The Mating Game is set in the same universe as The Fake Mate so I was excited to read it. It has two wolf shifters and there’s lots of shifter sex. While it wasn’t as light and fun as The Fake Mate, I enjoyed returning to Ferguson’s world of wolf shifters.

The story opens when Tess is surprised to find out she is an omega wolf shifter. She went to the doctor because she didn’t feel well and Dr. Carter (from The Fake Mate) prescribed her hormone regulators to help ease her symptoms and told her she might feel the need to copulate so she should steer clear of alphas! She is on her way to a small ski lodge in Colorado that she will be renovating and plans to stay there by herself until her brothers show up later in the week. But when she arrives, there is a large lumberjack looking guy coming down the rickety stairs of the lodge and he doesn’t look happy to see her.

Hunter has been running the lodge with his aunt Jeannie since his parents passed away ten years ago in a car accident. Jeannie has been telling him they need to fix up the lodge and he finally gave in, but he’s not happy about it. He’s worried about the lodge’s finances and when he sees Tess, he wonders if she can handle the job because she seems tiny to him. Tess doesn’t appreciate him questioning her abilities – she’s been doing renovations for the last ten years and her father did them for eighteen years before that. She convinces him that she and her crew are up for the challenge (plus he thinks she smells nice). It was fun to see where the story was going between Tess and Hunter as they got to know each other. It doesn’t take long before things get steamy in the hot tub and she asks him to help her with her heat. I also thought it was cute when he teaches her how to shift into a wolf.

I liked Tess. She is upbeat and takes videos of her renovation projects which she posts on social media. Her posts are very popular and she is waiting to hear from HGTV on whether she will get to do a show with them. Her father has been ill and Tess wants to help pay for surgery for him to get a pacemaker.

Hunter is pretty grumpy because he doesn’t want to like Tess, but she is beautiful, snarky and he is attracted to her. He is feeling guilty about something to do with his parent’s deaths and we don’t find out what happened till later in the story. He also had a girlfriend that broke his heart so he is wary to trust again. When a snowstorm moves in, the power goes out, things get cozy and there’s a lot of knotting going on.

Hunter could be a little gloomy at times. A new highway went in a few years ago that bypassed Hunter’s lodge and he has been struggling to get by. The lodge was in such disrepair when Tess arrived that I wondered what Hunter did all day besides chop wood and run around in the woods as a wolf. But he likes taking care of Tess and she likes being taken care of. It was nice to see him join in to help her with some of the renovation work. Tess’s brothers work on her crew and add humor and tension to the story. It’s also fun to see Mackenzie and Noah from The Fake Mate make appearances. (Noah and Hunter are cousins.)

Readers that enjoy spicy paranormal romances might want to check out this story with wolf shapeshifters and lots of knotting. I hope there will be more books in the series.