Good Boy, Bad Idea

MM Boss/Employee Age Gap Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Praise Kink, Boss/Employee, Age Gap, Forbidden Workplace, Secret Relationship, Possessive Hero

He only wanted approval. The boss who gave it to him wanted something else entirely.

Eli Mercer has spent his whole life being the good kid — dependable, competent, invisible. His new job as executive assistant to Jonah Voss, the most exacting CEO in the city, should be terrifying. Instead, it’s the first time anyone’s ever looked at what he does and said you’re exceptional.

The problem is how badly he needs to hear it again. And again. And what he’s willing to do, after hours, behind a locked office door, to earn it.

Jonah Voss doesn’t do reckless. He builds empires with precision, runs boardrooms with authority, and keeps the world at exactly the distance he chooses. But Eli’s earnestness gets under his skin — because it feels real in a way most things don’t. And once Jonah discovers that his praise makes Eli come apart, he can’t stop giving it.

What starts as late-night tension becomes a private arrangement: at work, nothing changes. After hours, behind the closed door, Eli belongs to Jonah. The praise gets filthier. The marks get harder to hide. And the line between professional admiration and obsession disappears completely.

But secrets in glass-walled offices don’t stay secret. When office gossip, professional jealousy, and Eli’s own deep-seated fear of being useful instead of loved collide, they’ll both have to decide: is this a controlled arrangement, or something worth burning the rulebook for?

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Boss/employee MM romance with scorching praise kink
✅ Age gap (25/41) with an exacting older love interest
✅ “Good boy” as a lifestyle and a love language
✅ Forbidden office romance with locked-door tension
✅ A possessive hero who learns to be vulnerable
✅ Touch-starved MC who deserves the world and finally gets it
✅ Graphic, explicit heat that serves the emotional story
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink and power dynamics), strong language, workplace power imbalance, and depictions of anxiety and approval-seeking behavior. Intended for readers 18+.

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

Chapter One: First Day, Last Nerve

The elevator smelled like someone else’s cologne and bad decisions.

Eli stood in the back corner with his messenger bag pressed against his hip, watching the floor numbers climb. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. His reflection stared back at him from the polished steel doors — dark blond hair combed too neatly, button-down tucked too precisely, the kind of put-together that screamed I’ve been awake since four in the morning and I’m trying to hide it.

He had, in fact, been awake since four in the morning. He’d also reorganized his binder of notes twice, stress-eaten a granola bar that tasted like compressed sawdust, and practiced saying “Good morning, I’m Eli Mercer, your new executive assistant” in the bathroom mirror until his roommate banged on the door and told him to stop being psychotic.

Seventeenth floor. Voss & Kade Consulting.

The doors opened and Eli stepped into a lobby that looked like it had been designed to make people feel underdressed. Slate floors, floor-to-ceiling glass, the kind of modern furniture that cost more than his car. A massive V&K logo was mounted behind the reception desk in brushed steel, and the woman sitting beneath it looked like she could end a man’s career with a single email.

“Eli Mercer?” she said before he could open his mouth.

“That’s me.”

“Mara Solis. Office manager.” She stood and offered a firm handshake and a look that assessed him crown to shoes in about half a second. “You’re early.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It’s the first good sign I’ve had all week.” She grabbed a folder from behind her desk and came around. “Follow me. I’ll get you set up before the wolves wake up.”

She walked fast. Eli kept pace. The office unfolded around them — open floor plan with glass-walled conference rooms, rows of analyst desks, a kitchen area that smelled like espresso and low-grade panic. The morning shift was just arriving, jackets over arms, laptops already open.

“So,” Mara said without turning around, “what did the recruiter tell you?”

“That the position opened suddenly and that Mr. Voss values efficiency.”

She snorted. “That’s one way to put it. Your predecessor quit on a Tuesday afternoon. No notice. Left his badge on the desk and walked out like the building was on fire.”

Eli’s stomach tightened. “Can I ask why?”

“You can ask. I don’t think anyone knows for sure.” She paused in front of a glass-walled office at the end of the hall. The lights were off inside. The nameplate on the door said JONAH VOSS in clean block letters. “Some people can handle the pace. Some people can’t. The recruiter was supposed to screen for that.”

