The Bachelor Pad’s Secret Ingredient

MM Culinary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Bi Awakening, Praise Kink, Fake Dating, Workplace Romance, Forced Proximity, Size Difference, Possessive Hero, Opposites Attract, Secret Relationship

The celebrity chef needs a reputation makeover. His straight sous-chef needs a very different kind of hands-on instruction. Unfortunately, both problems are about to be filmed in high definition.

Rafael Moretti’s food empire is burning after one viral meltdown. The network’s ultimatum: fix your image or lose everything.

Enter Owen Park — food influencer, relentless optimist, and the only man in New York brave enough to tell Rafe his brand is “aggressively divorced-dad with a blowtorch.”

Owen’s plan is simple: film a casual cooking show, rehabilitate the chef, save the restaurant.

The complication is Luca DeLuca.

Rafe’s executive sous-chef is six-foot-three of tattooed muscle, protective instinct, and devastating competence. He hates influencers. He hates cameras. He has never, not once, looked at a man the way he looks at Owen when the cameras stop rolling.

When a fake romance storyline sends the series viral, Luca starts questioning everything he thought he knew about himself.

Owen has one rule: he won’t be someone’s experiment.

Luca agrees.

Then backs Owen against a kitchen counter and asks to be taught exactly what he’s been missing.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Grumpy chef x sunshine influencer MM romance

✅ Bi awakening with a praise-addicted hero who falls HARD

✅ Fake dating that becomes devastatingly real

✅ Kitchen counter scenes that will ruin you for cooking shows

✅ Size difference deployed with surgical precision

✅ A sunshine hero who refuses to be anyone’s secret

✅ Food so good it’s basically foreplay

✅ Standalone HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including first-time and bi-awakening intimacy), strong language, workplace power dynamics, family tension around coming out, and depictions of anxiety. Features consensual praise kink and possessive dynamics. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Owen

The hostess at Sable & Salt had the dead-eyed composure of someone who’d spent years telling hedge fund managers that no, their AmEx Black did not actually buy them a table tonight. She looked at me the way a bouncer looks at a fake ID.

“Owen Park. I have a ten o’clock with Rafael Moretti and the Culinary Channel production team.”

She consulted something behind the podium. Possibly a list. Possibly her will to live. “Through the dining room, past the bar, second door on the left. They’re in the private space.”

“Thank you.”

“Mr. Moretti doesn’t like phones at the table.”

“Good thing we’re not eating.”

She almost smiled. Almost.

I walked through the dining room and tried not to gawk, because I was a professional and professionals did not stand in the middle of a Michelin-adjacent restaurant at ten in the morning whispering holy shit to themselves. But the room earned it. Sable & Salt was the kind of place that made you aware of your own breathing — cathedral ceilings, slate-gray walls, an open kitchen visible through a wall of tempered glass where copper pots hung like a modernist art installation. The tables were black walnut. The chairs were leather. The menu, which I had studied online at two a.m. because I always did my homework, did not list prices. If you had to ask, you couldn’t afford the bread course.

It smelled like charred rosemary and rendered fat and money.

I’d eaten here once, three years ago, on a brand deal that paid well enough for a solo tasting menu. The food had been technically flawless and emotionally vacant — every plate a gorgeous middle finger aimed at anyone who thought cooking should make you feel something other than inadequate. I’d given it a B-plus on my channel and received death threats from food Twitter for a week.

Now the man who built this temple to culinary intimidation needed me to make people like him again.

Life was funny.

I passed the bar — black marble, backlit amber bottles, a bartender already polishing glasses with the quiet intensity of a man disarming a bomb — and heard the kitchen before I saw it. The sounds were unmistakable: the rhythmic thock of a knife on a board, the hiss of something hitting hot oil, the low rumble of voices calling and responding in the precise shorthand of a professional line.

I glanced through the glass.

And that was when I saw him…

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The New Kitchen — Luca and Owen christen their new apartment kitchen on their first morning together. Counter sex, cacio e pepe, and the most romantic spatial measurement in the history of real estate.

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