His Ex-Husband’s Brother

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Ex-Husband’s Brother, Forbidden Romance, Age Gap (43/36), Size Difference, Praise Kink, Chef Romance, Small Town, Secret Relationship, Forced Proximity, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort

My ex-husband’s brother was never supposed to touch me. Nine years of restraint. One dark kitchen. No going back.

My ex-husband’s brother was never supposed to look at me that way.

Dorian Rourke was the responsible one. Older. Controlled. Untouchable. For eight years, he was the man who stood across family tables and never said what passed between us whenever our eyes met.

Nothing happened while I was married. That should make wanting him now simple. It doesn’t.

I’ve returned to Blackwater Harbor to reopen my restaurant and rebuild a life that belongs entirely to me. Dorian has purchased the property next door, and the whole town is already waiting for us to become enemies.

Instead, he follows me into my dark kitchen after closing. He tells me he’s wanted me for years. I tell him that admitting it changes nothing.

Then he puts his hands on me — patient, steady, devastatingly precise — and every careful lie I’ve told myself collapses.

He’s seven years older. Six inches taller. Built like the Maine coast, and just as unforgiving. And when he calls me good in that low voice, I stop pretending I don’t need this.

Our relationship is legal. Consensual. And completely unforgivable to half his family.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Ex-husband’s brother forbidden romance with ZERO cheating

✅ Seven-year age gap with massive size difference (6’4″ x 5’9″)

✅ Praise kink that will RUIN you

✅ Chef romance — food as love language, kitchen as territory

✅ Small-town gossip, family scandal, and a public declaration that earns every tear

✅ Emotional slow burn with early physical payoff (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)

✅ A hero who waited nine years and a chef who finally lets himself be fed

✅ Guaranteed HEA

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, divorce, family conflict, small-town gossip, discussion of attraction during a prior marriage (no cheating occurred), past parental death, and temporary romantic separation. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Micah

The last plate of the night is a brown-butter hotteok with salted maple cream, and I send it out with hands that haven’t trembled since culinary school.

Twelve hours. That’s how long I’ve been standing on this line. My feet are numb inside my boots, my lower back has fused into a single knot of protest, and there’s a fresh burn on the inside of my left forearm from the plancha that I won’t notice until tomorrow. None of it matters. What matters is the plate — the crisp golden dough split open to show the dark sugar filling, the drizzle of cream drawn in a precise half-moon, the single microgreen placed with tweezers because I’m not an animal.

“Order up,” I say. “Table nine. Last dessert of the night.”

Remy takes the plate with both hands, inspects it the way I taught him — tilt for light, check the rim, look for smudges — and carries it through the pass window.

Salt & Juniper is open.

Not reopened. Open. I’ve been telling myself that distinction all day. This isn’t a resurrection. It’s not the sequel. The first Salt & Juniper was a restaurant I ran in a building owned by my husband’s family, serving food I’d designed to make his relatives feel sophisticated at their own dinner parties. That restaurant died with the marriage, and I let it.

This one is mine.

The property deed is in my name. The renovation loan is under my social security number. The lease has no Rourke family signature, no Rourke family cosign, no tiny Rourke family clause that could be activated to remind me I was only ever borrowing my own success.

“That’s it,” Remy says, pushing back through the kitchen door. “Dessert’s down. Table nine looks like they might propose over your hotteok.”

“They’d better. That filling took three days to ferment.”

Remy grins. He’s twenty-eight, ambitious, and built like a swimmer — long arms, fast hands, the kind of instinctive palate I’d kill for.

“Full house tonight,” he says. “Every seat. Forty-eight covers.”

“I noticed.”

“Some of them even came for the food.”

I look at him. He holds up his hands.

“I’m just saying. Table four asked me if you were the chef who used to be married to Nolan Rourke. Table seven wanted to know if the menu was ‘inspired by your time as part of the Rourke family.’ And the blogger at the bar asked whether your Korean-fusion approach developed during or after your involvement with one of Blackwater Harbor’s founding families.”

I dry my hands on a side towel. Slowly. Deliberately. The way I do everything when the alternative is throwing something.

“What did you tell her?”

“I described the gochujang-butter lobster in clinical detail until she stopped asking personal questions.”

“Good man.”

“I live to serve.”

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The Tunnel — A scene TOO HOT for retailers

Three months after the festival. The tunnel between their buildings is finished. And Micah has plans for the tasting table he built with his own hands. Underground. Private. Explicit beyond anything in the main book.

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