Victoria Pinder’s Fake Relationship Romance Series

The fake relationship runs through nearly every world I have built — because it is one of the most honest ways I know to get two guarded people close enough to break through. Here is how each series handles it.

Virgin Cove — Where the Town Remembers Everything

Virgin Cove is a small coastal town where you cannot be anonymous. The sea is right there. The neighbors know your family. The diner still has the booth where you used to sit with your first love. When you come back to Virgin Cove, the town does not let you pretend the past did not happen — and that makes the fake relationship unbearably electric.

In a small town, a fake relationship is not just between two people. It is between two people and everyone who has ever watched them. The audience is not strangers at a gala. It is the woman who knew you at seventeen, the man who watched the original relationship fall apart, the entire town that has been waiting to see what happens when the two of you are finally in the same zip code again. You cannot half-commit to a performance when every person at the farmers market is watching. You have to sell it. And selling it means touching, and laughing, and looking at each other in a way you promised yourself you would not.

Virgin Cove delivers fake dating laced with second chances — the particular devastation of pretending to fall for someone you already fell for once. The sea is the backdrop and the metaphor: the tide always comes back. So do the feelings you thought you buried.

Best for: Readers who want coastal atmosphere, small-town pressure, second chance heat underneath the fake dating arrangement, and the specific ache of performing love in front of people who knew you before.

Princes of Avce — Royal Fake Marriages Where the Stakes Are Dynastic

The fictional kingdom of Avce runs on protocol, succession law, and the kind of old-world hierarchy where who you marry has political consequences that outlast you. That makes the fake marriage trope not just romantic — it is survival. When a prince needs a wife and a woman needs cover, the arrangement is not a modern convenience. It is a centuries-old institution both of them are trying to weaponize for opposite purposes.

Rossie’s story in Forbidden Marquis is one of the most devastating entries in this trope I have ever written. She is abandoned at the altar — publicly, in front of everyone who matters — and flees to Paris with her pride in pieces. Stefano is an Italian marchese who needs her for reasons of his own. Their contract marriage begins as mutual transaction: she gets cover, he gets an alliance. What neither of them planned for is what happens when the contract becomes a life. When you have to show up every day as someone’s spouse, even as a performance, you cannot fully protect yourself from the person you are performing with.

The Princes of Avce series is steeped in forced proximity, enemies-to-lovers tension, and the slow burn that only happens when two people are trapped inside a fiction neither of them knows how to end. Twelve books. Twelve royal fake marriages that turn real in ways no succession law anticipated.

Best for: Readers who want sweeping royal settings, high emotional stakes, fake marriages with legal and dynastic weight, and the slow dismantling of two people who thought they were too sophisticated to fall.

Irresistibly Series — Hired to Spy on Him, Married to Him for Cover

The Bentley family are the rightful heirs to the throne of Hoskell. Their father, the King, was assassinated. Their assets were frozen. They are fighting a counter-espionage war against the Kirno conspiracy from a Miami condo complex — and winning requires tactics that look nothing like romance.

Eva and Jake’s story in Irresistibly Strong is the fake relationship at its most high-stakes. Eva did not walk into this arrangement with clean intentions — she was hired to infiltrate. Jake is the Bentley brother assigned to negotiation, counter-intelligence, and outmaneuvering every threat before it lands. He is not a man who gets surprised. He is a man who is always the smartest person reading the room.

Except he did not anticipate her.

The marriage is for cover. The intimacy of it — the daily proximity, the having to know each other’s rhythms, the appearing in public as his wife — that was not supposed to feel like anything. The Bentley brothers literally built Safe Rooms into the condo blueprints to beat surveillance. They designed their entire environment for containment and control. And none of that architecture protected Jake from what happened when he stopped treating Eva as a variable and started treating her as a person.

This is the fake relationship where the lie was built on betrayal, which means the moment of choosing truth costs more than almost anything I have ever written.

Best for: Readers who want espionage stakes, high-pressure fake marriage arrangements, a hero who is never surprised and a heroine who surprises him anyway, and emotional payoffs that had to be earned through genuine moral reckoning.

Favorite Series — Fake Roommate, Fake Girlfriend, Real Consequences

The Marshall and Campbell families move through Miami in a world of money, film sets, and the kind of social dynamics where who you appear to be with matters enormously. The fake relationship in this world is not royal or espionage — it is personal. It is the specific humiliation of needing someone to pretend, and the unexpected grace of having them actually show up.

Jay Marshall needed a smart woman with class for a conservative investor who hated his flashy Miami reputation. Penny Knightheart is a mechanical engineer living on a $900-a-month budget, running from a mother who has made an art form of marrying for money. The arrangement: fake roommate and date in Jay’s 9,500-square-foot Coconut Grove condo for $750 a month. The problem: Penny is exactly the kind of woman who does not perform. She is competent, direct, and entirely unimpressed by money in a way that Jay has never encountered before. The investor buys it. Jay does not know what to do with the fact that he does too.

Brandon Campbell and Eva Bishop take a different shape. Brandon is a billionaire film producer; Eva is broke, pregnant, and $2 million in debt after a failed self-funded play. He needs a fake girlfriend to investigate financial fraud on his film set without alerting the guilty parties. She needs income badly enough to take the job. The film set is a pressure cooker where every emotion is performed for a living — which makes it nearly impossible to know when Eva stops acting and starts feeling it. Brandon is not sure either. That uncertainty is the story.

Best for: Readers who want Miami heat, grounded heroines who have nothing to prove and nothing to perform, and fake arrangements that unravel into something neither party saw coming.

Modern Scottish Lairds — The Lie Has Nowhere to Hide

An ancient Scottish castle in winter is not a forgiving environment for a performance. There is no party to disappear into, no crowded ballroom to give you breathing room. It is stone walls, cold mornings, and a Highland laird who uses gruffness the way other men use armor. When there is a fake relationship in this world, it has to survive conditions where pretending is almost physically impossible.

Banner and Miriam in Wrong Scot for Christmas are not built for comfortable lies. He is too direct. She is too honest. The snowstorm that traps them together is the plot mechanism — but the reason the story works is that the isolation removes every social convention they would normally use to keep their distance. They have to deal with each other as actual people. The fake warmth becomes real warmth because there is no performance space left. Just two people and a fire and the creeping understanding that this is the most genuine either of them has been in years.

Best for: Readers who want grumpy heroes, snowbound settings with no escape, and the particular honesty that happens when there is literally nowhere to go.

Steel Series — Fake Marriages With Family Stakes

Ten siblings. Secret babies, fake marriages, and the kind of pro-athlete world where your personal life becomes public property the moment you step onto the field. A Steel’s love is forged to last — but the fake marriages in this series are not shortcuts. They are crucibles. The arrangement puts two people in immediate domestic proximity, strips away the dating-performance layer, and asks them to function as a unit before they have any business trusting each other.

The fake marriage in the Steel Series always has consequences that extend beyond the couple — family loyalty, public perception, contracts, children. The fiction is embedded in a real life. And real life, lived together closely enough, has a way of becoming exactly what it was pretending to be.

Best for: Readers who want sports romance texture, family saga depth, and fake marriages with stakes that live in the real world long after the arrangement was supposed to end.