Review: Garbriel’s Mate – Tina Folsom

Gabriel’s Mate by Tina Folson
Series:  Scanguards #3
Release Date:  December 3, 2010
Publisher:  Tina Folsom
Page Count:  270
Source:  Provided by Publicist
Buy the book at: Amazon 

After Maya is turned into a vampire against her will, vampire and Scanguards bodyguard Gabriel is charged with protecting her and finding her attacker.
Gabriel has never guarded a body as perfect as Maya’s. But while the sexual tension between them rises and the rogue vampire closes in on them, Gabriel can’t allow himself to give into the desire he feels for Maya. He fears to fully show himself to her despite the intimacies they share – afraid she will react like all other women when she discovers the horror he hides.
Will she run from him when she discovers his secret, calling him a monster, a freak, a creature not worthy of her love?

When Gabriel was more fully introduced to us in Amaury’s Hellion, I wanted to know more about his story.  But the turn this one took threw me for a loop.

Gabriel was a man that has been tortured by a bodily deformity he’s had since birth.  He was shunned and scarred by his wife, who deemed him a monster because of it.  He volunteered to be turned into a vampire hoping that would make him feel better about himself.  Unfortunately he didn’t.  So here he was, a 180+ year old vampire who has had limited sexual experience because of his deformity.

Along comes Maya, a doctor who was attacked outside her apartment by a rogue vampire who started the turning process with her.  Gabriel is immediately drawn to her and vows to protect her.  When he’s faced with the prospect of her dying because the turning was happening correctly, he offered up his blood because he couldn’t face her death.

Maya has to face the death of her human life, but in addition, she has to deal with being an abnormal vampire since drinking human blood makes her sick.  The only blood she craves is from Gabriel.  While she was initially scared of the scarred man, she soon finds herself having to deal with an attraction to him that seems to grow with each passing day.

The two of them have to deal with communication issues and their own insecurities in order to find themselves on the path to happily ever after.  But they also need to deal with the fact that both of them are only half vampires.

Through a witch, they discover they are both half satyr and that Gabriel’s deformity is actually an essential satyr “bit”.  This is when things got a little strange for me, but Tina Folsom worked the extra bit into the storyline (you’ll have to read it to find out what that is).

Loved the Rogue storyline and how someone close to the Scanguards went bad. The Rogue was definitely not who I thought it was and even when the signs were there, I didn’t want to believe it.  It was this storyline that kept me reading, rather than the romance between Gabriel and Maya.

Not my favorite of the series, but still an entertaining read.