Vacation Girlfriend, Double Trouble

MFM Why-Choose Romance
by Isla Wilde

Pairing: MFM (Why-Choose)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Vacation Fling, Fake Dating, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Why Choose, Touch Starved, Praise Kink, Body Worship

Two best friends. One fake vacation girlfriend. Seven days that change everything.

Paige Wynn is twenty-nine, recently dumped via voicemail, and determined to take her dream beach vacation alone. She’s spent five years being the easy girlfriend — agreeable, organized, low-maintenance — and she’s about to discover what happens when two men treat her desires as the main event.

Gavin Holt is six-three, broad-shouldered, and steady in a way that makes you want to lean into him. A commercial pilot who stays calm in any crisis except the emotional kind, he notices everything Paige needs before she says it — and he’s terrified of what happens when he finally admits he needs her back.

Eli Marlow is the kind of man who makes chaos feel like an invitation. A private chef with tattoos, an easy laugh, and a mouth made for both cooking and trouble, he’s always been the fun one — the vacation, never the destination. Until Paige makes him want to stay.

When the fake vacation-girlfriend joke stops being funny and starts being everything — first with Gavin, then with Eli, then with both of them at once — Paige realizes she doesn’t want to choose. And for the first time in their lives, neither do they.

But wanting everything means risking everything. The friendship. The fantasy. The fragile architecture of three hearts that might be stronger together — or might shatter under the weight of what they’re building.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ MFM why-choose with NO MM sexual contact
✅ Vacation fling that becomes the real thing
✅ Fake dating × two best friends
✅ One-bed forced proximity in a shared villa
✅ Touch-starved heroine who learns she deserves more
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno heat — graphic, explicit, emotional
✅ Two men who worship her (and communicate like adults)
✅ HEA guaranteed

Buy Ebook

Buy Audiobook — $3.99

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MFM scenes with no MM sexual contact), strong language, a breakup via voicemail, and depictions of emotional vulnerability. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One

The third time was when it really sank in.

Paige sat on the lid of a toilet in the Jacksonville International Airport women’s restroom, her carry-on wedged between the wall and the sanitary disposal bin, and pressed play on Derek’s voicemail for the third time. She didn’t need to hear it again. She’d memorized every word by the second listen, could have transcribed the whole thing longhand like a court reporter with a grudge. But something about the repetition felt necessary, the way you might probe a broken tooth with your tongue—not because it helped, but because the pain confirmed the tooth was actually broken and you weren’t imagining it.

“Hey, Paige.” His voice, tinny through the phone speaker, bounced off tile and fluorescent light. “So… I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About us. About where I’m at. And I think—I think we need to be honest that this isn’t working anymore. You’re amazing, you know that. You’re so—organized and driven and all of that. But I need someone who challenges me, you know? Someone a little more… spontaneous. I feel like I’ve outgrown what we have, and I think if you’re really honest with yourself, you’d say the same thing. I hope you find what you’re looking for. I really do. Take care of yourself.”

Take care of yourself. Like she was an acquaintance he’d bumped into at a gas station and not the woman who’d shared his bed for five years, picked up his dry cleaning when he forgot, and once drove forty minutes in a thunderstorm to bring him soup when he had the flu. Take care of yourself. The verbal equivalent of a pat on the head and a shove out the door.

She pressed the phone against her forehead and breathed.

The worst part wasn’t the breakup. People broke up all the time. The worst part was the voicemail. Five years of sleeping next to someone, learning the precise volume at which they snored, knowing that they liked their steak medium-rare and their coffee black and their towels folded in thirds, and Derek Fallon couldn’t even pick up the phone and say the words live. He’d waited until he knew she’d be busy—packing for their trip, the trip she’d planned, the trip she’d budgeted for over eight months, the trip that was supposed to celebrate her promotion and their anniversary—and left a voicemail like he was canceling a dentist appointment.

She deleted the voicemail. Then immediately wished she hadn’t, because now she couldn’t listen to it a fourth time.

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Get it together, Wynn.”

