Best Man, Better Lover

MM Bi-Awakening Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Bi Awakening, Wedding Party, Forbidden Romance, Secret Relationship, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Coming Out

He’s standing at the altar for the wrong person. His best man already knows how to wreck him.

Evan Hart has spent his whole life doing the right thing — good job, good fiancée, good smile that never quite reaches his eyes. He’s six days from the wedding everyone expects, and the hollow feeling in his chest is getting harder to ignore.

Theo Morales has spent eleven years being Evan’s best friend and pretending that’s enough. He’s charming, experienced, and so deeply in love with Evan that he’s built his entire emotional life around managing a wanting that has no future.

One drunken dare at the bachelor party cracks the lie wide open. Now they’ve got six days in a beachside resort to either burn it out of their systems or burn everything else down. Rules get made. Rules get broken. And every night, the line between “best friends” and “something worse” disappears a little more.

With a wedding ticking closer, a fiancée who doesn’t deserve the lie, and a decade of buried feelings detonating between them, Evan has to decide: walk down the aisle and keep pretending, or blow up his life for the man who’s been standing next to him all along.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Best friends to lovers with an eleven-year slow burn
✅ Bi awakening — “straight until him” with graphic, explicit heat
✅ Wedding-week forced proximity and forbidden hookups
✅ Secret relationship with near-miss tension (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — 12 on-page scenes)
✅ Praise kink, dirty talk, and power shifts
✅ A hero who chooses himself and a love interest who waited eleven years
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including oral, anal, and rimming), strong language, infidelity (groom with best man — resolved with clear HEA), coming out under pressure, and strained family dynamics. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Welcome to Paradise

The puddle-jumper dropped thirty feet without warning, and Evan Hart gripped the armrest hard enough to leave fingernail crescents in the leather.

“Oh my God, look at the water!” Lauren pressed her phone against the oval window, snapping photos of the coastline like they weren’t currently plummeting through the atmosphere in a tin can with propellers. “Babe, look. You can see the resort from here.”

Evan looked. The island spread beneath them like a postcard—white sand, dark trees, a cluster of terracotta rooftops nestled against a strip of turquoise so bright it looked photoshopped. Beautiful. Perfect. Exactly the kind of place where a man was supposed to feel excited about marrying the woman sitting next to him.

He felt like he was going to throw up.

“Turbulence,” he muttered when Lauren glanced at him. “I’m fine.”

She squeezed his knee and went back to photographing their descent, narrating for the Instagram story she’d been building since they left Newark. Six days until I do! ✈️🌴💍 He’d watched her type it at the gate, watched the likes roll in during their layover in Jacksonville, watched her refresh the comments with a glow on her face that he hadn’t been able to put there in months. Maybe years.

The plane leveled out. His stomach didn’t.

They landed on a strip of asphalt that barely qualified as a runway, collected their bags from a cart that a guy in board shorts wheeled out by hand, and climbed into the resort’s shuttle van. Lauren immediately began cross-referencing the welcome packet against her wedding binder—the physical one, three inches thick, tabbed and color-coded, that she’d insisted on bringing despite having the entire thing digitized on her iPad.

“The rehearsal dinner is Thursday at seven in the Pavilion,” she said, pen cap between her teeth. “But it says the Pavilion seats eighty and we only have forty-six confirmed, so we might want to reconfigure the layout—”

“We just landed,” Evan said. He meant it gently. It came out flat.

Lauren looked up. “I’m just trying to stay on top of things.”

“I know. You’re amazing at that.” He leaned over, kissed her temple, and caught his own reflection in the van window. He looked tired. He looked like a man who’d been smiling on command for six years and whose face had started to forget how to do it on its own.

The van turned through a pair of wrought-iron gates, and Marisol Cove opened up around them like a secret someone had been keeping. The main lodge was low-slung and Spanish-styled, draped in bougainvillea so thick the stucco barely showed through. Beyond it, a scatter of white cottages trailed down toward a beach that curved like a parenthesis around water so clear he could see the sandy bottom from the parking lot. String lights crisscrossed between palm trees. A wooden sign read The Sandbar with an arrow pointing toward an open-air tiki bar to the right of the pool.

And there, behind the bar, leaning on his elbows with a cocktail shaker in one hand and a laugh already halfway out of his mouth, was Theo Morales.

Evan’s chest did something stupid.

He’d known Theo would be here. Obviously. Theo was the best man. Theo had helped pick this resort. Theo had texted him three hours ago—landed early, already made friends with the bartender, she’s letting me use the good tequila—but knowing Theo was here and seeing him were two entirely different experiences, the way knowing the sun was hot was different from standing in it.

Theo hadn’t spotted them yet. He was talking to the girl behind the bar, gesturing with the shaker, doing that thing he always did where his whole body became part of the conversation—shoulders rolling, eyebrows working, that sharp grin flashing like a dare. He’d pushed his sleeves up past his elbows, and the late-afternoon sun caught the dark ink of his half-sleeve, the geometric lines and botanical shapes that wrapped his left forearm like a love letter to some artist Evan had never asked about. His hair was doing the thing it did in humidity—dark waves falling across his forehead, the kind of effortless that Evan knew took about thirty seconds of him running his hands through it and calling it done.

Evan’s gaze snagged on the tendons of Theo’s forearms as he shook whatever he was mixing. The flex of muscle under olive skin. The way his wrist turned—

He looked away so fast his neck twinged.

