Bed, Breakfast, & Benefits

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Length: 55,000 words
Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Forced Proximity, Only One Bed, Praise Kink, Slow Burn, Small Town, He Falls First

He checked in for content. He stayed for the man changing his definition of home.

Nolan Voss is a burned-out ex-chef hiding from the world in a struggling coastal Maine bed-and-breakfast. He cooks like a god, speaks in single sentences, and hasn’t let anyone past his front door in three years — not since the man he loved filmed their worst moment and posted it for thirty thousand strangers.

Eli Marsh is a mid-tier travel vlogger running out of money, credibility, and reasons to keep smiling on camera. When he books a week at the Heron’s Rest to feature it on his channel, he expects quaint scenery and good B-roll. He doesn’t expect the grumpiest, most devastatingly competent man he’s ever met — or the booking error that puts them in the same bed.

One room. One bed. One week of shared mornings, stolen touches, and a benefits arrangement that was supposed to stay off-camera and off the record. But when Eli’s coverage of the inn goes viral and the internet starts shipping “the hot innkeeper” with the man behind the lens, their private thing threatens to become very, very public — and Nolan has to decide if being seen by the world is worth it when Eli’s already seen all of him.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Grumpy innkeeper × sunshine vlogger MM romance
✅ Only one bed + forced proximity that DELIVERS
✅ “He shows love through food” and “he shows love through words”
✅ Praise kink on both sides (giving AND receiving)
✅ Scorching heat that escalates with emotional stakes (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Small-town Maine with the nosiest, most lovable side characters
✅ No big breakup — just two wounded men learning to trust again
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, and depictions of past emotional abuse and career burnout. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: Vacancy

The bread was the only thing in my life that rose on schedule.

Four forty-five in the morning, and I was elbow-deep in dough, working it against the butcher block counter the way my grandmother taught me—heel of the palm, fold, quarter turn, repeat. The kitchen was dark except for the single pendant light over the island and the blue glow of the oven preheating to 425. Outside, Cove Harbor was still asleep. The ocean was a low hum beyond the bluff, steady as a pulse, and the only other sounds were the tick of the baseboard heater and the wet slap of dough against wood.

This was the part of the day I didn’t hate.

I shaped two loaves—one sourdough, one rosemary olive oil—set them on parchment-lined sheet pans, scored the tops with a razor blade, and slid them into the oven. Then I washed my hands, dried them on the towel slung over my shoulder, and poured my first coffee from the pot I’d started twenty minutes ago. Black. Bitter enough to strip paint. Exactly right.

The Heron’s Rest Bed & Breakfast looked good in the half-dark. Soft. The wide-plank floors gleamed where I’d refinished them last spring. The exposed beams caught shadows from the pendant lights. The common room, visible through the kitchen pass-through, had the kind of effortless warmth that took me six months of deliberate effort to achieve—mismatched armchairs, wool throws, a stone fireplace I’d re-pointed by hand.

In daylight, you could see the cracks. The window in Room Three that stuck. The water stain on the second-floor ceiling I hadn’t gotten to yet. The booking calendar on my laptop, open on the counter, showing a month of white space where reservations should be.

I took my coffee to the laptop and scrolled through the numbers I already knew by heart. Two rooms booked for the weekend. One single-night Tuesday. The Petersons had cancelled their annual fall stay because they were “trying Airbnbs this year,” which was a nice way of saying they’d found somewhere cheaper. The couple from Connecticut had left a four-star review that dinged me for “limited dining options,” as if I was supposed to conjure a prix fixe menu for two guests and a cat.

Three months. That was the math. If bookings didn’t pick up by January, I’d have to take a second mortgage on the building or start selling off furniture. Maybe both. The thought made something tighten behind my ribs—not panic, exactly. More like the feeling you get when you’re holding something heavy and your arms start to shake and you realize you’ve been holding it too long but there’s no one to hand it to.

I closed the laptop. Drank my coffee. Checked the bread.

By six-fifteen, I had the dining room set: five place settings on the long farmhouse table, though only two rooms were occupied. Cloth napkins—always cloth. A small pitcher of wildflowers I’d cut from the side garden yesterday, the last of the season before the frost took them. I’d prepped a frittata with roasted red peppers and goat cheese from the farm up the road, sliced the bread, set out butter and three kinds of jam. The coffee station had a fresh pot of the good stuff—locally roasted, small batch, costs more than it should but guests notice.

I heard footsteps on the stairs. The Adlers—mid-sixties, birdwatchers, here for the annual migration. They came down in matching fleece vests, binoculars already around their necks, and I had their plates ready before they sat down.

