His Best Man
MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder
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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Runaway Groom, Best Friends to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Bi Awakening, Praise Kink, Roommates to Lovers, One Bed, Touch Starved
He ran from his wedding. He ran straight into the one person he should have been marrying all along.
Jamie Carter was five minutes from saying “I do” when he looked in the mirror and realized he couldn’t do it for one more day. Not the suit, not the spreadsheet future, not the woman who deserved someone who actually burned for her. He walked out the side door, called the only person he trusted, and showed up at his best man’s apartment in a half-undone tux with shaking hands.
Ryan Diaz answered the phone mid-game and said four words: “Get here. Don’t stop.” He gave Jamie his bed, his clothes, and the kind of safety that makes you stop performing and start feeling. What was supposed to be a week on the couch turned into late-night confessions, “practice” kisses that stopped being practice, and the slow, devastating discovery that the person they’d each been comparing everyone to was sleeping three feet away.
Jamie has never wanted anyone the way he wants Ryan. Ryan has been wanting Jamie for twelve years and calling it something safer. Now they’re sharing a bed, a bathroom, and every secret they’ve been keeping—and the walls between best friend and something more are coming down faster than either of them can rebuild.
But Jamie’s family wants answers. His ex-fiancée wants closure. And Ryan’s fear of being the rebound—of being the convenient option, the nearest available body in a crisis—might destroy them before the world outside the apartment gets the chance.
His Best Man is a high-heat MM contemporary romance featuring a runaway groom, his secretly-in-love best man, one bed, praise kink, bi awakening, and a guaranteed HEA. This novel contains graphic sexual content and is intended for readers 18+.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Best friends to lovers with twelve years of secret pining
✅ Runaway groom lands on his best man’s couch
✅ Forced proximity in a tiny apartment with one bed
✅ Bi awakening with praise kink (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ “I’ve been comparing everyone to you for twelve years”
✅ Protective best man who makes terrible coffee and holds you like the world is small
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including oral, penetrative, and mutual masturbation), strong language, wedding abandonment, family conflict, internalized homophobia, and themes of identity crisis. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Runaway in a Tux
The tie was strangling me.
Not literally. Literally, it was a perfectly knotted Windsor in dove gray silk that my mother had picked out and my future mother-in-law had approved and some wedding coordinator whose name I’d already forgotten had adjusted four times in the last twenty minutes. It was a beautiful tie. It matched the groomsmen’s pocket squares and the ribbon on the centerpieces and the custom napkins that said Jamie & Meredith, June 14th, Forever Starts Today.
But it was strangling me.
I stared at my reflection in the groom’s suite mirror—a floor-length oval in a gilded frame that probably cost more than my monthly rent—and tried to recognize the man looking back. Clean-shaven. Hair styled with something that smelled expensive and held like cement. A charcoal suit that fit me like it had been sewn directly onto my body because, functionally, it had been. Three fittings. Three. For a suit I’d wear once and then hang in the back of a closet next to the khakis I wore to my corporate job.
I looked put together. I looked like a man about to marry the woman he loved in front of two hundred people. I looked like I was going to throw up.
“Five minutes, Mr. Carter!” The wedding coordinator’s knuckles rapped against the door. “Your bride is ready. Guests are seated. We’re right on schedule.”
Right on schedule. The whole thing had been on schedule since Meredith and I got engaged twenty-two months ago. She didn’t leave things to chance. She managed our relationship the way she managed product launches at work—milestones, deliverables, clear success metrics. I knew the spreadsheet. I had a tab on it. My tab was labeled “Jamie – Action Items.”
My hands were shaking.
This isn’t right.
The thought was so clear it was almost audible. Not a whisper, not a doubt—a statement. Calm and certain and absolute.
This. Isn’t. Right.
My legs moved before my brain gave permission. I crossed the suite in four strides, opened the side door—the one that led to the service hallway, not the ceremony—and stepped through it. Nobody stopped me. I walked out into the parking lot, into the June heat, and kept walking.
Four blocks later, I sat on a low concrete wall outside a closed dry cleaner and called the only person I could think of.
“Yo.” Ryan’s voice was distracted, half-present. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting married right now?”
“I didn’t do it.” My voice cracked. “I’m sitting on a curb in my tux.”
He didn’t ask why. The silence lasted exactly two seconds, and then his voice came back, stripped of every trace of sarcasm. “I’m texting you my address. Get in an Uber. Don’t talk to anyone else.”
Ryan’s apartment was on the second floor of a walk-up. I’d been there a hundred times. Since high school, Ryan’s place had been wherever I went when the rest of my life felt like a costume I couldn’t take off.
He opened the door, took one look at me, and pulled me inside. Sat me on the couch. Got me water. Then his hands were on me—not like that. Tender, almost parental. He unbuttoned my shirt, slid it off, unlaced my dress shoes. Got me a faded t-shirt and sweatpants. His clothes. Too big on me. I let myself be handled. First time in years someone had taken care of me without expecting something back.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Okay. You hungry?”
Simple. Safe. I exhaled for the first time in hours. I pressed my face against his shoulder because I couldn’t look at him—because if I looked at him right now, with his arm around me and his shirt on my body and the wreckage of my entire life on his floor, I would say something I couldn’t take back.
So I didn’t look. I pressed my face into his henley and breathed him in and let myself be held, and I thought about how I’d called him first. How it hadn’t even been a choice. How his name was the only one my fingers knew how to find.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I wasn’t performing. I was sitting on a secondhand couch in borrowed clothes in a tiny apartment, and the only person who’d ever made me feel like I didn’t need a reason to exist was right here, holding me like it was the simplest thing in the world.
Everything else was going to be a disaster. But right now, with Ryan’s arm around me and his heartbeat steady against my ear, my hands had stopped shaking.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Christening the New Place — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Jamie and Ryan move into their new apartment. Marcus paints a wall the wrong color. Lucia brings enough food for thirty people. And the second everyone leaves… they christen every surface. Counter sex, shower round two, praise kink turned up to eleven, and the filthiest, most joyful scene in the book.
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