A toilet flushed two stalls down. Footsteps. The sound of a faucet and a paper towel dispenser. Paige held very still, as if the woman washing her hands might somehow sense that there was a twenty-nine-year-old marketing professional three stalls over having a full emotional collapse on a public toilet because her boyfriend of five years had dumped her forty-eight hours before their anniversary vacation via a sixty-three-second voicemail.

Sixty-three seconds. She’d timed it. Five years of her life reduced to barely over a minute. That was roughly twelve seconds per year. Less time than it took to microwave a Hot Pocket. She’d given Derek Fallon five years of patience, compromise, and frankly excellent birthday presents, and he’d given her sixty-three seconds and a “take care of yourself.”

The restroom door swung shut. Silence.

Paige pulled her phone back and opened her texts.

Maren’s name was at the top, a string of messages from that morning: Did you listen to it again? Stop listening to it. Paige I swear to God if you’re in the airport bathroom listening to it again—

She typed: He dumped me via voicemail. I’m going anyway.

Three dots. Then:

Good. Drink his half of the minibar. Block his number. Get a tan and forget that man’s middle name.

Paige almost smiled. She didn’t know Derek’s middle name. Five years and she’d never thought to ask, which felt like its own kind of verdict.

She stood, flushed the toilet she hadn’t used, and rolled her carry-on out of the stall. In the mirror above the sink, she looked exactly like a woman who’d spent twelve minutes crying in an airport restroom: mascara slightly south of where it belonged, nose pink, eyes the specific shade of gray-blue that went bloodshot in the most unflattering way possible. She splashed water on her face, fixed what she could, and assessed.

She was wearing the outfit she’d planned for travel day: a linen jumpsuit she’d bought specifically for this trip, white sneakers, gold hoops, her hair pulled into a low knot that had looked effortlessly chic in her bathroom mirror at 5 a.m. and now looked like something that had been through a wind tunnel. She’d packed a week’s worth of carefully curated resort wear: sundresses, bikinis, one pair of heeled sandals, a silk slip she’d bought in a moment of optimism that now made her want to set her suitcase on fire.

She’d packed all of it for Derek. Or, more accurately, she’d packed it for the version of herself that existed when Derek was watching. The Paige who didn’t take up too much space. Who wore the bikini but didn’t ask if he’d noticed. Who initiated sex maybe once a month—never more, because the one time she’d tried to be bold about it, reaching for him two nights in a row, he’d said “Again?” in a tone that made her feel like she’d asked him to donate a kidney.

She dried her hands. Straightened her jumpsuit. Tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“You’re going on this vacation,” she told her reflection. “You’re going to have a good time. You’re not going to check his Instagram.”

Her reflection looked skeptical.

“Fine,” she amended. “You’re going to check his Instagram a maximum of twice, and then you’re going to put your phone in the hotel safe and go to the beach.”

She pulled her carry-on toward the gate with the posture of a woman marching into battle against her own humiliation.

The flight was two hours and fourteen minutes of trying not to spiral.

Paige had booked first class as part of the anniversary surprise—two seats, side by side, with champagne and warm nuts and the little hot towels she’d always thought were absurdly luxurious. Now she sat in 2A with an empty 2B beside her, sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc that cost more than her dignity and reading the same paragraph of her novel four times without absorbing a word.

The woman in 1C kept glancing back, clearly wondering why the pretty brunette in first class was drinking alone and staring out the window with the intensity of someone planning a heist.

Paige pulled up her phone. The itinerary she’d built was still saved in her notes app: a color-coded masterpiece of restaurant reservations, snorkel excursions, sunset cocktail hours, and a couples’ massage that she now needed to cancel before she arrived and someone with a clipboard and a sympathetic smile asked where Mr. Fallon was. She went through it line by line and deleted every entry that included the word couples’.

That eliminated about seventy percent of the itinerary.

She replaced the gaps with aggressive self-care: solo beach time, books by the pool, the resort’s yoga class, lunch at the oceanfront restaurant where she’d eat at the bar like a woman in a perfume commercial and not like a woman who’d been dumped by a man named Derek. She added: cocktails, plural, nightly.

She almost wrote cry on the balcony, 9 p.m. but decided that could be a game-time decision.

