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A High-Heat MM Age-Gap Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Escort/Client, Age Gap, Touch Starved, Praise Kink, Control/Surrender, Possessive Hero, Grief Recovery, Slow Burn

He paid for the hours. He never planned to pay with his heart.

Renzo Hale is one of the city’s most exclusive male companions. He sells time, attention, fantasy, and discretion—but never the unguarded man beneath the tailored clothes.

Alaric Wynn is a forty-seven-year-old luxury hotel developer who hasn’t touched anyone since his husband died four years ago. He books Renzo for one evening, intending to prove that physical intimacy no longer has the power to hurt him.

Instead, Renzo recognizes a man who isn’t afraid of sex. Alaric is afraid of wanting it.

One evening becomes a weekly appointment. Weekly appointments become an exclusivity contract. Alaric pays for dinners, travel, touch, and the illusion that he can control when Renzo enters and leaves his life.

But the arrangement begins to collapse when Renzo starts staying beyond the purchased hours, Alaric starts asking for affection that can’t be written into a contract, and both men discover that the most intimate moments are the ones for which no invoice is ever issued.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Silver fox widower x beautiful young escort
✅ Escort/client with genuine feelings and sex-work-positive treatment
✅ Praise kink so intense it breaks the powerful man open
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Touch starvation, body worship, blindfolds, and formalwear
✅ Grief handled without making the late husband a villain
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including edging, blindfolds, restraints, praise kink, and body worship), strong language, on-page grief and loss, discussions of terminal illness, and depictions of jealousy and possessive behavior. Sex-work-positive. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: The Appointment

The razor caught the light as Renzo tilted it beneath his jaw, and he paused—not because his hand was unsteady, but because steadiness was the entire point. Every detail mattered tonight. The line of his jaw, clean. The edges of his stubble, precise enough to look deliberate but soft enough to press against skin without leaving a mark. He rinsed the blade under hot water and watched the steam curl against the mirror.

Seven-thirty. Ninety minutes until the car arrived.

He worked through the rest of his routine with the unhurried efficiency of a man who understood that preparation was not vanity. It was architecture. The right shirt changed the way a client’s eyes traveled. The right cologne—applied to pulse points, never sprayed into the air like some department-store amateur—created an olfactory memory that outlasted the evening. The right trousers sat at the right height on the right hips and made a man wonder what removing them would feel like before the thought fully formed.

Renzo selected the dark green silk. It caught light beautifully without trying too hard, and the color warmed his skin in a way that made people want to touch him. Black trousers, slim but not painted on. The thin gold rings—three tonight, index and middle fingers on his left hand, thumb on the right. The small hoop in his left ear. Belt, shoes, coat. Each piece chosen, not grabbed.

He stood in front of the full-length mirror and assessed himself the way a contractor assesses a building: structurally, without sentiment. Thick black curls falling over his forehead in a way that looked careless and had taken four minutes. Dark eyes, the kind people called expressive when they meant readable. Warm olive skin, clean-shaven jaw, mouth that—according to more than one client—always looked like it was about to smile at a secret.

Good. He looked like exactly what he was: someone worth the price.

His phone buzzed on the bathroom counter. He picked it up and scrolled to the booking details he’d already memorized.

Client: Alaric Wynn. First appointment. Screening verified. Requested: dinner, conversation, physical affection, the possibility of sex. No specific fantasy indicated. Rate: accepted without negotiation. Duration: four hours.

That last detail was the one Renzo kept returning to. Four hours was generous for a first booking—most new clients started with two, hedging their discomfort with a short window. And the rate had been accepted without a single counter-offer. Renzo’s fees were significant. Men who didn’t flinch at them either had more money than sense or had already decided the evening was worth whatever it cost before the first word was exchanged.

He tapped over to the screening file. Alaric Wynn. Forty-seven. Founder of Wynn House Hotels—a small chain of boutique luxury properties known for the kind of tasteful design that made architecture critics use words like intimate and intentional. Widowed. No prior bookings with any companion service in Renzo’s professional network, and Renzo’s network was extensive enough that the absence was meaningful. A first-timer. A wealthy, grieving, forty-seven-year-old first-timer who had requested “the possibility of sex” with the same clinical uncertainty most men reserved for describing a medical symptom.

