Structural Damage
An MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder
📚 Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Gay Awakening, Age Gap (42/24), Forced Proximity, Blue Collar, Grumpy/Sunshine, Roommates to Lovers, He Falls First, Closeted, Secret Relationship, Boss/Employee
He thought the marriage failed because he was a workaholic. He was wrong.
Garrett Cole is the best construction foreman in North Jersey. Forty-two years old, recently divorced, and completely oblivious to the reason his marriage actually failed. He thought he was emotionally absent. He thought he was broken. He thought the hollow feeling in his chest was just what being a man felt like.
Then his twenty-four-year-old lead carpenter needs a place to crash.
Julian Reyes is talented, tattooed, and completely at ease in his own skin. He’s been out since seventeen, and he’s been the “experiment” for closeted men before. He has hard rules about that — rules he has no intention of breaking for his grumpy, flannel-wearing, aggressively heterosexual boss.
Except Garrett isn’t as straight as he thinks. And the spare room is fifteen feet from the master bedroom. And the electricity from a knee pressed against his thigh on the couch is about to detonate twenty years of denial.
What starts as a confused kiss against a kitchen counter becomes a secret, explosive education behind closed doors — one that forces Garrett to confront everything he buried beneath a concrete foundation of masculinity, marriage, and the rigid expectations of a blue-collar world. But Julian won’t be anyone’s dirty secret. And when Garrett’s ex-wife walks in on the one thing he can’t explain away, the walls start coming down — all of them.
You’ll love this if you enjoy:
✓ A 42-year-old man discovering he’s not straight — on his knees
✓ Forced proximity with one thin wall between bedrooms
✓ Grumpy construction foreman melting for a sunshine carpenter
✓ “Show me how this works” — the midnight doorway scene
✓ A mirror scene that forces him to watch himself fall apart
✓ Possessive alpha energy against a washing machine
✓ The public declaration that changes everything
✓ Desperate motel room reunion sex
✓ Heat that escalates from confused to claiming to tender to joyful
✓ A guaranteed happily ever after built on solid ground
Structural Damage is a 64,000-word high-heat MM contemporary romance featuring a repressed construction foreman, the younger man who demolishes his defenses, a gay awakening that rewires everything, and a love story built from the foundation up. Standalone. No cliffhanger. HEA guaranteed.
⚠️ Content Warning: This book contains explicit MM sexual content, a gay awakening with on-page identity crisis, age gap dynamics (42/24), boss/employee relationship, a closeted main character with internalized shame, an ex-wife confrontation scene, emotional breakup and separation, possessive behavior, mirror sex, rough sex, praise and dirty talk, oral sex, anal sex (both directions), public-adjacent encounters, and graphic intimate scenes of escalating intensity across 15 chapters. Heat level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️. Intended for readers 18+ only.
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“The Locked Door” — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Three months after the epilogue. Cole & Reyes Contracting is thriving. The foreman’s trailer has a lock Garrett never used — until Julian texts him a photo of a finished cabinet install with a winking emoji and twenty-six minutes of lunch break to kill. Every surface. Every sound. The crew fifty feet away and a deadbolt between them. This is what happens when two men who build things for a living decide to wreck something instead.
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Good Boy, Bad Idea
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Off Camera, On Knees
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The contract was supposed to be business. The safe word was supposed to be a formality.
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