CHECKED INTO HIM
An MM Contemporary Romance • by Jace Wilder
📖 Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Workplace Romance, He Falls First, Hurt/Comfort, Praise Kink
He built the perfect system. Then the perfect man walked in and broke it.
Evan Cole runs the Bellamy Hotel with inhuman precision. Every orchid angled. Every thread count verified. Every system calibrated to eliminate the one thing Evan can’t tolerate: imperfection. He’s spent six years turning a historic boutique hotel into the best-run property in the portfolio, and he did it by keeping the world at exactly arm’s length. Control is his love language. Solitude is his operating system. The building is enough.
Lucas Reed is the hospitality consultant corporate sent to evaluate the Bellamy for brand expansion — and from the moment he leans against Evan’s front desk with a battered leather duffel and a smile that takes up too much room, everything Evan has built starts to shift. Lucas is warm where Evan is precise. Instinctive where Evan is analytical. He leaves his shoes by the door and his coffee is a war crime and he has a way of looking at Evan that suggests the most carefully managed hotel in the city is being run by the loneliest man in it.
They clash immediately. Over operations, over philosophy, over whether a lobby orchid is a decoration or a diagnostic. But the friction generates something neither of them expected — not just heat, but recognition. Because Lucas, who has never stayed anywhere longer than six months, sees in Evan a man worth staying for. And Evan, who has never let anyone past his systems, sees in Lucas the chaos his life has been missing.
When a devastating fight nearly destroys everything they’ve built — when Evan weaponizes Lucas’s deepest wound and Lucas packs a bag — they face the question that has haunted them both since the beginning: Is the person who could hurt you most also the person worth risking everything for?
CHECKED INTO HIM is a high-heat MM contemporary romance featuring a control-obsessed operations director who hasn’t smiled in six years, a nomadic consultant who’s never unpacked a bag, an elevator scene that changes everything, and a love story built one compromised system at a time. It contains explicit content, emotional devastation, praise kink, and a happily-ever-after that required both of them to burn down everything they’d built and start again — together.
The building told me to stay before you did.
🔥 Exclusive Bonus Content
Want more Evan and Lucas? Get an exclusive bonus chapter that’s too hot for Amazon — set the night of the Bellamy’s centennial, featuring the rooftop, the suite, a new dynamic neither of them saw coming, and the kind of celebration that doesn’t make it into the annual report.
Read Chapter One Free
Click to Expand Chapter One: The Orchid Was Wrong
The orchid was wrong.
Not dramatically wrong—not wilted or broken or the kind of catastrophe that would send a guest to TripAdvisor with their knives out. But Evan Cole could see from fifteen feet away that the arrangement on the lobby’s center table had been rotated approximately forty degrees from its optimal position, which meant the single cymbidium stem with the hairline bruise on its lower petal was now facing the entrance instead of the wall.
He crossed the marble floor in six precise strides, adjusted the vase a quarter turn, and stepped back to confirm.
Better.
“Mr. Cole?” The front desk supervisor, Priya, appeared at his elbow with a tablet. “The Whitfield party wants to extend through Sunday, but their suite is booked for a corporate check-in on Saturday afternoon.”
“Move the corporate guest to 1804. Same tier, better view. Send the Whitfields a complimentary bottle of the Sancerre they ordered at dinner last night with a handwritten note—not printed, handwritten—telling them we’re delighted they’re enjoying their stay. Use the cream cardstock, not the white.”
Priya tapped her screen. “The cream is—”
“Second drawer, left side of the concierge desk, behind the luggage tags.”
She gave him a look that fell somewhere between impressed and mildly frightened, which Evan considered the appropriate reaction from his staff. “On it.”
He watched her go, then checked his watch. 7:14 a.m. In the next forty-six minutes, he would walk the restaurant to confirm breakfast service was running smoothly, review the housekeeping report for last night’s turnover, check in with engineering about the persistent hum in the sixth-floor HVAC unit, and approve the floral order for Friday’s rehearsal dinner in the garden terrace.
The Bellamy Hotel didn’t run itself. It ran because Evan made it run, because he’d spent six years learning every square inch of this building—every pipe, every circuit, every thread count—and arranging it all into a system so precise that guests experienced the illusion of effortlessness.
Effortlessness was never effortless. It was the product of obsessive attention applied relentlessly by someone who couldn’t turn it off.
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Checked Into Him
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