This was going to be either the simplest evening of his month or the most complicated.

He closed the file and called Dorian.

“You’re calling me ninety minutes early,” Dorian said by way of greeting. “Either you’re nervous or you need me to talk you out of canceling.”

“Neither. Safety check-in. New client tonight.”

“The hotel guy.”

“Wynn, yes.”

“The rate he agreed to is obscene, you know that.”

“I’m aware.”

“Like, not regular-obscene. Anxious-obscene. That’s the rate of a man trying to buy enough cushion that the whole thing doesn’t feel real.”

Renzo smiled. Dorian had a gift for reading finances the way Renzo read bodies—with an accuracy that was almost rude in its precision. “Noted. I’ll check in by one. If you don’t hear from me—”

“Standard protocol. I know. Hey—what are you wearing?”

“The green silk.”

“Fuck. Poor bastard doesn’t stand a chance.”

Renzo hung up, pocketed the phone, and checked himself once more in the mirror. He didn’t feel nervous. Nerves implied uncertainty, and Renzo was not uncertain about what he did. He was excellent at it. He made lonely, wealthy, complicated people feel seen, and he did it with skill, with warmth, and with the kind of deliberate attention most people reserved for falling in love but never sustained with the same consistency.

The difference between Renzo and a lover was reliability. Renzo always showed up. Always left on time. Never made promises he couldn’t itemize on an invoice.

The car arrived at nine.

The building was exactly what Renzo expected: steel and glass, Midtown, the kind of address that communicated wealth without the vulgarity of displaying it. The doorman nodded him through without questions—Renzo’s name was on the approved list, which meant Alaric had planned ahead. Good. Planning was controllable, and Renzo suspected this man survived on control the way most people survived on oxygen.

The elevator was silent. Thirty-second floor. Renzo adjusted his coat collar, rolled his shoulders once to release the last residual tension in his body, and let his expression settle into the version of himself that worked best for first appointments: warm, unhurried, present. Not seductive—seduction was a later-stage tool, and deploying it too early made a nervous client feel hunted rather than welcomed.

He knocked.

The door opened within three seconds. Alaric Wynn had been waiting by it, which meant he’d been pacing, which meant the evening’s anxiety had a physical component. Renzo catalogued this and let none of the cataloguing show on his face.

His first impression was large.

Not just tall—though Alaric was tall, at least six-four, and the doorframe emphasized it—but substantial. Broad shoulders that filled his dark suit jacket without straining it. A heavy chest, the kind of build that came from genetics and decades rather than a gym membership. Silver threaded generously through dark hair at the temples and into a close-trimmed beard that covered a strong jaw. Pale eyes—blue-gray, wintry—that assessed Renzo with the same evaluative precision Renzo was using on him. A nose that had been broken at least once and healed slightly crooked, giving his face the asymmetry that kept handsome from sliding into pretty.

He was dressed as though attending something he’d rather avoid. Dark suit, no tie, top two buttons of a white dress shirt undone. The collar gaped enough to reveal the hollow of his throat and the beginning of silver chest hair. A watch—expensive, understated—and a ring. Right hand, fourth finger. Wedding band. Still worn but moved from the left.

“Renzo.” Alaric’s voice was lower than expected, with the clipped cadence of a man who used fewer words than most and expected each one to carry weight. He stepped back, opening the door wider. “Come in.”

“Thank you.” Renzo entered and let the apartment speak for itself while he removed his coat.

It spoke clearly, and what it said was empty. Not sparse in the deliberate, aesthetic sense—this wasn’t minimalism. This was a man who had stopped furnishing his life. The bones were beautiful: warm hardwood, a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows showing the city’s nervous light, built-in shelving that held books and nothing personal. The furniture was high quality and arranged with hotel precision. No photographs on any surface. No jacket tossed over a chair, no half-read newspaper, no evidence that anyone lived here rather than merely stayed.

The apartment felt like a lobby. Which was ironic, or maybe inevitable, for a man who built hotels for a living.