The captain announced their descent. Paige looked out the window at the Gulf Coast sprawling below—turquoise water, white sand, palm trees like something from a screensaver—and felt a sharp, unwelcome pang of how beautiful it was. She’d imagined seeing this with Derek’s hand on her thigh and his voice in her ear saying something about the water. Now she was seeing it alone, and it was gorgeous, and the gorgeous made the alone worse.

Her phone buzzed. Derek: Hope your flight is good. I meant what I said—I really do hope you find what you’re looking for.

She stared at the text for ten full seconds. Then she typed, deleted, typed again, deleted again, and finally sent:

Please don’t text me right now.

She turned off her phone before he could respond and shoved it into her bag like it had bitten her.

The resort was obscenely beautiful, because of course it was.

Isla del Sol Resort & Spa sat on a private stretch of Gulf Coast beach like a postcard that had become sentient and decided to charge four hundred dollars a night. White stucco buildings with terracotta roofs. Bougainvillea dripping from every balcony. A lobby that smelled like hibiscus and money and the collective contentment of people who could afford to be here on a Tuesday.

Paige stepped out of the resort shuttle and immediately felt underdressed, overdressed, and emotionally naked all at once. The couple ahead of her—matching linen, coordinated luggage, the easy physicality of people who were about to have a tremendous amount of vacation sex—held hands as they walked toward the front desk. The couple behind her were arguing about sunscreen in the affectionate way that meant they’d be making up within the hour.

She was the only person who’d arrived alone.

Not alone, she corrected herself. Solo. Solo was a choice. Solo was empowered. Solo was a woman in a linen jumpsuit with a color-coded itinerary and a fully stocked minibar waiting for her.

Solo was also a woman standing in a resort lobby surrounded by couples, holding a reservation that said Wynn/Fallon, Anniversary Package and trying not to make a sound that would alarm the concierge.

“Welcome to Isla del Sol!” The woman at the front desk had the kind of smile that could survive a hurricane. “Checking in?”

“Yes. Paige Wynn.”

Clicking. Typing. The smile held. “Here we are—the Oceanview Suite, anniversary package. Congratulations!” She looked past Paige’s shoulder. “Will Mr. Fallon be joining you later?”

And there it was. The question she’d known was coming, that she’d rehearsed for on the plane, that she’d prepared a breezy, confident response to.

“He will not,” Paige said, and her voice came out flat and strange, like a GPS recalculating after a wrong turn.

The woman’s smile didn’t falter. She’d clearly seen this before. “No problem at all. Everything is ready for you. Here’s your key—top floor, ocean view, and there’s a complimentary bottle of champagne waiting in the room.” A beat. “Would you like me to have that removed?”

Paige considered it. A bottle of champagne, sitting on a table in a room she was supposed to share, celebrating an anniversary that no longer existed.

“Leave it,” she said. “I’ll drink it myself.”

The woman handed her the keycard with the respect you’d give a soldier heading to the front.

The room was gorgeous and Paige hated it.

Not the room itself—the room was stunning. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Gulf, gauzy white curtains lifting in the breeze from the open balcony, a king bed so large it looked like it had been designed for people with ambition. The bathroom had a soaking tub and a rainfall shower and those little bottles of high-end shampoo that she always stole and never used.

On the credenza by the window: a bottle of champagne in a silver ice bucket, two flutes, and a card that read: Congratulations on your anniversary! Here’s to many more.

Paige picked up the card, read it twice, and set it facedown.

She unpacked methodically, because she was a person who unpacked methodically and if Derek thought that was a character flaw then Derek could go fuck himself. Sundresses in the closet. Bikinis in the top drawer. Toiletries arranged on the bathroom counter in the order she’d use them. The silk slip—which she considered throwing away, then folded and tucked into the bottom drawer because she’d paid sixty-eight dollars for it and spite only went so far.

When the suitcase was empty and the room was organized, she stood in the center of all that beautiful space and felt the silence press in.