“And did they?”

Mara looked at him. Her expression was somewhere between skeptical and hopeful, like she was watching someone walk a tightrope and hadn’t decided yet whether to lay out a net. “Guess we’ll find out. Your desk is there.” She pointed to a workstation just outside the glass office. It was pristine. Empty monitor, empty inbox tray, a single orchid in a white pot that looked like it was one bad day away from dying. “IT already set up your login. I sent your onboarding checklist to your email, and there’s a hard copy in the folder.”

“I already reviewed the digital version last night.”

Mara’s eyebrows went up a millimeter. “All of it?”

“And the org chart. And the last three months of board meeting minutes that were on the shared drive.”

She stared at him for a long beat. Then something shifted in her face — not a smile, exactly, but the faint outline of one. “Don’t die here, Eli. I’d actually like to keep you.”

She left him with the folder and the orchid.

Eli sat down, opened his laptop, and spent the next forty minutes mapping every active project, pending deadline, and recurring calendar event onto a color-coded system he’d built in a spreadsheet the night before. Blue for client meetings. Red for board obligations. Yellow for internal reviews. He cross-referenced the master calendar against the project tracker and found two scheduling conflicts in the first week alone.

He flagged them. Made a note. Kept going.

By eight fifteen, the office had filled in around him. The energy was sharp — people moved with purpose, spoke in clipped sentences, and nobody lingered at the coffee machine. This was not a place that tolerated drift.

Eli was fine with that. Drift made him nervous. Structure was the thing that kept the anxiety from eating him alive. Give him a system, a list, a set of expectations, and he could be perfect. He could be exactly what was needed.

He just needed someone to tell him what that was.

At eight thirty-two, the glass office behind him lit up.

Eli didn’t turn around immediately. He heard the door open and close. Heard the low thud of a bag being set down. Heard — nothing. No music, no phone call, no small talk with a passing colleague. Just silence and the faint creak of a chair.

He gave it two minutes. Then he stood, grabbed his binder, straightened his tie, and knocked.

“Come in.”

The voice was low. Not loud — it didn’t need to be. It was the kind of voice that expected to be heard without repetition, and the architecture of the room seemed to agree.

Eli opened the door and stepped inside.

Jonah Voss was seated behind a desk that could have doubled as a landing strip. He was reading something on his laptop, one hand resting on the edge of the keyboard, and he did not look up.

He was — bigger than the website photo had suggested. Not just tall, though he clearly was, even sitting. Broad through the shoulders. Dark suit, dark hair, silver threading through at the temples. His jaw looked like it had been engineered by someone who understood the commercial value of authority. The office smelled faintly of good coffee and something warmer underneath — wood, leather, the ghost of cologne that probably cost more than Eli’s rent.

“Eli Mercer,” Eli said. “Your new executive assistant. I started—”

“Monday. I know.” Jonah still hadn’t looked up. He finished whatever he was reading, closed the laptop with a precise click, and then raised his eyes.

Gray. Steady. Absolutely unreadable.

The weight of his attention landed on Eli like a physical thing, and Eli’s spine straightened involuntarily. It wasn’t unfriendly. It wasn’t friendly either. It was the focused assessment of a man who had learned to evaluate people quickly because his time was worth more than their comfort.

“Sit,” Jonah said.

Eli sat.

Jonah opened a drawer, pulled out a thin stack of folders, and placed them on the desk between them. “Your predecessor left midway through three active client transitions, a board presentation, and a filing system that appears to have been organized by someone having a stroke. I need all of it untangled by end of week.”

Eli opened his binder to the page where he’d already started mapping the project backlog. “I’ve identified the three transitions — Harmon Group, LuxTech, and Bellweather Capital. The board presentation is drafted but missing the Q3 financials appendix, which I flagged with accounting this morning. The filing system—”

“You flagged accounting already?”

“At seven forty-five. They said the appendix would be ready by Thursday.”

Jonah paused. It was brief — barely a breath — but Eli caught it. A flicker of something that might have been surprise, quickly absorbed back into the granite composure.

“The filing system,” Jonah continued, as if the pause hadn’t happened.

