Madeline Grant has never quite felt normal, but with the extreme tiredness and inhumanly painful cramps she’s been experiencing lately, the ER nurse feels less than human.  That’s no surprise to Jake Redthorn.  When he comes to the hospital Maddy works at, he immediately senses she’s a shifter and is about to go into heat.  Maddy’s in danger if she doesn’t breed with a shifter ASAP, but Maddy’s a Lynx and Jake’s a Wolf – their mating would be forbidden.  To save Maddy, Jake calls his best friend, Will Tanner, a Lynx shifter, and asks him to help Maddy through her first time.  But when the weather interferes and Jake’s forced to help Maddy himself, their taboo bond sets off a whole series of problems.  Neither Jake nor Maddy’s tribe will take their break with tradition lightly, and to make matters worse, Will immediately falls for Maddy as well.  Will would be the perfect match for Maddy, if her heart weren’t already taken.  What’s a shifter to do?

Evangeline Anderson heats up the holidays in this sexy shifter adventure.  In Madeline’s Mates, Will, Jake, and Maddy are all thrown in an untenable situation.  Tradition and the laws of their people demand that Maddy and Jake be separated, even though it’s pretty much love at first sight.  Will, who would have been the ideal man for Maddy, only comes in second best to her affections for much of the book because she fell for Jake first.  The drawing point of this story is the likeability and inherent honor of all three protagonists.  Yet, while Maddy and Jake’s romance captured me from the start, her connection with Will never seemed as solid to me.  I appreciated the strong bond of friendship between Jake and Will, but try as I might to see it otherwise, Will felt like a third wheel.  Despite Ms. Anderson’s best efforts to convince me otherwise, I still felt by the end of the story that Jake and Maddy would have had a complete relationship sans Will.  Still, I thoroughly enjoyed Madeline’s Mates and when it comes to writing meltingly hot sex scenes, few match up to Ms. Anderson’s talent.