Reviewed by Sadonna

TITLE: Mate

SERIES: Forbidden Desires #3

AUTHORS: Piper Scott & Virginia Kelly

NARRATOR:  Michael Ferraiuolo

LENGTH: 11 hours and 35 minutes

RELEASE DATE: August 31, 2019

BLURB:

Spitfire disgrace Matthieu Boudreaux has one wish: to age out of the Pedigree he despises, then destroy it. With one year left before he achieves the first step of his goal, Matthieu finally has some hope for an independent future. That is, until a surly Amethyst dragon by the name of Geoffrey Drake and his entourage show up at Matthieu’s cloister and inform him he’s been selected to be part of an “experiment”.

Geoffrey Drake, proud and stuffy legal counsel for the Amethyst clan, has been charged with ruining his own life. His mission? Deliver a potential mate to the son of the Amethyst clan’s most despised enemy – and the man he’s loved in secret for the last hundred years – Topaz dragon Ian Brand. Refusal is impossible. Dragons don’t consort with dragons, and should Geoffrey decline, he risks exposing them both.

Ian Brand, charming black sheep of the Topaz clan, is trapped between his forbidden love for an Amethyst dragon centuries his senior and his duty to his family. Chosen by his unhinged father to be the Topaz candidate for the mating experiment, Ian is faced with a terrible choice: run away with the man he loves and face the deadly consequences or accept his fate with a broken heart.

But dragon magic – as Matthieu, Geoffrey, and Ian soon discover – works in mysterious ways. When an unforeseeable circumstance draws them all together and puts their futures at risk, they have no choice but to set their differences aside and work together to prove a new, startling truth….

What the dragon world knows about mates has been wrong all along, and it will be up to the three of them to prove it.

Please note: Mate is a steamy omegaverse romance involving male pregnancy that will leave you in stitches. It contains an experiment gone awry, five eccentric peacocks, an unusually large number of whelps, an ancient Viking Daddy dragon, and science! For maximum enjoyment, Mate is best listened to following the events of Clutch and Bond.

REVIEW:

Note:  As this is the third book in this series, there are lots of spoilers for books 1 and 2.  Highly recommended that these books be enjoyed in sequent.

Matthieu is a disgrace.  He’s always planned on aging out of the pedigree cloister, going to law school and fighting for omega rights.  But that all goes to hell in a handbasket when he is chosen for an experiment – to mate with a Topaz clan member and see if they can reproduce.  Needless to say, he is LESS than thrilled by this turn of events.  Geoffrey Drake is the legal representative who appears (along with his brother Everard and his mate Harry) to take him to the chosen representative – who happens to be Ian Drake, Geoffrey’s lover of the past 100 years.   Of course this is somewhat less than ideal!

Ian and Geoffrey have been in a forbidden relationship for nearly a century.  Two alphas should never be together, but they have loved each other in secret for some time.  But this edict just may break them apart – certainly if Ian’s sire has anything to say about it.  Geoffrey is nearly despondent to think that he will have to give Ian up and Ian is not exactly thrilled with the idea either.  But somehow they have to make this work for everybody.  Matthieu is not excited about the whole thing either, but it’s clear that if they don’t do what’s asked of them, they will all lose.  So they vow to try to figure out how the three of them can make this work.

When they try to figure out how the three of them can be together, things go a bit wonky and the mate bonds are completely unexpected.  And of course there is the eminent evidence of their mating to content with as well 😉  And when it becomes obvious that Matthieu has mated with both Ian and  Geoffrey, they are desperate to try to convince the rest of the council that indeed this is a good thing and not something that should be punished.  The help they get from another clan is sexy, saucy, sarcastic and sometimes humorous 🙂  We also get to visit with characters from the previous two books and some of the story overlaps here.  But in the end it takes more than an village for Ian and Geoffrey to get what the need with Matthieu – and with more than a little bit of danger in the mix!

Ah, this series is just so good and so much fun!  Matthieu is a spitfire and he’s not going to take a lot of crap from anyone 🙂  I loved his fierceness.  He’s not going to be cowed by Ian or Geoffrey.  He comes to care about both of them – despite his resistance.  Ian takes his role as counsel seriously as does Geoffrey.  And although Geoffrey is ready to step aside and go back to his lonely existence, he rally wants to try to make it work.  I loved the Opal clan as well in this story.  There are a lot of characters and stories there that are fabulous 😉  Ian and Geoffrey and Matthieu are all in to make everything work for the three of them and their children and will stop at nothing to protect their love and their family.  Once again Michael Ferraiuolo is amazing.  All of the accents in this one were fabulous – French, Russian, Swedish, English – and all just fantastic.  He’s the absolute best and this one was certainly challenging.  I can’t recommend this series or this narrator highly enough.  Fantastic!  I can’t wait for more 😀

RATING: 

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