“Nolan, this bread,” Mrs. Adler said, closing her eyes on the first bite. “What’s in this one?”

“Rosemary from the garden. Castelvetrano olives. Little bit of honey in the dough.”

“It’s divine.” She said it the way people say things when they mean it but also when they want to fill silence, and I nodded and went back to the kitchen because I’ve never known what to do with a compliment except leave the room.

Mr. Adler wanted to know the best trail for spotting warblers. I told him the coast path past the lighthouse, early, before the dog walkers. He thanked me three times. They were good guests. Quiet, grateful, gone by seven.

The other room—a solo business traveler who’d barely spoken—left his key on the desk without breakfast. I cleared his room by eight. Stripped the bed, scrubbed the bathroom, restocked the toiletries I ordered in bulk from a supplier in Portland because the margins on the fancy ones were a joke.

By nine, the inn was empty and clean and so quiet I could hear the clock in the hallway marking every second like a countdown.

I was wiping down the kitchen island when I heard tires on the gravel drive, followed by the screen door and Margot’s voice, which always arrived about ten seconds before the rest of her.

“It smells like heaven in here and you look like hell.”

I didn’t turn around. “Good morning, Margot.”

She appeared in the kitchen doorway—sixty-three, silver hair in a braid, reading glasses on a chain, wearing her usual uniform of an oversized flannel and rubber-soled clogs. Margot had been the previous owner’s housekeeper. When I bought the place, she’d made it clear that she came with the building, like the plumbing. I hadn’t argued. Partly because she was the best housekeeper I’d ever met and partly because arguing with Margot was like arguing with weather.

She poured herself coffee, leaned against the counter, and studied me over the rim of her mug.

“You’ve been up since four.”

“Four-thirty.”

“You need to hire someone.”

“I need to afford someone.”

“Same thing.” She set down her mug and pulled out her phone. “I was at The Anchor last night. Jenny Kowalski said her niece is looking for work—”

“Margot.”

“Part-time. She’s twenty-two, she’s strong, and she doesn’t talk much, which I know matters to you.”

“What matters to me is making payroll for the one employee I already have.”

She looked at me the way she always did when I said something she considered beneath my intelligence, which was often. “Have you looked at the calendar this week?”

“I look at the calendar every day. That’s the problem.”

“Then you know it’s bad.”

I didn’t answer, because we both knew it was bad, and saying it out loud wouldn’t make it less bad, and I was tired of the conversation we’d been having in various forms for the past four months. The inn was beautiful. The inn was well-run. The inn was hemorrhaging money because no one knew it existed.

“You need marketing,” Margot said.

“I have a website.”

“Your website looks like it was built in 2006 by someone who hates joy.”

“It has all the relevant information.”

“Nolan.” She set her mug down with a ceramic click. “You are a brilliant cook. This place is gorgeous. The reviews are wonderful—when people actually leave them. But you’re invisible. Nobody finds this place unless they specifically go looking for a bed-and-breakfast in a town most people can’t find on a map. You need someone to see this place. You need—”

“If you say social media, I’m going to put my head in the oven.”

“I was going to say exposure.”

“Same thing.”

“It is not the same thing. Exposure means people knowing you exist. Social media is one way to get there. You could also—” She ticked options on her fingers. “Partner with the tourism board. Do a food column for the Cove Harbor Gazette. Host a supper club. Let me put the inn on one of those travel websites—”

“No.”

“—or you could stand here making bread for empty tables until the bank takes the building. Your call.”

She picked up her mug and went to start on Room Three’s window, leaving me alone in the kitchen with the bread cooling on the rack and the quiet pressing in from every direction.

The thing Margot didn’t understand—or understood but refused to accept—was that the invisibility was the point. I hadn’t moved to a town most people can’t find on a map by accident. I’d done it on purpose. I’d done it because the last time I was visible—the last time I was content, in every sense of the word—I’d ended up on someone’s phone screen in the worst moment of my life, and thirty thousand strangers had watched me lose my shit in a kitchen and decided they knew who I was.

That was three years ago. A different city, a different kitchen, a different version of me who believed that talent and hard work would be enough and that the person sharing his bed wouldn’t weaponize his worst night for clicks.

I’d been wrong on both counts.

I bought the Heron’s Rest with what was left of my savings and the conviction that if I made the food good enough and the rooms clean enough, people would find me. They had, in small numbers. Enough to keep the lights on for two years. Not enough to keep them on for a third.

