Black Tie Damage

MM Celebrity Bodyguard Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Celebrity Bodyguard, Second Chance, Forced Proximity, Age Gap, Closeted Bisexual, Romantic Suspense, Protective Hero, Scar Worship, Control/Surrender, Coming Out

Hollywood thinks Julian Cross has no fear. Gabe Navarro knows exactly where he hides it.

Julian Cross is Hollywood’s most profitable action star. He’s also seven years into pretending the only man he ever loved never existed. When a threat at a black-tie awards gala turns violent, Julian’s insurer brings in an independent executive-protection team. Its lead threat specialist is Gabriel Navarro — the former bodyguard Julian kissed in hotel corridors, promised a future, and abandoned without explanation.

Gabe wants the contract, the answers he was denied, and nothing else. Then the threats begin referencing a stunt performer who died on Julian’s breakthrough film — and a studio cover-up Julian helped keep buried. Forced into a secure residence together, Julian and Gabe uncover evidence that someone is trying to make Julian confess while someone else is trying to ensure he never reaches a microphone.

Their attraction survives the years. Trust may not survive what Julian chose to hide.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A silver-templed action star in tailored black tie
✅ A disciplined former lover in an immaculate security suit
✅ Second-chance bodyguard romance with forced safehouse proximity
✅ “Are you still on duty?” tension that COMBUSTS (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Both men top and receive — no fixed hierarchy
✅ A credible romantic suspense plot with real stakes
✅ Cuff-link removal as foreplay (you’re welcome)
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit consensual sexual content (graphic MM scenes including switching), gun violence, threats and stalking, on-set death in backstory, corporate cover-up, career coercion, vehicle sabotage, celebrity closeting, bisexual erasure, and a temporary breakup. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Black Tie Damage

The tuxedo cost eleven thousand dollars.

I mention this not because money matters — though it does, viscerally, to the boy from Brixton who still lives somewhere behind my sternum — but because in approximately fourteen minutes, a man with a borrowed service credential and a modified prop revolver would put a bullet through a Swarovski chandelier and ruin it.

Eleven thousand dollars of midnight-navy Brioni, hand-stitched in Rome. The fit was obscene. The lapels were satin-faced and sharp enough to cut, the trousers tapered to break precisely at the shoe, the shirt so white it looked like a religious experience. I wore it the way I wore everything at these events: like armor. Like a costume designed by a committee to communicate that Julian Cross was controlled, masculine, untouchable, and absolutely fine.

I was none of those things.

But I was very, very good at the performance.

“Julian, you look incredible tonight.” Simone Adler, head of acquisitions at Lionsgate, pressed her cheek against mine. She smelled like Chanel and ambition. “Ashes of August is extraordinary. You should be proud.”

“I am. Tremendously.” I gave her the smile — the one my publicist called the Closer. Teeth without hunger. Warmth without access. Enough charm to imply intimacy while promising nothing.

Simone held my arm a beat too long. Her eyes said she was calculating whether sleeping with me would advance her career or complicate it. I’d been subject to that particular equation since I was thirty and foolish enough to believe it was flattering.

“We should have dinner,” she said.

“We absolutely should.”

We would not.

I extracted myself with the ease of long practice and moved through the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire, the charity gala for the Film Industry Safety Foundation unfurling around me like a very expensive anxiety dream. Crystal chandeliers. White roses in silver urns. Eight hundred guests in formal wear worth more than most people’s houses, drinking champagne that cost more per glass than a day’s wages in any of the countries where my franchise grossed its billions.

I hated these events.

Not the charity — the Safety Foundation was one of the few causes I gave to without needing my publicist to suggest it. The irony of that was a blade I’d been swallowing for nine years. I hated the performance. The careful navigation of bodies and agendas, the mental map of who I could speak to, who I should avoid, whose handshake disguised a negotiation, whose smile was a threat assessment.

My left knee was already stiffening. Three hours in dress shoes, concrete beneath thin carpet, and the cartilage that eleven years of action films had turned to gravel was staging its nightly protest. I shifted my weight, adjusted my stance, made the movement look like I was turning toward a waiter for champagne. No one noticed the limp because no one was supposed to.

Cal Ward didn’t limp.

At 9:47 PM, I was standing near the far bar discussing distribution models with an A24 executive when a man I had never seen before walked directly toward me through the crowd.

He was mid-thirties. Average height. Dark hair, pale skin, unremarkable suit. He moved with purpose but not urgency, which is why the security detail didn’t intercept him — he looked like every junior publicist, every assistant producer, every mid-level executive who populated these events like well-dressed furniture.

His credentials were valid. I would learn later that they were duplicates of a real catering employee’s service badge.

He was six feet from me when I noticed his hand.

It held a revolver. Short-barreled. Silver. The kind of prop I had held in forty-three scenes across eleven years — I recognized the silhouette the way a carpenter recognizes a hammer.

Then the sound.

A gunshot indoors is nothing like the movies. It is a flat, enormous crack that empties the world of every other frequency. The bullet went high and struck the chandelier above me.

Glass fell.

I turned my head — instinct, not training — and a shard opened my left cheek from the corner of my eye to my jawline. Blood appeared with the strange immediacy of a practical effect, hot and bright against white shirt.

Chaos. Screaming. Eight hundred people in formal wear stampeding toward exits while the man with the revolver moved through the panic like a swimmer through current.

The man disappeared through the east service corridor — the one I had walked exactly once before, seven years ago, with a man’s hand on my lower back, my bow tie undone, my mouth still tasting like his.

The attacker used the same route.

There are coincidences, and then there are messages.

A black envelope was found beneath my chair. Inside was a photograph of a man named Elias Ward — a stunt rigger who died on the set of my breakthrough film — and one line from a safety complaint that was supposed to have been destroyed:

HE TOLD YOU THE LINE WOULD FAIL.

My hand moved to the scar beneath my ribs. The long one. The one I touched when I was hiding something.

Someone had the original documents. Someone knew about the corridor, the cover-up, the man I had erased from my life with eleven words and a blocked number.

I pressed my fingers against the scar and breathed and did not think about him.

I did not think about him so hard that my eyes burned.

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The First Stay — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Three months into the reconciliation. The first time Gabe sleeps over at Julian’s actual house — not the safehouse. The cuff-link ritual performed in Julian’s own bedroom for the first time. Domestic, scorching, joyful. The ordinary made extraordinary.

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