“I’ll need access to the archive server to rebuild it properly. I can have a new structure proposed by Wednesday and fully migrated by Friday, if IT can prioritize the permissions request.”

Jonah studied him. The silence lasted three seconds, maybe four, but it felt like standing in front of an X-ray machine.

“IT will prioritize it,” Jonah said. “I’ll send the email.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Deliver.” He leaned back, and the chair creaked faintly. “My calendar is non-negotiable. If something needs to move, you come to me first. Not the client, not Nate, not anyone. Me. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“I take my coffee black. I don’t eat lunch at my desk. I don’t care about birthdays, office social events, or whatever holiday potluck Mara is organizing this quarter. If a client calls after six and I’m not available, you handle it, and I expect a summary on my desk before I arrive the next morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

The sir came out automatically. Reflex. The kind of word Eli’s mouth produced when confronted with authority before his brain could catch up and offer something less — whatever that was. Less eager. Less transparent.

Jonah’s gaze held for one extra beat. “If you can’t keep up, tell me now. I’d rather know on day one than day thirty.”

Eli met his eyes. Held them. Somewhere beneath his ribs, something pulled tight and hot, and he told himself it was adrenaline.

“I can keep up.”

“We’ll see.” Jonah reopened his laptop. Dismissal. “Close the door behind you.”

Eli closed the door behind him.

He stood at his desk for five full seconds without moving, his hand still on the edge of his chair, his pulse tapping a steady rhythm in his throat that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with something he didn’t have a name for yet.

Then he sat down, opened his laptop, and got to work.

By Wednesday, Eli had rebuilt the filing system, delivered the board presentation appendix a day early, and memorized the coffee order of every partner on the floor.

Jonah’s was black, as stated. But he took it in a specific mug — the dark gray one on the second shelf of the kitchen cabinet, not the identical-looking one on the third shelf, which was Nate Kade’s and apparently the source of a long-standing territorial dispute that the office treated as folklore.

Eli learned this from Mara, who told him over her own coffee with the resigned fondness of someone who’d been cataloging CEO quirks for years. “They’ve been partners since the beginning,” she said. “Jonah built the machine. Nate keeps it human. If Jonah is the blade, Nate is the handle.”

“And what are we?”

“The people who try not to get cut.”

Eli didn’t get cut. He got efficient.

He answered every email within the hour. He built a tracking system for Jonah’s client touchpoints that was, objectively, better than anything the firm had used before. He intercepted a furious voicemail from the Bellweather Capital CFO and drafted a response so diplomatically lethal that Mara read it aloud in the kitchen and called it poetry.

He also stayed late. Not because anyone asked him to — the first week, Jonah left by seven most nights and didn’t seem to notice whether Eli was still at his desk. But the work was there, and the work needed doing, and Eli had never been the kind of person who could leave something unfinished and sleep.

So he stayed. Nine o’clock. Ten. The office emptied around him in layers — the analysts first, then the associates, then the partners, until it was just Eli and the cleaning crew and the low hum of the building’s circulatory system pushing conditioned air through empty rooms.

He liked the quiet. It was the only time the anxiety fully settled, when there was no one left to perform for, no eyes measuring whether he was doing enough. Alone, he could just work, and the work was the closest thing to peace he knew.

Thursday evening, he was still at his desk at nine thirty when Jonah’s office light was on.

Eli glanced up. He’d assumed Jonah had left hours ago — his calendar had been clear after five. But the light was on, the door was closed, and through the glass Eli could see him on the phone, pacing behind his desk.

Jonah’s jacket was off. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows. His tie was loosened — not removed, just pulled down an inch, the knot sitting just below the hollow of his throat.

Eli looked away. Then looked back. Then very deliberately looked at his own screen and kept typing.

Twenty minutes later, Jonah’s door opened.

“You’re still here.” It wasn’t a question.

Eli looked up. Jonah was standing in the doorway of his office, backlit by the desk lamp, and from this angle — rumpled, loosened, human — he looked different than the man who’d told Eli to deliver on Monday morning. Less fortress. More person.

“The Harmon Group transition files had gaps,” Eli said. “I’m closing them.”