I poured another coffee I didn’t need and opened the laptop again, this time pulling up the booking portal. No new reservations. I refreshed. Nothing. Refreshed again, because apparently I was the kind of man who thought the universe would reward persistence—

A notification popped up.

New Booking Request

Guest: Eli Marsh

Channel/Referral: EliGoesPlaces (YouTube)

Duration: 7 nights

Room preference: Best available

Notes: Hi! I’m a travel content creator and I’d love to feature Heron’s Rest on my channel. Happy to discuss collaboration or just book as a regular guest—either way, your place looks incredible. Can’t wait!

Three exclamation points. The word “content.” The phrase “happy to discuss collaboration.” Every red flag I owned was up and waving.

I clicked the link to his channel.

The header image was a guy in his late twenties leaning against a railing somewhere Mediterranean, sunlight catching sandy brown hair that looked like it had never met a comb, grinning at the camera with the kind of effortless charisma that made you want to either punch him or buy him a drink. His bio read: Slow travel, good food, better stories. 183K subscribers. Business inquiries: eli@eligoesplaces.com.

I clicked on his latest video. “48 Hours in Portland, Maine—the REAL Guide.” Thirteen minutes. I watched thirty seconds of him walking through a fish market, narrating with his hands, making the woman behind the counter laugh, tasting something and making a sound that was—

I closed the tab.

One hundred and eighty-three thousand subscribers. Seven nights at my best rate was significant money. Money I needed. Money that was sitting in my inbox right now, attached to a man who made a living pointing cameras at things and people and places and turning them into content for strangers.

Everything I’d spent three years running from, walking through my front door with a smile and a ring light.

I stared at the booking request. The cursor blinked in the response field.

Decline. Close the laptop. Make lunch for no one.

I thought about the bank statement I’d opened last night and closed without reading. I thought about the property tax bill on my desk, the one I’d been using as a coaster. I thought about January and what happens to a building when no one can afford to heat it.

I thought about Margot saying your call like she already knew what I’d choose and was just waiting for me to catch up.

I typed:

Hi Eli—thanks for your interest in Heron’s Rest. Happy to host you as a regular guest. Regarding content/filming: I’d prefer to discuss boundaries in person once you arrive. Looking forward to your stay. —Nolan Voss, Owner/Innkeeper

Professional. Controlled. Not a single exclamation point.

I hit send before I could delete it, closed the laptop, and stood in my kitchen listening to the clock and the ocean and the particular silence of a building that was either about to be saved or ruined by a man named Eli who dotted his messages with exclamation points and made fish-market women laugh on camera.

The bread was done. I pulled it from the oven—two perfect loaves, golden-brown, the rosemary fragrant and the crust crackling as it cooled. I set them on the rack. They were beautiful. No one was here to see them.

I took a picture. Not to post. Just to prove to myself that the bread existed, that the morning had happened, that I’d made something worth keeping even if the only audience was me.

Then I put my phone away and started prepping lunch.

Margot came back through an hour later, saw the booking confirmation on the laptop screen, and raised her eyebrows.

“An influencer? You?”

“Content creator. And he’s a paying guest.”

“Nolan Voss, letting a camera into his inn.” She was smiling. The dangerous kind. “Should I iron the good sheets?”

“Don’t make it a thing.”

“It’s already a thing.” She patted my arm on her way past. “Wear the blue henley when he gets here. It does things for your shoulders.”

“Margot.”

“I’m just saying. If you’re going to be on camera, you might as well look good.”

She disappeared into the linen closet, humming, and I stood in the hallway thinking about the fact that I’d just invited a stranger into the only safe place I had left, and that my sixty-three-year-old housekeeper was already picking out my outfit.

I went back to the kitchen. Started chopping onions for a soup no one had ordered.

The knife felt good in my hand. The rhythm was familiar. Dice, sweep, dice, sweep. This, at least, I knew how to do. This, at least, I could control.

Five days until Eli Marsh arrived.

I had no idea what to do with myself in the meantime, so I did what I always do: I cooked, I cleaned, I kept the lights on, and I didn’t think about the way he’d tasted that thing in the video and made that sound, the one I’d closed the tab to stop hearing.

I definitely didn’t think about that.

I chopped the onions until my eyes burned, and I told myself it was the onions.

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Off the Record — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Three weeks apart. Four hundred miles of distance. One phone call that starts with “I miss you” and ends with both of them wrecked, breathless, and more in love than ever. The phone sex scene that didn’t make the book — exclusively here.

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