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MM Enemies-to-Lovers Romance
by Jace Wilder
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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Age Gap, Silver Fox, Forced Proximity, Bookshop Romance, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, Control/Surrender, Class Difference, Found Family
He came to close the bookshop. He did not plan to fall for the man behind the counter.
Calder Voss is very good at ending things. Businesses. Contracts. Jobs people thought were safe. His firm sends him to assess The Open Spine, a struggling queer bookstore sitting on the most valuable block in the city, and recommend whether it lives or dies. Simple. Clinical. Done in six weeks.
Then he meets the owner.
Theo Bell is fifty-one, silver-haired, ink-stained, and absolutely furious that a man in a three-piece suit thinks he can reduce twenty-two years of community to a spreadsheet. He’s loud. He’s warm. He flirts like breathing and fights like it matters.
Calder is supposed to be objective. He is not supposed to stay for the midnight poetry reading. He is not supposed to notice the way Theo’s voice drops when he’s angry. And he is definitely not supposed to let Theo pin him against the shelves and kiss him like he’s trying to win an argument with his mouth.
But the numbers are ugly, the deadline is real, and the developer circling the building does not care that Calder is falling for the one man who will never forgive him if he does his job.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Enemies-to-lovers MM with explosive banter
✅ Silver fox bookstore owner vs. buttoned-up consultant
✅ Age gap (34/51) with scorching chemistry
✅ Praise kink that hits like a weapon
✅ A man who unravels beautifully under pressure
✅ Found family, community rescue, and a bookstore worth saving
✅ HEA guaranteed (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ graphic, explicit, emotional)
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, workplace power dynamics, family estrangement, parental emotional abuse, and themes of professional ethics and control. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: The Villain Walks In
Theo Bell had a theory about mornings.
The good ones started with silence — with the particular hush of a bookstore before the world remembered it existed. The creak of old floorboards greeting his weight. The snap of the deadbolt surrendering. The coffeemaker’s first asthmatic gurgle, its ancient heating element performing a miracle it had no business still pulling off.
He’d owned The Open Spine for twenty-two years, and this ritual had never once failed to calm the low-frequency hum of anxiety that lived permanently in his chest. The store was a living thing in the quiet hours — breathing, settling, holding its shape while the city outside did whatever cities did at seven in the morning.
Today, however, the deadbolt didn’t need surrendering.
Because the door was already unlocked.
Theo stood on the sidewalk with his keys in one hand and a brown bag of day-old croissants from the bakery next door in the other, staring at the front door of his bookstore like it had insulted his mother. He distinctly remembered locking up last night. He always locked up. He was pathological about it — a man who ran a queer bookstore in a building he didn’t own learned early to check the locks twice and the alarm once and the locks again for good measure.
He pushed the door open slowly, reaching for his phone with the hand holding the croissants, which meant he entered his own establishment wielding a pastry bag like a weapon.
The lights in the fiction section were on.
Someone was standing between Biography and Self-Help, holding a tape measure against the shelving unit and photographing the result with a tablet. A man. Tall, lean, wearing a three-piece suit at seven o’clock in the goddamn morning.
“The biography section is six inches deeper than standard retail shelving,” the man said without looking up. “That’s not accidental, is it?”
Theo blinked. “Who the hell are you?”
Now the man turned. Pale green eyes behind those glasses — the kind of green that happened in nature only when something was trying to warn you.
“Calder Voss.” He extended a hand. “Voss and Mercer Advisory. I’ve been retained by Hargrove Properties to conduct a viability assessment of the commercial tenants in this building.”
Of course the executioner is beautiful, Theo thought. That’s how they get you to hold still.
He pulled out his phone and called Nia.
“We have a problem.”
“The building’s in debt restructuring. They sent a consultant to assess whether we’re worth keeping alive. He has six weeks to decide.”
“Shit. What does he look like?”
“He’s wearing a vest,” Theo said.
“Fuck.”
“How hot?”
“He looks like if a spreadsheet became a person and then that person went to a very expensive barber.”
“So hot.”
“Just get here. And bring the good coffee. We’re going to need it.”
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
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The Upstairs Office — A scene TOO HOT for retailers
Calder’s new office is a tiny room above the bookstore with a window overlooking the shop floor. Theo brings him coffee on the first morning. The coffee goes cold. The desk gets christened. And the window? Calder learns that Theo’s voice carries further than either of them planned.
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