Paint Me Filthy

MM Artist Romance
by Milo Hart

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Artist/Muse, Forbidden Romance, Praise Kink, Body Worship, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, Touch Starved, Age Gap, Control/Surrender, Bi Awakening, Forced Proximity

He paints broken things beautiful. Ryder wasn’t supposed to be just another canvas.

Lucien Voss is a disgraced painter with one shot at redemption — a solo show at The Whitney, ninety days to hang it, and a body of work he hasn’t been able to make in five years. He’s sober. He’s tired. And the sadistic ex-gallerist who blackballed him from every major gallery in New York is circling again, ready to ruin him twice.

Ryder Kane is a twenty-seven-year-old ex-wrestler with a blown ACL, a body he’s been trained to perform in, and a Craigslist ad that’s about to change his life. He answers it on a dare. He walks up four flights of stairs. He takes off his shirt for a stranger with paint on his knuckles and violet eyes — and finds out, at twenty-seven, that he has been lying to himself about what he wants since college.

For ninety days, Luc will paint him. On canvas. On skin. On a drop cloth in a Bushwick loft at 4 AM, in six colors, with a single thin gold line down Ryder’s sternum and a word — good boy — that neither of them is ever going to un-hear.

But Luc’s ex is moving. The retrospective is already crated. The critics are already writing. And the painting that’s going to save Luc — the painting that’s going to end the man who broke him — can’t be made in Luc’s hands alone. It has to be made, for the first time in his career, with someone else’s.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Artist/muse slow-burn that detonates into an inferno
✅ Praise kink as emotional language, not just flavor
✅ Tortured, sober, brilliant hero who finally gets chosen
✅ Ex-wrestler bisexual-awakening hero who handles his man’s ex so well you’ll cheer
✅ Found-family art collective (they keep the folder)
✅ Burn-the-ex revenge plot that ends with a painting, not a fight
✅ An 87,000-word love story that earns every scene
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains graphic, explicit MM sexual content (including praise kink, body paint, body worship, and on-page penetrative scenes), a bisexual-awakening arc, on-page references to a past coercive relationship (past-tense, not depicted), references to a past suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization (past-tense, handled with care), references to SSRI medication use, the death of a parent (pre-canon, grieved on-page), depictions of body dysmorphia and recovery, and a villain who is a patient, gaslighting emotional abuser (not depicted committing violence on-page). Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One

The address on the Craigslist ad is in Bushwick, fourth floor, no buzzer. The kind of building that used to make things. Windows like an old factory, bricks black with a hundred years of New York grime, a fire escape bolted to the side that looks like it would kill you if you sneezed on it.

I stand on the sidewalk for a full minute before I go in.

This is a fucking terrible idea.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Matty, my roommate, the human goblin who dared me into this.

MATTY: did you go in yet

MATTY: pussy

MATTY: 😘

I don’t answer. I shove the phone back in my jacket and climb.

The stairwell smells like turpentine and old wood. Four flights. I’m breathing through my nose by the top and pretending it’s because of the torn ACL and not because I’m a grown man about to take my clothes off for a stranger for money. My right knee clicks on the last landing. It always does. The surgeon told me it would always do that. Told me a lot of things, actually, back in the green scrub-smell of the recovery room when I was still high and crying. Your competitive career is done, Mr. Kane. But you’ll walk normally.

Congrats on the walking, champ.

The loft door is a slab of industrial steel painted matte black. No name. No number. Just a piece of masking tape with VOSS hand-lettered in what looks like actual paint.

I knock.

Nothing.

I knock again, harder, because I am a 220-pound ex-wrestler and the door is steel and I can hear music somewhere inside, something low and sad with a lot of piano.

The door opens.

I do not have time to prepare my face.

The guy on the other side is tall. My height, maybe an inch over. Barefoot on concrete. Paint-stained jeans hanging off his hips like they’ve forgotten they had a job to do. A white T-shirt that used to be white. Black hair falling past his jaw, wet like he’d been running water through it. Skin the color of unprimed canvas. Eyes — and I swear to God this is the part I can’t explain later — eyes that are not a color I’ve ever named. Gray, maybe. Violet in the wrong light. Tired. Not in a sleepy way. In the way of somebody who’s been awake a long time in the other room of himself.

He holds a coffee cup in one hand and a brush in the other. Both look like extensions of him. Like he was grown with them.

“You’re Ryder,” he says.

He doesn’t ask it.

“Yeah,” I say. And then, because I am a functional idiot who defaults to charm when I don’t know where my hands are supposed to go: “And you’re Picasso.”

