Under His Desk

MM Boss/Assistant Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Boss/Employee, Power Exchange, Praise Kink, Secret Relationship, Competence Kink, Forced Proximity, Touch Starved, Age Gap

Do your job. And while you’re at it, do exactly what I tell you under my desk.

Marcus Hale built his consulting firm from nothing. At 39, he’s the most demanding CEO in Chicago — controlled, precise, and impossible to please. He’s burned through three assistants in four months. Nobody lasts. Nobody’s good enough. Nobody holds his attention.

Ryan Cole is 25, broke, and desperate for a paycheck that covers his student loans. He’s smart, adaptable, and the first assistant who doesn’t flinch when Marcus pushes. He doesn’t just survive — he anticipates. And Marcus notices.

What starts as professional admiration becomes closed-door sessions that last too long. Proximity that runs too hot. A hand on the back of his neck during a phone call. A single word — good — that rewires everything.

Then the door locks. And the instruction changes.

Behind the glass walls of a fortieth-floor office, Marcus and Ryan build a dynamic that’s equal parts professional and primal — structured, secret, and increasingly essential. But when the CFO notices, when the walls start closing in, and when the framework Marcus designed can’t contain what’s growing between them, both men have to decide: is this a system that works, or something far more dangerous?

Something real.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Boss/assistant MM romance with scorching power exchange
✅ “Good boy” praise kink that rewires both their brains
✅ Under-the-desk scenes during conference calls
✅ Competence as foreplay — he does his job too well
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ A control freak who learns to let go and the man who teaches him
✅ HEA guaranteed

Buy Now

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), power dynamics, boss/employee relationship, strong language, and themes of control and vulnerability. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One

I fired my last assistant on a Tuesday.

She’d misfiled a contract, put the wrong date on a board memo, and cried when I pointed it out. Not even loudly — just that quiet, trembling-chin thing that’s supposed to make me feel like the villain. I handed her a tissue, told her to collect her things, and had security escort her out by lunch.

That was three weeks ago. HR had sent two replacements since. The first lasted four days before she quit via email at eleven o’clock at night — a coward’s exit, but at least she’d spared me the tears. The second, a guy named Trevor with an MBA and a handshake like a dead trout, made it exactly six hours before I caught him scrolling Instagram behind a spreadsheet he’d pretended to finish.

So when Linda from HR appeared in my doorway on a Friday morning with that particular expression — tight smile, defensive posture, the look of a woman delivering a bomb she hoped wouldn’t go off in her hands — I didn’t bother looking up from my laptop.

“Last one,” she said.

“You said that about Trevor.”

“I mean it this time. If this doesn’t work, you’re sourcing your own candidates.”

I glanced up. She had someone behind her — partially obscured, waiting in the hall like he’d been told to stay. Good. Points for not barging in.

“Send him in.”

Linda stepped aside, and Ryan Cole walked into my office.

First impression: young. Not childishly young, but young enough that the suit was clearly new — sharp navy, well-fitted, but he wore it like he was still getting used to the weight of it. Clean-shaven. Dark hair, a little longer on top than corporate typically allowed, pushed back like he’d run his fingers through it in the elevator. Brown eyes that swept the office in a single efficient pass — bookshelves, desk, view, me — and settled.

On me.

Most people looked at the view first. Fortieth floor, floor-to-ceiling glass, Lake Michigan stretching out like a promise. It was a hell of a view. I’d chosen this office specifically because of it — not for my enjoyment, but because it disoriented people. They’d walk in, get hit with all that sky and water, and forget for a half-second why they were there. It gave me an advantage I didn’t need but enjoyed having.

Ryan Cole didn’t look at the view.

He looked at me, and he didn’t look away.

“Tell me why you’re here,” I said.

“Because you’ve burned through three assistants in four months and HR is out of options.”

The bluntness landed like a slap. Not rude — factual. He said it the way you’d read a weather report. Chance of rain. Your turnover rate is abysmal.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“You asked why I’m here. I’m here because the position pays eighty-two thousand dollars, which is twenty-three thousand more than my last job, and because working for someone difficult is only a problem if you’re bad at your job.” He paused. “I’m not bad at my job.”

I leaned back in my chair and studied him. The confidence wasn’t bravado — I’d seen enough of that to spot the difference. This was quieter. He believed what he was saying because he had evidence for it.

I decided to break him.

“Your first task. Quarterly projections for the Davenport account. The formatting is wrong, the numbers in section three don’t match the appendix, and there’s a typo on page twelve. Fix it, reformat to house style — which you don’t know yet — and have it on my desk in ninety minutes.”

He walked out without asking a single clarifying question.

He had it done in seventy-three minutes.

The formatting matched a style guide he’d reverse-engineered from three previous quarterly reports. The numbers were corrected. And there was a sticky note on the printed copy that read: Section 4.2 references a client contact who left the company in March. Updated name and title per LinkedIn. Confirm?

I stared at that sticky note for longer than I should have.

He’d caught something I hadn’t asked him to catch. Something I hadn’t noticed. And instead of fixing it silently to show off or ignoring it because it wasn’t his problem, he’d flagged it.

Something shifted in my chest. A small thing — a gear clicking into a position it hadn’t occupied in a long time. I ignored it.

By six o’clock, the floor was emptying. I never left before seven. Usually later. Ryan was still at his desk.

I could see him through the glass. Everyone else was gone. But Ryan was there, laptop open, the blue light of the screen reflected in his eyes. He’d taken off his tie at some point. His collar was open one button, and I could see the hollow of his throat, the shift of tendons when he swallowed.

I was watching him. I was aware of that.

“Same time tomorrow?” he asked at the door.

“Earlier,” I said.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t ask how much earlier. Just nodded, once, as if I’d confirmed something he already knew.

I turned back to my laptop. Tried to focus. Instead, I sat there thinking about the way he’d said sir in the conference room and the way his throat had moved when he said it.

I closed the laptop. Poured two fingers of Macallan. Drank it standing at the window, looking out at the city, and told myself that the gear clicking in my chest was just a well-run machine appreciating good engineering.

I almost believed it.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

Buy Under His Desk

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

After Hours — The First Date — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Marcus takes Ryan to dinner for the first time — no office, no locked doors, no professional alibi. Just two men at a restaurant, learning to be a couple. The waiter keeps interrupting. Marcus keeps directing. And by the time the check arrives, Ryan’s had three courses, two glasses of wine, and one devastating instruction whispered across the table that turns the walk home into a race.

Get the Bonus Chapter →