3.5-4 stars
This was a pretty good story. I liked Ariel and Mandra and their story was pretty enjoyable.
Ariel is a pilot that works for a private airline that developes new airplanes. Ariel grew up with her sister, Carmen, and Trisha (who’s like a sister) and they’re all still very close. Ariel used to be in the military but what she always wanted to do was to be a vet because she loves finding animals that need help and helping them.
Mandra is a dragon shifter from an alien planet. His older brother, Zoran, is the King of their people (he’s also the hero from book #1) and Mandra serves his people as a military commander along with his other brothers. Mandra’s dragon has been wanting a mate and Mandra does too but the scarcity of women on their planet has made this difficult. Mandra isn’t sure what to think when he finds out his brothers are bringing some alien women home with them but he certainly didn’t expect to find his true-mate in the bunch.
If you’ve read the previous books in the series, you pretty much know how this starts out and what happens while the women are on the ship going from Earth to Valdier. All the books about the 5 women this story begin with the same story…they’re changed slightly depending on the woman but it’s pretty much the same beginning (which makes me glad I’m only reading 1 a month or it might get tedious). The main difference in the early part of the story is that Mandra and Ariel don’t meet until she arrives on Valdier. From what he was told, Mandra expected the Earth women to be frail and delicate and what he finds is nothing like that. Since 3 of the other women met their mates on the ship, they’re pretty much claimed by the time they reach Valdier but Ariel and Carmen arrive on the planet still planning to escape and find a way to get home.
Ariel meets Mandra and their first (few) meeting(s) don’t go very smoothly. I honestly couldn’t understand what Ariel thought she was doing at first but thankfully, Morian (Mandra’s mother) finds Ariel and gets her to settle in to her new home (at least for the time being). Ariel finds that she has feelings for Mandra but she’s been burned before by a guy that claimed to love her but ended up trying to change her via emotional abuse. Because of this, Ariel had sworn off men and Mandra bears the brunt of her emotional issues. Of course, if Mandra talked to Ariel more instead of letting her find stuff out as they went, he might have made things easier on himself. Once Ariel figured out that Mandra is a good guy and she wants to be with him, things go pretty well (except for one major exception) and after they get past some danger and drama, Mandra and Ariel end up together and starting a HEA.
This was a pretty enjoyable story. I liked Ariel for the most part…most of the time she seemed smart and caring but there were a couple of times I questioned the smart part. She wasn’t a TSTL heroine but she had a few moments I wondered about. Still, outside of those few moments I liked Ariel very much. Mandra was a good hero but as I already stated, he’d have done better if he’d communicated more. Overall, I thought this was a pretty good story and addition to the series (which I would recommend, just maybe with a bit of time between the books). 🙂