He doesn’t smile.

His mouth does this thing where one corner moves a millimeter, and I feel it in my stomach like a joke I don’t get yet. He steps back and holds the door with one bare foot and says, “Come in.”

I come in.

The loft is enormous. Twenty-foot ceilings. North wall all windows. Gray afternoon light coming down in clean sheets across a floor that used to be wood and has now been painted on so many times it is topography. An easel the size of my torso against the far wall, canvas on it, something half-dark I can’t see clearly. A mattress on a raised platform shoved into the corner. A kitchen that is four things: a hotplate, a sink, an espresso machine that looks like it costs more than my car, a single white mug on a single wooden counter. A speaker playing the piano thing. No TV. No couch. No rug. A single leather pose couch in the middle of the room like an altar.

“Jesus,” I say, before I remember I was going to try to play this cool.

He closes the door behind me. The sound of it latching is weirdly final.

“Coffee?” he asks.

“Sure.”

“It’s black.”

“Cool.”

“I don’t have milk.”

“Cool.”

“You keep saying cool.”

“Cool.”

He crosses the room with two cups. Sets one on the floor by my foot. Sits across from me on a paint-splattered wooden stool that puts him at exactly my eye level and forty inches away.

He looks at me the way other people read.

“Three questions,” he says.

“Shoot.”

“Can you hold still.”

“Yeah. I can hold still.”

“For how long.”

“As long as you need.”

“Second question.” He takes a sip of his coffee. “Can you live here for ninety days.”

“Sorry. Live here.”

“It was in the ad. I have a show. Ninety days. I work at night. You would have your own corner. The mattress is mine. I will pay you six thousand dollars for the duration, plus food, plus a bonus if I sell.”

“What’s the show.”

“A gallery show at The Whitney. Emerging wing.”

“And I’m—”

“You’re the muse,” he says.

Something in my chest does something it hasn’t done in a while.

“Third question. Can you be looked at.”

I laugh. “Sorry. I model. Professionally. So. Yes.”

“No. That wasn’t what I asked. Try again.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever been looked at. Not — not the way you’re asking.”

“Better. You’ll learn.”

He stands. Comes back with a pad and a stick of charcoal.

“Hold still.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“I’m — fully dressed.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want—”

“Not yet.”

Not yet.

He starts sketching. He sketches for forty minutes. I do not move.

At minute twenty-six I realize I’m half hard in my jeans, and I have no clear reason why, and I’m a professional, and I’m straight, and this is a paying job, and the guy across from me hasn’t touched me, hasn’t said my name, hasn’t done anything except look.

Look is apparently enough.

He sets the charcoal down.

“Good,” he says.

That word lands in the middle of my chest with more weight than it should.

“Stand up. Take off your shirt.”

My hands go to the hem and stop. My hands are shaking.

“Take your time, Ryder.”

The way he says my name.

I pull the shirt off. I am standing bare-chested in the middle of a twenty-foot-ceilinged loft in Bushwick on a gray afternoon in front of a man who has not stopped looking at me since I walked through the door.

He looks. Slow. Top to bottom. The little softness at the bottom of my stomach that I fucking hate, that I’ve been meaning to cut for eight weeks, that I was hoping he would miss.

He doesn’t miss it. He doesn’t flinch. I wait for the thing I always wait for — oh, you’ve let yourself go a little, huh — and it doesn’t come.

“Thank you,” he says. “For the shirt.”

“Something else?”

“Yeah. What’s your first name.”

“Lucien. Luc.”

“Luc.”

“Friday, Ryder.”

I go down four flights of stairs holding the banister like a man coming off anesthesia. I look up at the fourth-floor window. He’s standing in it. Coffee cup in one hand. Watching me.

I walk to the train.

I don’t know, yet, what it is going to cost me to learn that word in his voice.

I just know that somewhere in the middle of all of that, sitting on a leather couch in a room that used to be a factory, I stopped pretending — for forty whole minutes — that I knew who I was.

And that I’m going back.

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Wet Paint — a 16,000-word scene TOO HOT for Amazon.

The morning after the Whitney opening. Luc wakes up with a ring on his finger and a canvas he has never been able to paint. He has ninety minutes and six colors and a very specific plan for his fiance’s body. Body paint. Body-print canvas. A gold line. A reverse. The painting that hangs above their bed for the rest of their lives.

Sixteen thousand words of pure explicit payoff — every word Amazon wouldn’t let me print.

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