Boss’s Favorite Problem
An MM Office Romance — by Jace Wilder
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Book Details
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno (5/5)
Word Count: ~96,000
Length: 20 chapters
POV: Dual (Daniel & Lucas)
Distribution: KU Exclusive
HEA: Yes — absolutely
Tropes
Enemies to Lovers · Boss/Employee · Office Romance · Grumpy/Sunshine · Praise Kink · Power Exchange · Secret Relationship · Forced Proximity · Touch Starved · He Falls First · Bi MC · Jealousy
He was supposed to be a performance problem. He became the only performance that mattered.
Lucas Reed is the sharpest analyst in the department and the biggest headache on Daniel Hayes’s team. He asks dangerous questions in meetings, picks holes in the boss’s slides, and hasn’t met a boundary he doesn’t want to test. His work is exceptional. His attitude is a disciplinary file waiting to happen.
Daniel Hayes is the VP of Corporate Strategy — controlled, precise, devastating in presentations, and absolutely determined not to let one mouthy analyst dismantle the professional composure he’s spent eight years rebuilding. The last time Daniel let someone close at work, it destroyed his career. He transferred. He rebuilt. He swore: never again.
But Lucas Reed doesn’t follow rules. Lucas pokes. Lucas pushes. Lucas stands in Daniel’s office at midnight and says show me — and when Daniel finally breaks, the explosion isn’t just physical. It’s structural. One kiss turns into ground rules. Ground rules turn into a secret affair. And the secret affair turns into something that neither of them can contain — not behind glass walls, not behind performance reviews, and not behind the careful, coded language they’ve built to hide the most dangerous thing either of them has ever felt.
When HR starts watching and a career-altering promotion forces their hand, Daniel and Lucas have to choose: keep hiding, break apart, or blow up everything they’ve built and rebuild it — together, in daylight, where love isn’t a liability but a foundation.
You’ll love this if you enjoy:
- Enemies-to-lovers with verbal foreplay sharp enough to cut
- Boss/employee romance that takes the power dynamic seriously and resolves it ethically
- Praise kink and power exchange written as intimacy, not just heat
- A grumpy boss who breaks pens when he’s jealous and writes love letters disguised as performance reviews
- A bratty sunshine hero who provokes because he’d rather be punished than ignored
- Secret relationship tension with coded texts, glass-wall eye contact, and a near-disaster in the office
- Full graphic heat that escalates chapter by chapter (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
- An HEA with a moved-in epilogue, a terrible throw blanket, and an argument about a dog named Stakeholder
Content Warnings
Explicit on-page MM sex (graphic, detailed, frequent). Boss/employee power dynamic explored with full consent negotiation and structural resolution. Praise kink, power exchange, light restraint (silk tie), edging, denial. Workplace secrecy and the emotional cost of hiding a relationship. Past relationship betrayal (off-page). Jealousy subplot. One almost-caught scene. Career stakes and HR involvement (resolved positively). Bi MC. All sex is between consenting adults with explicit safewords and aftercare. HEA guaranteed.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: The Smartest Mouth in the Room
Lucas
I saw the error on slide fourteen and made a decision that would ruin my Tuesday.
Not immediately. For about three beautiful seconds, I considered letting it go. Daniel Hayes was standing at the front of the conference room in a charcoal suit that probably cost more than my rent, delivering the quarterly strategy review with the calm precision of a man who had never been wrong about anything in his life, and I thought: You could just let this one slide, Lucas. You could sit here, nod along, drink your terrible coffee, and walk out of this meeting with your professional reputation intact and your boss not actively fantasizing about strangling you.
Three seconds. That’s how long my self-preservation instinct lasted.
“Sorry — can we go back to fourteen?”
Every head in the room turned. Nadia, two seats to my left, made a sound that was either a cough or a prayer. Daniel’s fingers paused on the clicker. He didn’t look at me immediately, which was somehow worse than if he had — it was the pause of a man deciding whether to acknowledge an insect or simply wait for it to fly into the window.
“You have a question, Reed?”
Not Lucas. Never Lucas. Always Reed, delivered in that low, precise voice that made my name sound like a disciplinary action.
“More of an observation.” I pulled up the model on my laptop. “The revenue projection on fourteen is using last quarter’s conversion rate, but we adjusted the acquisition funnel in March. If we run it with the updated rate, the delta swings about four hundred K. Which changes the margin forecast on —”
“Slides eighteen and twenty-two,” Daniel finished. His jaw did that thing — the almost imperceptible tightening that I’d learned to read like a seismograph. “You’re correct.”
The silence in the room was magnificent. Eight people who’d been quietly dying inside for the last forty minutes suddenly remembered how to breathe.
“That’s — a significant catch,” said James Whitfield’s voice from the conference phone. “Good eye, Lucas. Daniel, let’s get those slides corrected before the board deck goes out.”
“Already noted.” Daniel’s voice was perfectly level. Absolutely controlled. The voice of a man who could commit murder and make it sound like a quarterly adjustment. “Let’s continue.”
He didn’t look at me for the rest of the presentation.
He was waiting. Not obviously — Daniel Hayes didn’t lurk. He was standing near the water station with a posture that suggested he’d simply paused on his way to somewhere important, and if I hadn’t spent eighteen months studying this man like a field researcher tracking a particularly dangerous predator, I might have believed it was coincidental.
“Reed.”
I stopped. Gave him my best unconcerned expression. “Hayes.”
“I appreciate the catch on slide fourteen. Your attention to the model’s inputs is exactly the kind of rigor this team needs.”
“I sense a ‘but.’”
“But. If you identify an error in my materials, the appropriate channel is to bring it to me before the presentation. Not during. Not in front of the full department and a senior partner on speakerphone.”
“I would have, but you’re usually too busy being right to check your email.”
The thing about poking Daniel Hayes was that it never produced the explosion you expected. Other bosses would snap. Daniel just went still. The anger compressed. His gray eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that made me think of pressure systems, tectonic plates, all those forces that built quietly until the ground opened up.
“My door is always open. You know that.”
“Your door is open. You are not.”
Something moved behind his eyes. Not anger. Something closer to recognition, which was infinitely more dangerous.
“My office. Fifteen minutes.”
He walked away, and I watched him go because I am a stupid, self-destructive person who has never once in his life chosen the safe option. His shoulders under that charcoal suit moved with a precision that shouldn’t have been attractive — like he’d calculated exactly how much motion was necessary and eliminated everything extraneous. I wanted to make him inefficient so badly I could taste it.
“You’re staring,” Nadia said from behind me.
“I’m plotting his demise.”
“Uh-huh. You plot his demise the way most people watch porn. With intensity and concerning focus.”
His office door was open, as promised. Daniel was behind his desk, jacket off, hung on the back of his chair. As Lucas leaves, Daniel’s hand lands briefly on his shoulder — guiding him toward the door. The touch is professional. The heat of it is not. Lucas thinks about it for the rest of the day.
You have my attention. You’ve had it for a while.
I was in so much trouble.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 An Exclusive Bonus Chapter
The Quarterly Review — An extended scene set six months after the epilogue. Daniel’s been keeping a secret file. What follows is 5,000 words of established-couple kink, domestic filth, and the specific joy of two men who know exactly how to take each other apart. Too hot for Amazon. Available free on this site only.
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