“That could wait until tomorrow.”

“It could.”

The silence between them had weight. Not tension — not yet. Just the particular gravity that happens when two people are the only ones awake in a place designed for crowds.

“When’s the last time you ate?” Jonah asked.

The question startled him. “I — lunch? I think?”

Something shifted behind Jonah’s expression. Not displeasure. Something closer to recognition, like he was looking at a pattern he understood.

“Go home, Eli. The files will be here in the morning.”

“I’m almost done.”

“That wasn’t a suggestion.”

Eli held his gaze for a beat longer than was probably advisable. Then he saved his work, closed his laptop, and stood.

“Good night, Mr. Voss.”

“Jonah.”

The correction was quiet. Casual, even. But it landed in Eli’s chest like a key turning in a lock he hadn’t known was there.

“Good night, Jonah.”

Jonah nodded once and went back into his office. Eli packed his bag with hands that were perfectly steady and a heartbeat that was not.

Friday morning, the crisis hit.

The quarterly board presentation — the one Eli had personally reviewed, proofread, and loaded onto the conference room system — was missing a page. Slide fourteen, the revenue reconciliation, had somehow been replaced by a duplicate of slide nine during the final upload.

Eli discovered this at eight forty-seven. The board meeting started at nine.

He didn’t panic. Panic was a luxury for people who had someone else to clean up after them.

He pulled the original file from the archive server, isolated the correct slide, rebuilt the transition animations so they’d match the rest of the deck, tested it on the conference room display, and swapped it into the live presentation. Eight minutes. No one in the conference room noticed because no one in the conference room was there yet.

Except Jonah.

Jonah was already seated at the head of the long table when Eli slipped in through the side door at eight fifty-three. He was reviewing his notes, pen in hand, perfectly composed. He looked up when Eli entered, and his eyes tracked the slight flush on Eli’s face, the barely-controlled breathing, the laptop clutched under his arm.

Eli set the presentation remote on the table beside Jonah’s folder. “Slide fourteen had a duplication error in the final upload. It’s corrected. The live file is clean.”

Jonah looked at him.

It was a different look than Monday. Monday had been evaluation — clinical, impersonal, the same gaze he probably leveled at quarterly projections and contract language. This was something else. This was seeing.

“When did you catch it?”

“Eight forty-seven.”

Jonah glanced at his watch. Eight fifty-four. Seven minutes.

He set his pen down. Leaned back. And said two words with the quiet precision of a man who did not waste them:

“Good catch.”

That was it. No elaboration. No follow-up. He picked up his pen, returned to his notes, and the board members began filing in.

Eli walked out of the conference room on legs that felt slightly detached from the rest of his body. He sat down at his desk. He opened his laptop. He stared at the screen without reading a single word on it.

Good catch.

Two words. Ordinary words. The kind of thing a boss says to an employee a dozen times a week without either of them remembering it by lunch.

Except Eli remembered. He remembered the low register of Jonah’s voice and the way it had dropped half a note, the way the good had been deliberate and the catch had landed with the weight of something earned rather than given. He remembered the look — brief, focused, specific to him. Not the room. Not the presentation. Him.

His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against the desk and waited for the tremor to stop, and when it didn’t stop after thirty seconds, he folded them in his lap and sat very still.

It was praise. Just praise. The normal kind. The kind that every boss in every office gave to every competent assistant who did their job correctly.

It didn’t mean anything.

His pulse didn’t settle for an hour.

At five o’clock, Eli packed his bag, said good night to Mara, and walked to the elevator. He pressed the button and stood very still while the numbers counted down, and he told himself — firmly, rationally, with the airtight logic of a person who was absolutely not developing a fixation — that next week would be fine. That this was a good job with a demanding boss and that the tight, electric feeling behind his sternum was just the residual buzz of a high-pressure week, nothing more.

The elevator arrived. The doors opened. He stepped inside.

And he thought about Jonah’s voice saying good catch the entire train ride home.

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The first time. Jonah’s POV. Every restrained thought, every calculated touch, every moment he almost lost control — from inside the head of the man who was trying very hard not to fall in love with his assistant. You’ve read what Eli felt. Now feel what Jonah was holding back.

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