Raw & Roasted
A Grumpy/Sunshine Forced Proximity MM Romance
Ironroot Farm Book 1 • by Jace Wilder
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Forced Proximity, Size Difference, Age Gap, Praise Kink
A perfectionist chef. A reclusive farmer. One washed-out bridge that traps them together.
Remy Castillo has a plan. He has a five-star restaurant in D.C., a career built on absolute control, and a looming review from the city’s toughest critic. What he doesn’t have is the specific New Mexico Hatch chiles he needs to save his signature dish.
Desperate, he drives into rural Virginia to beg Silas Ashford—a reclusive farmer with a reputation for being impossible—to sell him his private stock.
Silas doesn’t like the city. He doesn’t like noise. And he definitely doesn’t like the soaking wet, high-strung chef shivering on his porch demanding peppers.
Silas says no. Then the storm hits.
When a flash flood washes out the only bridge back to civilization, Remy is stranded. Trapped in a farmhouse with no cell service, no escape, and a man who looks like he wrestles bears for fun.
Silas is rugged, taciturn, and runs hotter than a cast-iron stove. And when the power goes out, the only way to stay warm is to share the only bed in the house.
Remy is used to controlling the heat in the kitchen. But in Silas’s arms, he’s about to learn that the best things in life are messy, unscripted, and completely out of his control.
You’ll love this if you enjoy:
- ✓ Grumpy mountain man meets anxious city boy
- ✓ “There’s only one bed” with a size difference that matters
- ✓ A hero who learns to surrender control
- ✓ Praise kink, breeding kink language, and possessive heroes
- ✓ Food as foreplay and agricultural metaphors earning their keep
- ✓ Found family and building something together
Raw & Roasted is a full-length (55,000+ word) MM romance featuring a grumpy farmer, a sunshine chef who’s secretly a brat, explicit content including breeding kink language, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Book 1 in the Ironroot Farm series.
Read Chapter One Free
The Menu Crisis
The peppers were going to kill him.
Not literally—though at this point, Remy wouldn’t rule it out. No, they were going to kill his career, his reputation, and the last shredded remnants of his sanity, all because some mouth-breathing logistics coordinator in Albuquerque couldn’t tell the difference between “refrigerated shipping” and “leave it on a hot tarmac for sixteen hours.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Remy said into his phone, his voice hitting a register that probably only dogs could appreciate. “Those weren’t just peppers. Those were New Mexico Hatch chiles, hand-selected, from a specific field, at a specific elevation, picked at a specific point in their ripeness cycle—”
“Sir, I understand you’re frustrated—”
“Frustrated?” Remy laughed, and it came out slightly unhinged. “I’m not frustrated. Frustrated is when Whole Foods is out of organic lemons. Frustrated is when your line cook doesn’t know how to brunoise. What I am, Marcus, is watching my entire autumn menu collapse because your company turned three thousand dollars worth of premium produce into compost.”
Rain hammered against the windshield of his Audi, hard enough that the wipers couldn’t keep up. The GPS had given up twenty minutes ago, replaced by a spinning wheel of digital despair and an apologetic Recalculating that seemed increasingly sarcastic. Somewhere in rural Virginia, on a road that was more mud than asphalt, Remy Castillo was losing his mind.
“We can issue a refund—”
“A refund doesn’t help me when June Delacroix walks into my restaurant in five days expecting the signature dish I’ve been hyping for three months!”
He jabbed at the phone to end the call before Marcus could respond with another script-approved platitude. The screen immediately lit up with a text from his sous chef.
Delacroix confirmed for Friday. 8pm. Corner table. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
“I know it’s not a drill, David,” Remy muttered, tossing the phone onto the passenger seat. “I know it’s not a—mierda!”
The car lurched, something beneath the chassis making a sound like a dying animal, and then everything stopped. The engine was still running, the wipers still flailing, but the Audi wasn’t going anywhere. Remy pressed the accelerator. The wheels spun. Mud sprayed against the windows with a sound like wet applause.
He was stuck.
Of course he was stuck.
He sat there for a long moment, rain drumming on the roof, and considered his options. He could call a tow truck—except his phone showed one bar of signal that flickered in and out like a dying heartbeat. He could wait out the storm—except it had been raining for two days straight and showed no signs of stopping. Or he could get out of this very expensive German engineering and walk the last quarter mile to Ironroot Farm, where, according to a server at a Richmond restaurant who knew a guy who knew a guy, some reclusive farmer grew New Mexico varietals that rivaled anything coming out of the actual New Mexico.
Remy looked down at his clothes. White chef’s coat, because he’d come straight from the restaurant. Tailored navy pants that cost more than some people’s rent. Italian leather loafers—$400, a gift to himself after his first rave review—that had never touched anything more rugged than a freshly mopped kitchen floor.