This was the room where she was supposed to have anniversary sex. Where Derek was supposed to open the champagne and toast her promotion and maybe, if his past behavior was any indication, give her an adequate seven minutes of foreplay before finishing on his schedule and rolling over to check ESPN. That had been the plan. That had been what she’d saved for. What she’d arranged, orchestrated, color-coded into existence. And now she was standing in the middle of it alone, in a room with two champagne flutes and one woman, and the irony was so thick she could have drowned in it.

She picked up the champagne bottle. Examined it. Dom Pérignon. Someone at this resort had taste.

She popped the cork. It hit the ceiling, which felt appropriate.

She did not pour it into one of the two flutes. She took a long drink directly from the bottle, standing barefoot on the marble floor in her wrinkled linen jumpsuit, and let the bubbles burn the back of her throat.

Then she walked to the balcony.

The sun was starting to drop toward the water, turning the sky the kind of ridiculous pink-gold that existed specifically to make heartbroken women feel things. The ocean stretched out wide and flat and indifferent, the way the ocean always was—it didn’t care that Paige Wynn had been dumped via voicemail. It didn’t care that she was standing on a balcony drinking anniversary champagne alone. It was just there, being beautiful, doing its job, utterly unconcerned with her suffering.

She took another drink from the bottle.

Below, on the beach, a couple walked hand in hand along the waterline. The man said something and the woman laughed, tipping her head back, and the sound carried up to Paige’s balcony like a personal insult.

She thought about calling Maren. She thought about crying. She thought about getting on a plane tomorrow and going home, crawling into her own bed, and pretending the last forty-eight hours hadn’t happened. She thought about texting Derek back—not to reconcile, just to say the things she’d been too stunned to say, the things that were lining up in her chest like planes on a runway: You didn’t outgrow me. You were never tall enough to reach me. You called me “too planned” because you were too lazy to show up to anything I planned. You said “Again?” when I wanted you two nights in a row, and I spent three years after that apologizing for having a sex drive, and that is the most pathetic sentence I have ever thought in my entire life.

She didn’t text him. She didn’t call Maren. She didn’t cry.

She drank the champagne and watched the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico, and somewhere between the second and third long pull from the bottle, something shifted. Not healed—nothing healed this fast. But hardened. Calcified. A small, stubborn piece of her that had been curled on the floor stood up, brushed itself off, and said: No.

No, she was not going home early. No, she was not going to waste the trip she’d worked for. No, she was not going to spend seven days in this beautiful place mourning a man who couldn’t be bothered to break up with her in real time. She had a suite with an ocean view, a full minibar, a pool, a beach, and the entire Gulf Coast at her disposal. She had sundresses and bikinis and a silk slip that cost sixty-eight dollars. She had a promotion that she’d earned, and a week of vacation that she’d saved for, and a body that, despite Derek’s apparent indifference, was perfectly fucking capable of enjoying itself.

She was going to have a good time if it killed her.

Paige finished the champagne, set the empty bottle on the railing like a trophy, and went inside to figure out where a woman alone could eat dinner at a resort built for couples without looking like she’d been recently abandoned.

She did not, at that moment, have any idea that tomorrow she would spill a frozen mango margarita on a man in a white linen shirt and that the trajectory of her life would pivot on the arc of that drink. She did not know that in less than twenty-four hours, she would be sitting between two of the most attractive men she’d ever seen, laughing so hard her stomach hurt, feeling something crack open in her chest that had been sealed shut for years. She didn’t know any of that. All she knew was that she was alone in a beautiful room, and she was done being the kind of woman who apologized for wanting to be there.

She opened the minibar. It was, as promised, fully stocked.

She took out a tiny bottle of tequila, toasted the empty room, and said out loud to no one: “To spontaneity, Derek. Fuck you.”

Then she drank it and went to find dinner.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

Buy Ebook

Buy Audiobook — $3.99

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

The Villa Rule — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Three months after the vacation that changed everything, Paige books a weekend trip back to Isla del Sol with both her men. Same villa. Same bed. New rules. When Gavin pulls out a list of things they never got to try and Eli suggests they work through it in order, Paige discovers that the only thing better than a vacation fling is a vacation with two men who know exactly what she likes.

Get the Bonus Chapter →