Bad Neighbor, Great Lay

Contemporary Romance
by Isla Wilde

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MF (Male/Female)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Neighbors to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Single Dad, Grumpy/Sunshine, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Secret Relationship, Thin Walls

Thin walls, loud music, and parking wars pit a grumpy single dad against his carefree new neighbor — until a power outage traps them in the building’s elevator and they finally act on the tension.

Marcus Lane doesn’t have room for chaos. He’s a single dad with a seven-year-old, a labeled spice rack, and a bedtime routine he could execute blindfolded. His apartment is quiet, controlled, and exactly the way he needs it — until Jess Rivera moves into 4A with a record player, too many plants, and zero concept of quiet hours.

Jess is loud, talented, chronically barefoot, and everything Marcus doesn’t have bandwidth for. She plays music at midnight. She argues about parking. She teaches his daughter to paint and walks through every room like she owns it. She’s a problem. A beautiful, irritating, impossible-to-ignore problem.

When a power outage traps them in the building’s ancient elevator, the fight they’ve been having finally becomes the thing it’s always been: foreplay. What starts as stolen moments behind closed doors becomes an arrangement — no labels, no introductions, no letting his daughter get attached to someone who might not stay.

But Jess has been someone’s secret before. And Marcus is learning that the walls he built to protect his daughter are the same walls keeping out the woman who makes his careful life feel worth living.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Grumpy single dad × carefree neighbor
✅ Enemies to lovers with parking-note flirtation
✅ “Don’t make a sound” thin-wall tension
✅ Praise kink that’ll melt your spine (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ A seven-year-old who sees EVERYTHING
✅ The serious man who finally lets loose
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MF scenes including praise kink and soft restraint), strong language, depictions of single parenting stress, and themes of emotional vulnerability and fear of intimacy. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: The New Problem

The trick with bedtime is consistency. That’s what every parenting book says, every pediatrician, every smug relative who’s never had to negotiate with a seven-year-old who believes — with the unshakable conviction of a religious zealot — that she is not tired.

“One more chapter,” Cora says. Brown eyes enormous and fully weaponized. This is the face that has gotten me to agree to ice cream for breakfast on two separate occasions.

“We already did one more chapter. This is the one-more-chapter after the one more chapter.”

“You can’t do math at bedtime, Daddy. That’s a rule.”

“Whose rule?”

“Mine.”

I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. The machine works because the gears are tight. Bath at seven thirty. Story at eight. Lights out at eight thirty. Every night, no exceptions.

“Goodnight, bug.”

Wednesday night. Eight thirty-seven PM. Cora asleep. Dishes done. I’ve got approximately two hours of adult time and I intend to spend them on the couch with a cold beer and the Knicks game I recorded Sunday.

Silence. Beautiful. Earned. For approximately eleven seconds.

The bass hits first. A physical presence inside my wall. It’s coming from 4A — the apartment that’s been blissfully empty for three weeks since Mrs. Kowalski moved to Hoboken. Apparently, it’s not empty anymore.

Eight forty-nine PM. On a Wednesday. I look at the wall. Four inches of century-old plaster and precisely zero inches of soundproofing.

I knock on 4A. The door swings open, and the music rolls out like a warm, wine-scented wave.

She’s standing in the middle of the wreckage holding packing tape in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. Dark hair, claw clip losing its war with gravity. Tank top, paint-stained joggers, bare feet. There’s a streak of blue on her forearm.

“Hi,” she says, like I’m exactly who she was expecting.

“Marcus. 4B. Next door.”

“Oh! The neighbor!” Genuine delight. “Jess Rivera. I just moved in — obviously.”

“It’s nine o’clock on a Wednesday.”

“Is it?” She checks her phone with mild surprise. “You know how it is. The unpacking energy hits and you just — ride it.”

“I unpack methodically over three days using a labeled system.”

She laughs — sharp, surprised, her whole face opening up — and something in my chest shifts, like a lock turning that I didn’t know existed.

“My daughter is asleep. Right next door. Through that wall. The very thin wall.”

Behind her, a friend calls out: “Jess, is the hot neighbor inviting us to a building meeting or what?”

Jess doesn’t break eye contact. “He’s not hot, he’s annoyed. There’s a difference.”

“Not from this angle.”

“Welcome to the building,” I say, and turn toward my door.

“Goodnight, Marcus from 4B,” she calls after me. The way she says my name — like she’s tasting it, putting it somewhere she plans to come back to — makes me close my door harder than I need to.

Twenty minutes later, the music comes back. Low, smoky, the kind you play alone in the dark after everyone’s left.

Then she hums. Low and tuneless, half-conscious. The sound drifts through the wall like smoke and settles in my chest like a thing that plans to stay.

Tomorrow I’ll be normal. Tomorrow the wall will be just a wall.

Tonight, I lie in the dark and listen to the silence she left behind, and for the first time in three years, my quiet apartment doesn’t feel like peace. It just feels empty.

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The Thin Wall — Sunday Morning — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Six months after their first noise complaint, Marcus and Jess finally have the conversation about which apartment they’re keeping — and christen the answer. Shower sex, praise so filthy it fogs the mirror, and the moment Cora walks in on breakfast and declares “I KNEW you were having a sleepover.”

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