“It’s fine,” he told himself. “It’s a quarter mile. It’s just rain. You’re not made of sugar.”
He opened the door.
The wind immediately tried to rip it off its hinges, and rain slammed into him sideways with the force of a personal vendetta. Remy gasped, already soaked through in the time it took to step onto what should have been solid ground but was, in fact, mud the consistency of chocolate pudding.
His loafer sank to the ankle.
“Coño—”
He pulled his foot free with a sucking sound that would haunt his nightmares, grabbed his phone, and started walking. The road—if it could be called that—was a river of brown water that came up to his shins in places. Every step was a negotiation with gravity. His chef’s whites, pristine when he’d left D.C. four hours ago, were now splattered with mud that might have been mud or might have been something that came out of an animal. He didn’t want to know.
The farmhouse emerged from the rain like something out of a Gothic novel—a massive dark shape at the end of a gravel drive, all sharp angles and unwelcoming shadows. No lights in the windows. Either nobody was home, or they were actively avoiding human contact.
Given what Remy had heard about the owner, he was betting on the latter.
Silas Ashford, according to the culinary grapevine, was a recluse with a reputation. Grew the best produce in the mid-Atlantic but barely sold to anyone. Didn’t return calls. Didn’t do farm tours. Didn’t suffer fools. One chef had described trying to buy from him as “negotiating with a particularly stubborn mountain.”
Remy had left six voicemails in the past week. None had been returned.
But desperate times called for desperate measures, and showing up unannounced in a rainstorm was about as desperate as it got.
He climbed the porch steps, which groaned under his weight like they were personally offended, and stood dripping in front of a door that looked like it had been carved from a single massive plank of wood. For a moment, he just breathed, trying to compose himself. Trying to remember the pitch he’d rehearsed.
Mr. Ashford, I know this is unorthodox, but I’m prepared to pay triple your usual rate for—
No, too formal.
Look, I’m in a bind, and I’ve heard your peppers are—
Too casual. Too desperate. He was desperate, but he didn’t need to lead with it.
I’m Remy Castillo, executive chef at Verdure. You may have heard of—
Pretentious. God, he sounded pretentious even to himself.
Remy raised his fist and knocked.
Nothing.
He knocked again, harder.
Still nothing.
He was about to knock a third time when the door swung open, and every prepared word in Remy’s extensive vocabulary evaporated like steam off a hot pan.
The man in the doorway was…
Well.
Big didn’t cover it. Big was a retriever or a linebacker or a particularly ambitious SUV. This man was something else entirely—a wall of flannel-covered muscle that filled the doorframe like he’d been built specifically to fit it. Six and a half feet at least, probably closer to six-six, with shoulders wide enough to have their own weather system. Dark beard, neatly trimmed but substantial. Arms that strained the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. Hands that looked like they could crush a cantaloupe without trying.
Remy’s eyes traveled up—and up, and up, his neck craning back like he was trying to find the top of a redwood—until they finally reached a face that was all hard angles and shadowed eyes and an expression of profound, weathered irritation.
“You’re the chef,” the man said. Not a question. His voice was a low rumble, the kind you felt in your chest before you heard it in your ears.
Remy opened his mouth. What came out was: “I—you—the peppers—”
Eloquent, he thought bitterly. Really top-notch stuff.
“The one who’s been blowing up my voicemail.” The man—Silas, it had to be Silas—looked him over with the kind of assessment usually reserved for livestock at auction. Whatever he saw apparently didn’t impress him. “You look like a drowned rat.”
“I’m—” Remy drew himself up to his full five-foot-five, which put the top of his head somewhere around the middle of Silas’s chest. “I’m Remy Castillo. Executive chef at Verdure. I drove four hours in a monsoon to talk to you about your peppers, my car is stuck in your driveway, I’m soaking wet and covered in what I sincerely hope is mud, and I will pay whatever you want if you’ll just sell me enough New Mexico Hatch chiles to get through next week.”
He was breathing hard by the end of it, rain dripping from his hair into his eyes, and he realized distantly that he probably looked completely insane.
Silas stared at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth twitched.
“No.”
“No?” Remy blinked. “What do you mean, no?”
“It’s a short word. Two letters. Means the opposite of yes.” Silas leaned against the doorframe, arms crossing over his chest in a way that made his biceps do something frankly obscene. “I don’t sell to people who show up uninvited. I don’t sell to people who leave six voicemails in a week. And I don’t sell to city chefs who think they can throw money at everything.”
“But I need—”
“That’s your problem. Not mine.”
He started to close the door.