Alaric took Renzo’s coat and hung it in the entry closet with careful, almost ceremonial attention. His hands were large—square palms, blunt fingers, the kind of hands that looked like they’d been built for labor but had been trained for contracts. Renzo noticed them because noticing hands was professional instinct. How a man handled fabric told you how he’d handle skin.

“Dinner’s been delivered,” Alaric said. “I wasn’t sure what you preferred, so I ordered several options. If none of them work—”

“I’m not difficult to feed.” Renzo offered a smile designed to lower the room’s temperature by several degrees of formality. “Whatever you chose is fine.”

They moved to the dining table. Alaric had arranged the meal with obvious thought: the plates were warm, the wine already breathing in a decanter, the lighting adjusted to something softer than the overhead defaults. Everything was considered. Everything was managed. The man had stage-directed his own seduction and was now standing in the wings, unsure of his blocking.

Renzo sat. Alaric poured wine with hands that were steady but deliberate—the steadiness of someone concentrating on steadiness.

“Thank you.” Renzo tasted it. Burgundy, excellent, slightly warmer than ideal. Alaric had opened it too early, probably out of nerves. “This is beautiful.”

Alaric sat across from him. The table was too wide—formal dining for a man who clearly ate alone. The distance between their place settings was appropriate for a business dinner and entirely wrong for what this evening was supposed to become.

They ate. Alaric asked about the wine—a safe topic, knowledge-based, controllable. Renzo answered honestly rather than performing enthusiasm, noting the tannin structure and the vintage without embellishment. Alaric listened with the focused attention of a man accustomed to evaluating quality and noticed, visibly, that Renzo wasn’t flattering him.

Something in his posture shifted. A fraction less rigid. As though honesty were a language he hadn’t expected to hear tonight.

“You can ask me whatever you want,” Renzo said, setting his glass down. “Most clients have questions the first time.”

“I’m not sure what the etiquette is.”

“There isn’t any. Just say what you’re thinking.”

Alaric studied him for a moment that lasted longer than a moment should. Those pale eyes were unnerving—not cold, exactly, but precise. The gaze of someone who noticed craftsmanship, structural detail, the quality of joins. He was looking at Renzo the way he probably looked at buildings: assessing what was real and what was facade.

“I haven’t done this before,” Alaric said. Not apologetically. Factually. The way he might disclose a relevant variable in a negotiation.

“I know.”

“How?”

“Because you opened the door within three seconds of my knock, which means you were standing beside it. You poured the wine before I arrived, which means you needed something to do with your hands. And you put twelve feet of dining table between us, which means you haven’t decided how close you want me yet.”

Alaric’s expression didn’t change, but his fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the stem of his glass. “You’re observant.”

“It’s the job.”

“Is it always the job?”

The question was sharper than Renzo expected. Not hostile—curious, in the way a man who built things was curious about other people’s construction methods.

“When I’m here, yes.” Renzo held his gaze without flinching. “You don’t need to impress me, Alaric. You don’t need to perform. You hired me, which means the evening is built around what you want. All you have to do is say what that is.”

“And if I don’t know?”

“Then we figure it out. That’s what the time is for.”

Alaric drank his wine. Set the glass down with the careful precision of a man who was afraid that if he moved too quickly, something would shatter. “I should tell you something that’s relevant.”

“All right.”

“My husband died four years ago.”

The sentence landed in the quiet apartment like a dropped stone. Renzo registered it without reaction—not because he felt nothing, but because this was the moment that determined the evening’s trajectory, and the wrong response would close a door that had barely opened.

He didn’t offer condolences. Alaric’s jaw was set in a way that said he’d heard every possible condolence and each one had made him feel worse. He didn’t reach across the table, because twelve feet of dining table existed for a reason and it wasn’t Renzo’s place to dismantle someone else’s barricade uninvited.

He said, “Thank you for telling me.”

Alaric’s eyes flickered. He’d expected more. Sympathy, pity, the soft-voiced therapeutic murmur that people deployed when death entered a conversation. What Renzo gave him instead was acknowledgment without interpretation, and it clearly disoriented him.

