Diamond Ring (Unwritten Rules #3) by KD Casey

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Jake Fischer has been here before: pitching for the Oakland Elephants, hiding his worries behind a smile, hoping to win it all. Ten years ago, it didn’t turn out the way he wanted. Nothing in his life did. But now he’s back—and so is the one teammate tied inexorably to his past.
It doesn’t matter how many times catcher Alex Angelides replays that moment during the Fall Classic over in his mind, the outcome never changes. He’s not sure what happened to make that pitch glance off his glove, or what happened with his relationship with Jake—and he’s not going to be the one to ask.
A whole lot may have changed in the last decade, but some things have stayed the same. Jake and Alex still can’t stay out of each other’s faces on the field, or out of each other’s beds off of it. They’ve got a second chance to win it all…but only if they realize what they lost.
Rating: B
I read Unwritten Rules , KD Casey’s début for Carina Press, back in October 2021, and I’m afraid I wasn’t very impressed – I gave it a C- . I found the romance lacklustre, the chemistry lukewarm (at best) and the characters ill-defined – although it was very clear that the author has a great deal of talent. Because of that – and because I like, when I can, to give authors a second chance – I decided to give Diamond Ring , book three in the Unwritten Rules series, a try and I’m pleased to report a much more favourable result this time around.
Diamond Ring is a second-chance romance between catcher Alex Angelides and rising star pitcher Jake Fischer, who are both called up to play for the Oakland Elephants and arrive on the same day. They’re very different personalities – Jake is good-natured and enthusiastic (a bit like an excited puppy!), seemingly a bit more media savvy than Alex, who is quiet, prickly and maybe just a bit bewildered by it all. He’s surprised when Jake makes a point of including him in the interview he’s doing, although Alex can’t help but be a bit miffed that he, Alex, is so obviously an afterthought. But that’s the way it is with baseball; as he says later, “ p itchers get all the glory, catchers do all the work” . Alex isn’t quite sure why Jake seems to want to be his friend, but as the weeks and months pass, that’s what happens; as their working partnership develops, so does their personal one, blooming into a strong friendship with the potential for something more. Their first season goes well… until it doesn’t, and a missed play in the Fall Classic leads to losing the game and the championship, to harsh words and the makings of an estrangement.
Not long after Jake has returned home for the off season, he undergoes surgery for a torn ligament in his elbow, which means he’s going to be out of action for quite some time. Unfortunately, however, his recovery and rehab don’t go as well as hoped – some players make a full recovery from this, some don’t – and Jake is released from his contract and spends the next decade bouncing around minor league teams until he receives a call from the Elephants asking him to come back and play another season for them. He knows that for them, he’s only a stopgap, a last minute signing to fill a gap – and that for him, it was Oakland or nowhere. He knows that Alex is returning to Oakland this season, too. He doesn’t know how to feel about that.
Alex has had a decent career and has decided that this season will be his final one – altbough if he’d known, when he signed with Oakland, that Jake would also be returning, he’d have gone somewhere – anywhere – else. Ten years may have elapsed, but the reasons that led to the collapse of their friendship – arguments over how the series ended, how Jake’s arm got injured and their unresolved feelings of guilt, anger and frustraion – are never far from the surface, and their initial encounters are frosty and fraught with tension. Paired together as pitcher and catcher once more, they’re going to have to find a way to work together and talk to each other, even if their friendship is a thing of the past. But as they rediscover their ability to communicate on the pitch, they begin to rediscover it off the pitch as well, slowly re-learing each other as they begin to let go of ten years worth of resentment and start finding their way back to each other.
You can read the rest of this review at All About Romance.