“Wait—” Remy stuck his foot in the gap, which was either brave or stupid, and from the look Silas gave him, it was definitely the latter. “Please. I’m not trying to—look, I know I’m being a lot right now. I know I showed up like a crazy person. But I’ve got a critic coming in five days. The most important critic in D.C. And my entire signature dish depends on peppers that are currently decomposing in an Albuquerque shipping facility because someone didn’t understand basic refrigeration.”
Silas’s expression didn’t change.
“I’ve tasted produce from every farm within two hundred miles,” Remy continued, the words tumbling out faster now, “and none of it—none of it—has the complexity I need. But I’ve heard about your chiles. I’ve heard they’re different. That you’ve somehow managed to grow New Mexico heat in Virginia soil. And I just…” He exhaled, all the fight going out of him. “I’m desperate. I know you can tell. I know I look pathetic. But I’m asking anyway, because my restaurant is everything I have, and I can’t—”
A sound cut him off.
Not thunder—though there was plenty of that rolling in the distance. This was different. A crack, sharp and sudden, followed by a roar that vibrated through the porch boards and into Remy’s ruined loafers.
Both of them turned toward the sound.
Through the sheets of rain, maybe fifty yards down the road, Remy could just make out a structure—or what used to be a structure. A bridge. Wooden, single-lane, spanning what he now realized was a creek that had become a river that had become a churning brown monster of debris and force.
As he watched, the last section of the bridge—the section he’d driven across not fifteen minutes ago—tore free from its moorings and disappeared downstream.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Silas said, flatly: “Well. You ain’t going nowhere now.”
Remy’s brain, which had been operating on pure adrenaline and desperation for the past several hours, finally gave up. “What?”
“Miller’s Bridge.” Silas nodded toward the destruction. “Only road in or out when the creek floods. Which it’s doing.”
“But—but how long—”
“Few days. Maybe a week. Depends on the rain.” Silas pushed off from the doorframe, turning back into the dark interior of the house. “You coming in, or you wanna drown out there?”
Remy stood frozen on the porch, rain running down his face, his brain trying desperately to process this new information. Stranded. He was stranded. In rural Virginia. With a man who looked like he could bench-press a tractor and had just told him no with the finality of a closing door.
His phone buzzed. He pulled it out with numb fingers and looked at the screen.
Delacroix confirmed for Friday. 8pm. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Right.
Friday.
Five days.
Which he would apparently be spending trapped at a farm with a reclusive giant who didn’t want him here and had no intention of selling him anything.
“Mierda,” Remy whispered.
From somewhere inside the house, Silas’s voice rumbled: “You letting all the heat out. Get in or stay out. Decide.”
Remy looked back at the churning water where the bridge used to be. Looked at his car, barely visible through the rain, sunk up to its wheel wells in mud. Looked at his ruined shoes, his destroyed chef’s whites, his life spiraling out of control in ways he couldn’t have imagined this morning.
Then he stepped inside.
The door closed behind him with a heavy thunk, sealing out the storm, and Remy Castillo found himself standing in a stranger’s house with no escape route, no cell signal, and no plan.
The massive farmer stood in the hallway ahead of him, already walking away, his broad back filling the corridor like a wall.
“Guest room’s upstairs,” Silas said without turning around. “Kitchen’s through there if you’re hungry. Don’t touch anything you can’t identify.”
And then he disappeared around a corner, leaving Remy dripping on the hardwood floor, alone with the howling wind and the dawning realization that his life had just taken a very, very unexpected turn.
He was trapped.
With him.
For a week.
Remy closed his eyes and wondered if it was too late to go drown in the creek.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is Raw & Roasted spicy?
Very! Heat level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ (Inferno). This is a high-heat MM romance with explicit content including multiple detailed intimate scenes, praise kink, and breeding kink language. The tension builds through forced proximity before exploding in scorching encounters throughout the book.
What is MM romance?
MM means a romantic relationship between two men. In Raw & Roasted, Remy (26, chef) and Silas (34, farmer) are both the main characters. The book features their complete love story from meeting to happily ever after.
Is this book part of a series?
Raw & Roasted is Book 1 in the Ironroot Farm series, but it’s a complete standalone with no cliffhanger. Remy and Silas get their full HEA in this book. Future books may follow other characters in the Ironroot Farm world.
What tropes are in this book?
Raw & Roasted features: grumpy/sunshine (with a brat twist), forced proximity (washed-out bridge), there’s only one bed, size difference (6’6″ farmer, 5’5″ chef), age gap (34/26), praise kink, breeding kink language, and city boy meets country boy.
Is there a happily ever after?
Always. Every Fractal Enigma book ends with a guaranteed HEA. Remy and Silas face real obstacles—including their own fears and insecurities—but they earn their happiness together. No cliffhangers, no unresolved endings.
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