“I want to be clear about what I’m not looking for,” Alaric continued, his voice dropping into the register people used for contract terms. “I don’t want pity. I don’t want you to perform grief counseling. I don’t want you pretending to be in love with me. And I don’t want to be treated as though I’m fragile.”

“I understand.”

“Can you work with that?”

“Easily.” Renzo leaned back slightly, letting the posture create space that felt like an invitation rather than distance. “I don’t sell love, Alaric. I sell time and attention and whatever we agree the evening should include. If what you want is to be touched by someone who finds you attractive without the weight of everything that touch used to mean—that’s something I can do well.”

The word attractive landed exactly where Renzo placed it. Not as flattery—as fact. He watched Alaric absorb it, watched the man’s throat move on a swallow he probably didn’t intend to be visible.

“You find me attractive.” Alaric said it flatly, testing the idea for structural integrity.

“I’m sitting across from a tall, broad, well-dressed man with silver in his hair and hands I haven’t stopped noticing since he took my coat. Yes. I find you attractive.”

Renzo said it without heat, without performance. If he’d leaned into it—dropped his voice, held eye contact too long—it would have sounded like a pitch. Instead, he stated it with the same factual precision Alaric had used to disclose his husband’s death. The symmetry was deliberate.

Alaric looked at his own hands as though seeing them for the first time. Then at Renzo. Something shifted behind those pale eyes—not arousal, not yet, but the acknowledgment that arousal was possible. That his body might still contain the capacity for it. That the four-year silence might have an ending.

“I should tell you one more thing,” Alaric said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m not afraid of sex.” He paused. The pause was long enough to hold an entire history. “I’m afraid of wanting it.”

Renzo let the words settle. He understood the distinction perfectly—it was the difference between an act and an appetite, between a thing you could schedule and a hunger that refused to observe business hours. Alaric wasn’t worried about the physical mechanics. He was worried about the door that desire would open and whether he’d be able to close it again when the evening ended.

“Those aren’t the same thing,” Renzo said.

“No.” Alaric met his eyes. “They’re not.”

Silence held the room. The city hummed beyond the windows. The wine sat untouched between them. Renzo felt the evening pivot—the careful, clinical negotiation giving way to something with actual weight. Alaric Wynn was not a man who feared vulnerability because he was weak. He feared it because he’d been strong for so long that the muscles had locked, and unlocking them meant feeling everything he’d held in place for four years.

Renzo recognized the pattern. He’d seen it in other clients—the successful, controlled, deeply lonely men who arrived at his door armored in courtesy and money and the conviction that a transaction would protect them from anything as dangerous as genuine feeling.

But Alaric was different in one specific way that Renzo couldn’t quite dismiss. Most first-time clients wanted permission. They wanted Renzo to lead, to seduce, to make the decision for them so they could tell themselves afterward that it had simply happened.

Alaric wasn’t asking for permission. He was asking for a controlled environment in which to test whether his body still worked the way it used to. Whether desire, once admitted, would destroy him or merely change the shape of his grief.

The distinction mattered, and Renzo filed it alongside a physical observation he was choosing not to examine: the way Alaric’s right hand had moved to his wedding ring when he said the word wanting, thumb turning the band once before he caught himself and stopped.

“Should we move to the living room?” Alaric asked. His voice was steady, but the question carried the weight of a man stepping onto a bridge he wasn’t sure would hold.

Renzo stood. Smiled—not the professional warmth he’d deployed at the door, but something smaller and more honest. “After you.”

Alaric rose. His full height was startling up close—the sheer physical presence of him, the breadth, the way he moved with controlled grace that suggested a body accustomed to power but uncertain, now, of what to do with it.

He gestured toward the hallway. Renzo followed.

And noticed, as they left the table, that Alaric’s hand had gone to his chest rather than his ring.

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Six months later. The Amalfi Coast. A hotel that isn’t Alaric’s. A balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. And a man who has finally stopped watching the clock—because there is no clock. Wall sex, body worship, stolen bread, and the filthiest, most tender chapter in the series.

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