Grace Octavia

From the Essence© bestselling author of Take Her Man comes a chic page-turner starring the 3Ts—Tamia, Troy, and Tasha—three New York City “It Girls” whose lives are about to be turned upside down…
Gorgeous, sophisticated, and successful, Tamia is a sister that can’t be stopped. With her career as an attorney on the rise, and her millionaire boyfriend about to propose—Tamia has it all. But then she meets Malik, a sexy Harlem brother who pushes all her buttons, and makes Tamia second-guess everything in her life. Love struck for this bad boy with a cause, Tamia’s on a mission to convince Malik to stop playing hard to get and come along for the ride…

Meanwhile, since she married a pastor, Troy has gone from smokin’ hottie to Bible-quoting church lady. Everyone thinks Troy is happy until some dirty secrets turn Troy’s life—and marriage—upside down…

As the wife of a pro basketball player and mother of three, Tasha has traded her fabulous big city life for the suburbs. Bored and starving for some action, Tasha’s desires spin out of control, and she finds that being the new “It Girl” has its drawbacks…

Funny and soulful, Playing Hard to Get is a novel of passion, friendship, and finding yourself without losing everything you love…


Praise for Playing Hard to Get:

“Octavia gives Sex and the City a smart Afrocentric update.” —Publisher's Weekly

“Octavia's writing style is in a category all of its own... I thoroughly loved the book..” --APOOO Book Club

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Excerpt:

Chapter One
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players...
—Jacques in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It

And on this luxurious, $5 million stage, nestled on the twenty- second floor of the desirous address of One Central Park West, known to the world as Trump Towers, is an astute and determined player, a woman who, it would seem to anyone watching, was preparing for the role of her life.

No, she wasn’t making good on girlhood dreams of winning an Oscar or Emmy. Nonetheless, her starring role was just as riveting, just as compelling. Simply put, the angelically divine black beauty was attempting what other tired women had been trying to do at every other place in the world for as long as time existed— go to bed without having sex.

So, in the privacy of her bathroom, beneath a $10,000 Kalco chandelier that cast a sinister light over her freshly permed and then pressed hair, Tamia Dinkins slid an unnecessarily thick, overnight, extra-long, winged, and superabsorbent pad into the crotch of her aqua lace panties.

“Urggh,” she groaned at the prehistoric, uncomfortable weight and width of the thing between her thighs. It was so ridiculous and Tamia wondered how she ever, ever concealed these things beneath her acid-washed jeans and EnVogue-tight miniskirts when she’d gotten her period in junior high school. Happily, be cause of nature and the intelligent folks at Playtex, she’d outgrown these little mattresses now; however, that didn’t stop her from putting one on. Charleston, her ongoing leading male for the past six months, was in the bedroom. He’d been out there waiting nearly every night for two months, and quite frankly, Tamia was tired of how comfortable Charleston seemed to be getting with coming to her place, having acrobatic sex, slipping into a coma, and waking in the morning only to leave and return hours later to do it all again. And while the leading lady kept telling herself that she needed time and space to think about things with Charleston and where they were going, really she just wanted a night alone. She’d watch some tacky old R&B music videos, have a glass of overpriced Chardonnay, and think about nothing until the morning.

“Babe, what are you doing in there?” Tamia heard Charleston excitedly calling from the bedroom. He was probably already naked, his arms and legs spread out on her silk bedspread like a honeydusted cobweb.

“I’m coming,” she said. She hoped he’d noticed the Midol tablets she’d conveniently left on the nightstand.

On another stage, not too far from the last, in the pricey and historic Hamilton Heights enclave in Harlem, Tamia’s best friend was preparing for a less than convincing performance to achieve the same goal. Somewhere between Friday-night Bible study and walking into her refurbished brownstone, First Lady Troy Helene Hall decided that her husband, the good Reverend Dr. Kyle Hall, who’d come into her life like a prince in a fairy tale, wasn’t getting any either. In fact, it had now been exactly a month since Troy and Kyle had shared more than prayers in their antique Thomas Day bed. And even then, it had been a Valentine’s Day “treat” (Troy actually said this).

Trying her best to escape a diva past filled with enough Chanel and Lauren to solidify her top ranking among any circle of purified BAPs, a newly sanctified and debatably saved Troy prided herself on being less dubious and creative in her method of withholding sex than Tamia. She knew about the old “I’m on my period” maxi pad trick but thought no good Christian wife had any business lying to her husband like that. She thought that if she didn’t want to have sex, she didn’t have to have sex. It was that simple.

“No sex,” Troy rehearsed telling Kyle as she laid in bed, dressed in a white cotton smock that, combined with her smooth fawn skin and flaxen hair, made her look like an eighteenth- century house girl. Worse, beneath the frock, she had on the biggest, most raggedy, stretched-out, and faded panties she could find in the back of her drawer.