuance than typical sports romance fare.
Bailey’s greatest achievement here lies in creating a heroine who isn’t “saved” by love but rather learns to believe she’s worth saving. Eve’s journey from resigned isolation to tentative hope to full-hearted embrace of her life with Madden feels earned. Madden, too, evolves—from the patient pursuer to a man who demands Eve see herself as he sees her: worthy, miraculous, beloved.
For readers seeking smart, sexy romance with emotional depth, Catch Her If You Can by Tessa Bailey delivers abundantly. It confirms Bailey’s reputation for crafting couples whose chemistry transcends physical attraction, rooted instead in genuine understanding and mutual respect. The heat remains—this is Bailey, after all—but it serves character development rather than existing for its own sake.
The Big Shots series concludes not with a whisper but with the resounding truth that sometimes the longest journey is the one toward believing you deserve the love that’s been waiting for you all along.
If You Loved This, Try These:
- The Hating Game by Sally Thorne – For workplace tension that erupts into passionate romance
- Beach Read by Emily Henry – Similar exploration of writers confronting their pasts while falling in love
- The Score by Elle Kennedy – College hockey romance with marriage of convenience elements
- Kulti by Mariana Zapata – Sports romance featuring a patient hero and heroine with baggage
- The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata – Another marriage of convenience between professional athlete and determined woman