“There’s Theo!” Lauren waved through the van window even though they were still fifty yards out and Theo couldn’t possibly see her. “Oh thank God, someone fun is already here.”

The van stopped. Evan grabbed both roller bags before Lauren could reach for hers, mostly because he needed his hands full. Needed to be carrying something. Needed a reason not to—

“Hart!” Theo’s voice hit him like a punch he’d volunteered for. “Get over here.”

Theo came around the bar, wiping his hands on a towel he tossed over his shoulder, and crossed the patio in four strides. He hugged Lauren first—quick, warm, one-armed, a kiss on her cheek and a “You look incredible, future Mrs. Hart.” Lauren beamed. Then Theo turned to Evan, and his face did something it only did for Evan—opened, softened, became for one unguarded second exactly the face of the twenty-year-old kid who’d taught Evan how to make a gin and tonic in a dorm room with a stolen bottle of Beefeater and three limes.

They hugged.

It lasted too long. Evan knew it lasted too long because he felt the exact moment it crossed from normal to something else—the moment Theo’s hand flattened against his back and pressed, the moment Evan’s chin found the curve of Theo’s shoulder and stayed, the moment they were breathing each other’s air and neither one pulled away first. Theo smelled like lime juice and sandalwood and sunscreen, and Evan’s hindbrain cataloged every note before he could stop it.

They separated. Theo held him at arm’s length, both hands on Evan’s shoulders, and studied his face with the shameless attention of someone who’d been looking at it for eleven years. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Theo’s thumbs pressed into the muscle above Evan’s collarbones once, twice, and then he let go and it was over and Evan could breathe again. “Come on. I made you something.”

He led them to The Sandbar, where two drinks were already sweating on cocktail napkins. Evan picked his up and took a sip before he could ask what it was—a Bulleit old fashioned, made exactly the way Evan liked it, with a fat orange peel and two dashes of Angostura and the barest ghost of maple syrup that Theo had figured out seven years ago when Evan mentioned offhand that he liked his grandmother’s pancakes.

Seven years. Theo had remembered for seven years how Evan liked a drink that Evan hadn’t even ordered.

“Perfect,” Evan said, and didn’t trust himself to say more.

They checked in. Their cottage was on the second floor—Cottage 12, white walls, blue shutters, a queen bed with a mosquito net that Lauren immediately deemed “romantic” and Evan immediately deemed “a potential fire hazard.” The balcony overlooked the pool and, beyond it, the darkening stretch of ocean.

Lauren unpacked with military precision. Dresses on the left side of the closet, shoes underneath, toiletries arranged on the bathroom counter in the order she’d use them each morning. Evan put his bag on the luggage rack and opened it without unpacking anything.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too.” The words came out by reflex, the same way his hand found the light switch in a dark room. Automatic. Practiced. Not wrong, exactly. Just worn smooth.

She kissed his neck and went to shower. He stood in the bathroom doorway until the water started, then turned and walked to the balcony.

The sun was gone. The pool glowed turquoise beneath him, empty except for a couple of floating noodles. Beyond the pool, the beach was a pale stripe against black water, and beyond that, nothing—just the Atlantic and the sky and the low hum of insects and someone, somewhere, playing acoustic guitar badly.

Evan leaned on the railing and tried to name what he was feeling.

This was a hollowness that had taken up residence in his chest cavity sometime around the engagement party and had been expanding slowly ever since, like a sinkhole opening beneath a house so gradually that the homeowner doesn’t notice until the foundation cracks. This was looking at his own wedding and feeling the way he used to feel in church as a kid—obedient, present, waiting for the service to end.

He pulled out his phone and opened his notes app, the one he used for lesson plans and grocery lists and, buried in a folder labeled “Taxes 2024” so Lauren would never accidentally find it, sketches. Faces, mostly. Drawn with his fingertip on the phone screen in a way that was graceless and imprecise and still, somehow, the most honest thing he did.

He didn’t draw tonight. He opened the folder and scrolled through the last dozen sketches and stopped at the one he always stopped at: a jaw, a cheekbone, the curve of an ear with three piercings. He’d drawn it from memory two months ago, late at night, while Lauren slept and a documentary about coral reefs played on mute and his chest ached for a reason he had categorized, with the full force of his considerable capacity for self-deception, as missing my friend.

He closed the folder. Put the phone down.

From the balcony he could see Cottage 6, ground floor, its sliding glass door open to a patio with a hammock strung between two palms. A light was on inside. As he watched, a figure moved past the doorway—shirtless, silhouetted, reaching up to hang a towel on a hook. Theo. Just Theo, getting ready for bed in the cottage below, doing nothing, being no one other than his best friend of eleven years, and Evan’s pulse was suddenly audible in his own ears.

He watched for three more seconds. Then he stepped back from the railing, went inside, and closed the balcony door.

Sleep came eventually. He dreamed about the ocean, about swimming toward something he couldn’t see, about a hand reaching for him under the water. He didn’t know whose hand it was. In the morning, he wouldn’t let himself wonder.

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The Cove (Revisited) — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

One year later, Evan and Theo return to Marisol Cove — not as a groom and his best man, but as a couple. The hidden cove. The warm water. The sunset. This time, there’s no secret, no guilt, no locked door. Just two men rewriting their origin story in broad daylight — with their hands, their mouths, and every inch of the beach that started it all.

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