Aisle Be There
MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Blue Collar, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, Class Difference, Found Family, Feeding Kink, Food as Love Language
He came home to save the family grocery store. The butcher next door has a union petition, a perfect smile, and no intention of making anything easy.
When corporate turnaround specialist Evan Price is sent back to his Adirondack hometown to rescue his family’s failing neighborhood grocery store, he expects outdated systems, shrinking margins, and a temporary assignment before headquarters sells the property.
He does not expect Mateo “Teo” Alvarez, the store’s beloved butcher: a broad-shouldered local institution with a wicked mouth, a loyal crew, and a plan to convert the struggling market into a worker-owned co-op before Evan can turn it into another sterile corporate chain.
Their conflict turns personal when a proposed redevelopment deal threatens the entire block. To keep the market open, Evan and Teo must build a plan neither man could make alone — and decide whether falling for the enemy is worth risking the only place both of them call home.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Buttoned-up corporate executive × charismatic blue-collar butcher
✅ Enemies to lovers with scorching workplace tension
✅ Food as love language (he feeds him, every time)
✅ Praise kink that will melt your e-reader (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Found family grocery store ensemble
✅ Community vs. corporate — real stakes, real heart
✅ A hero who bakes bread at 4 AM and a hero who brings him dinner at midnight
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, food-related sensuality, corporate conflict, and themes of family estrangement. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
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Chapter One
The sign hadn’t changed.
That was the first thing I noticed when I pulled into the lot—the hand-painted PINE RIDGE MARKET letters still hanging above the entrance, faded from red to a dusty rose, one corner of the P slightly lower than the rest where a windstorm had loosened the bracket fifteen years ago. Maybe twenty. Nobody had fixed it. Nobody had replaced it. The sign just hung there, crooked and stubborn, the way everything in this town survived: by refusing to acknowledge it was deteriorating.
I sat in the rental car with the engine off and the windows down and let the parking lot happen to me. The smell hit first—overripe produce from the sidewalk bins, hot asphalt, the faint iron tang of the butcher’s exhaust fan pushing warm air into the August afternoon. Then the sound: a shopping cart with a bad wheel rattling across the pavement, a woman calling someone’s name from the entrance, the muffled thump of a delivery truck idling at the loading dock around back.
Nineteen years.
I hadn’t been back in nineteen years, and the parking lot smelled exactly the same.
My phone buzzed against the center console. Gavin—my father, though I’d been calling him Gavin in my head for at least a decade, which probably said everything that needed saying about our relationship.
Assessment timeline. 60 days. No extensions. Board meets October 15.
I texted back: Confirmed.
Then I sat there for another thirty seconds, watching a white-haired man in a green apron rearrange the sidewalk peach display with the tender precision of someone handling something precious, and I thought about what it would feel like to get back on the interstate and keep driving until I hit a city where nobody’s grandfather had taught me to stock apples.
I got out of the car.
The interior was worse than the photos in the assessment file, and the photos had been bad.
I cataloged automatically—it was reflex at this point, the way a surgeon walks into an OR and clocks every instrument before anyone speaks. Fluorescent lighting, two tubes flickering in the dairy aisle. POS system at least eight years out of date, the card readers scratched to opacity.
And still—underneath the neglect, underneath the fluorescent flicker and the scuffed floors—the bones were there. The layout was smart: wide central aisle drawing foot traffic past high-margin departments, the butcher counter visible from the entrance, the bakery positioned so the smell (what was left of it) hit you before you reached the registers. My grandfather had designed this floor plan.
Then he reached the butcher counter.
Teo was behind the glass, breaking down a pork shoulder with terrifying efficiency, talking to a customer about her daughter’s quinceañera menu. He was huge, loud, magnetic. His laugh carried across the store.
Something hooked behind my sternum. A pull, sharp and involuntary, the kind of physical recognition that bypasses every filter the rational mind has built.
I looked away. Adjusted my cuffs. Checked my watch.
He saw me coming. His gaze started at my shoes, traveled to my watch, paused at my rolled sleeves, and arrived at my face with an assessment already complete.
“Mateo Alvarez?” I extended my hand across the counter. “Evan Price. I’m—”
“I know who you are.”
His grip was firm, calloused, warm. His palm engulfed mine. He held the handshake exactly one beat longer than professional.
“Price, huh?” His mouth curved—not quite a smile, not quite a challenge. “We’ve been waiting for one of you to show up.”
I retreated to the upstairs office. Taped to the door: a petition signed by thirty-seven employees demanding transparency about the store’s future. Teo’s name was first.
Sixty days.
I was going to be in so much trouble.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
After Hours — An EXCLUSIVE scene
Three months into co-op ownership, Teo catches Evan bending over the bread table at closing time. The store is empty. The surfaces are clean. They won’t stay that way. Explicit, playful, and the filthiest use of a bakery section in literary history.
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