Out of Office Reply

MM Office Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Office Romance, Friends with Benefits, Forced Proximity, Mutual Pining, Secret Relationship, One Bed, Grumpy/Sunshine, Touch Starved, He Falls First, Slow Burn, Competence Kink, Control/Surrender

They have one rule: what happens at the office stays at the office. He set up an auto-reply to reject him on Saturdays. Eight months later, neither of them can log off.

Adrian Vale is the Operations Director who runs the office like a machine—precise, controlled, untouchable. He keeps his relationships professional, his emotions compartmentalized, and his personal phone programmed to auto-reply on weekends. He doesn’t do vulnerability. He doesn’t do mornings. And he definitely doesn’t do the loud, reckless, impossibly magnetic sales rep who keeps showing up at his locked office door.

Leo Cruz is the top closer on the sales floor—charming, physical, and incapable of taking up less space than he deserves. He agreed to Adrian’s rules because half of the man he loved was better than none. But eight months of locked doors, deleted texts, and a relationship that only exists during business hours is eating him alive.

When a corporate restructuring threatens to eliminate Leo’s entire division, the convenient proximity that makes their arrangement work is about to disappear. And both of them have to face what they’ve actually been doing for eight months—which is falling in love and pretending it’s stress relief.

A company retreat. A single king bed. An auto-reply that becomes a love letter. And the slow, devastating realization that the man who deletes every text is the same man who bought a second coffee mug and threw it away because keeping it meant admitting he wanted someone to stay.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ “We’re not dating, we’re just using each other” to “I’m in love with you”
✅ Grumpy/sunshine with a control freak who learns to let go
✅ Office romance with locked doors, stolen moments, and a company retreat
✅ One bed trope that DELIVERS (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ The most devastating coffee mug in romance history
✅ Dual POV, 93K words, standalone, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, workplace power dynamics, parental abandonment (backstory), and depictions of emotional avoidance and anxiety. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Adrian

The trick to running a Monday morning ops meeting was the same trick behind running anything well: never let them see you want something.

I’d been doing it for six years. Six years of pressed shirts and color-coded agendas and a voice that could make a room of forty people shut the fuck up without raising it above conversational volume. Six years of being the guy nobody wanted to disappoint.

I was good at my job. I was better at the performance of it.

“Moving on,” I said, flipping to the next slide. “Q3 client retention is up four percent, which means someone in this room is actually doing their job. I’d like to identify who so I can leave the rest of you off the holiday party list.”

Light laughter. Exactly the right amount. I didn’t look up from my laptop.

I didn’t need to look up to know where Leo Cruz was sitting.

Third row, left side, the chair closest to the window because he liked natural light. Legs spread wide because Leo Cruz had never once in his life taken up an appropriate amount of space. He’d be leaning back, one ankle crossed over his knee, pen tucked behind his ear even though he never wrote anything down.

“Sales is up eleven percent month-over-month. Cruz, is that your team or did someone finally fix the CRM formula?”

“That’s all me, boss.” His voice carried from the third row like he was standing next to me. “Well, me and the donuts I bring every Monday. Morale-based selling. Revolutionary strategy.”

I didn’t smile. I never smiled in meetings. But something shifted behind my ribs, the way it always did when he lobbed one back at me and the whole room laughed.

We were not a unit.

Leo didn’t leave. He stayed in his chair while the room emptied, scrolling through his phone with the practiced ease of a man who had nowhere to be. His tie was loosened already—it was 9:47 in the morning and his tie was loosened.

The door swung shut on its hydraulic arm. The click of the latch was a sound I knew better than my own heartbeat.

Three seconds. That was our buffer.

One. Two. Three.

Leo locked his phone. Looked up at me. And smiled.

That fucking smile. It was the thing that started all of this—eight months ago, a late Tuesday, the office empty. He’d smiled at me over a stack of contracts and I’d thought, very clearly and very uselessly: I would let you ruin me.

I hadn’t said that. I’d kissed him instead. Which, in retrospect, was worse.

“You cut the meeting short,” he said, standing. “That’s three minutes we get back.”

He was crossing the room. I should have been moving toward the door. Instead, I closed my laptop. Took off my glasses and placed them on top of it, lenses down, the way I always did when I didn’t want to see clearly.

Leo stopped a foot away. Close enough that I could smell him—cedar and coffee and that body wash he used that was probably twelve dollars at Target and had no business smelling like a reason to make bad decisions.

“Hi,” he said. Soft now. The performance was over.

“Hi.”

He reached out and straightened my tie. A slow, deliberate slide of his fingers along the silk, adjusting something that didn’t need adjusting. His knuckles brushed my sternum. I felt it in my spine.

“We have nine minutes before my next call,” I said.

“I only need seven.”

He kissed me. There was nothing tentative about the way Leo Cruz kissed. He kissed like he was trying to leave evidence—his hand on the back of my neck, his thumb pressing into the hinge of my jaw, his mouth open and hot and tasting like the shitty break room coffee he drank four cups of every morning.

I grabbed his tie—the already-loosened tie—and pulled him into me. Our chests collided. He made a sound against my mouth, half laugh, half groan, and I swallowed it because I was greedy for his sounds.

“Filing cabinet,” I said against his lips. It wasn’t a suggestion.

“Romantic.”

“Move.”

He grinned—I felt it against my mouth—and then he was walking me backward, his hands on my waist, my shoulders hitting the cold metal of the filing cabinet. Eight months. We’d been doing this for eight months and my body still responded to him like the first time—instant, electric, humiliating in its urgency.

He dropped to his knees. Christ. Every time he went down, he looked up at me first, and that eye contact was more dangerous than anything that came after.

“We don’t have time—”

“Then stop talking and let me work.”

I was breathing like I’d run a mile. My shirt was untucked on one side. My hand was still in his hair.

I made myself let go.

When I looked back, Leo was already at the door. Tie still loose. Hair only slightly disheveled. He had his phone in his hand and his mask back on, the easy, laughing, too-loud mask that made everyone on the sales floor love him.

“Good meeting, boss,” he said, and opened the door.

“Cruz.”

He looked back.

I should have said something. Thank you or tonight or I’m sorry I can’t be what you need me to be. Instead, I straightened my tie—the one he’d straightened first—and said, “Your Q3 numbers were solid. Keep it up.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite. Something sadder than that, tucked behind something braver.

“Always do,” he said.

The door closed.

My phone buzzed. A text. From Leo. Sent thirty seconds ago.

Rain check. Your office. 6 pm. Door locked.

I stared at it for ten seconds. Then I deleted the thread, the way I always did, and opened my email.

Eight months in, and I still hadn’t figured out which one Leo was going to be.

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Out of Office (Permanently) — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

One year later. Adrian takes Leo back to Lisbon. Same apartment. Same rooftop terrace. Same hammock he swore he’d never get in again. A tiny blue mug from the Alfama market. An auto-reply that says permanently. And the filthiest, most emotional, most joyful chapter in the series—rooftop sex under the stars, a not-quite-proposal, and proof that the man who once threw away a coffee mug has learned to keep everything.

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