Description

📖 Paperback Edition — He poured the perfect latte. He didn’t expect the man across the street to pour gasoline on everything he thought he knew about himself.

Milo Reyes is the kind of barista who remembers your order, draws a cat on your cup, and makes you feel like the most important person in the room—all while quietly dying inside. At twenty-nine, he’s a master of making everyone else comfortable and has no idea how to do the same for himself. He’s never touched a barbell. He’s never questioned the neat little boxes his life fits into. And he’s definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent not thinking about the grumpy gym owner across the street whose voice does something to his nervous system that he’s filed under admiration because that’s the drawer that locks.

Gage Mercer built Forge & Field with his bare hands and sheer stubbornness, and now he’s watching it bleed. The lease is climbing. The numbers are brutal. His solution: a six-week Fall Strong Challenge designed to pack the gym and prove that community-built fitness can survive in a world obsessed with apps and algorithms. He doesn’t need help. He doesn’t need a partner. And he especially doesn’t need the warm, cinnamon-scented barista from Cider & Steam who keeps writing encouraging things on his coffee cups and looking at him like he hung the squat rack and the moon.

But Milo signs up for the challenge. And Gage’s carefully controlled world—the one where he coaches without touching, protects without connecting, and never lets anyone close enough to see the cracks—starts to fracture the moment he says good in that low coaching voice and watches Milo’s whole body respond like it’s been waiting years for permission.

What follows is a slow, devastating collision: a man learning to want something he never let himself name, and a man learning that strength isn’t the same as control.

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno • MM Contemporary Romance by Jace Wilder • Forge & Field Book 1

Tropes: Praise Kink • Grumpy/Sunshine • Bi Awakening • Slow Burn • Forced Proximity • Found Family • Coach/Player • Touch Starved • Size Difference • Body Worship • He Falls First • Competence Kink • Hurt/Comfort • Small Town • HEA

Paperback details: 6 × 9 in • cream paper • matte cover. Includes a link to the exclusive bonus chapter.

⚠️ Content Warning: This book contains explicit MM sexual content, praise kink, a character navigating bisexual identity for the first time, discussions of financial stress and family expectations, and a happily ever after that earns every page. Intended for readers 18+.

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