Booked Solid

An MM Contemporary Romance · by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Praise Kink, Opposites Attract, Slow Burn, Class Difference, Competence Kink, Blue Collar, Touch Starved, Control/Surrender, Hurt/Comfort, He Falls First, Found Family, Second Chances

He came for the books. He stayed for the librarian who called him smart.

Miles Hartman runs the Bellhaven Public Library with meticulous precision, laminated policies, and the quiet authority of a man who has never once raised his voice and never needed to. He’s brilliant, controlled, and three years into a loneliness he’s mistaken for stability.

Jax Rivera is a tattooed bartender who dropped out of high school at sixteen. He’s loud, charming, and secretly studying for his GED in the back corner of the nonfiction section — hiding his workbooks under magazines so nobody sees him trying, because trying feels like a confession of failure.

When Miles catches Jax studying and offers to tutor him, their late-night sessions ignite a praise-kink-loaded affair that rewrites both their lives. Every “good” and “correct” and “excellent” that falls from Miles’s lips lands on Jax like a detonation — rewiring the damage of years of being told he was stupid. And every time Jax calls Miles’s intelligence sexy instead of cute, it heals the scar left by an ex who called his career a joke.

But the library is under threat. A city councilwoman is pushing a 30% budget cut, and if anyone discovers that the head librarian is sleeping with the patron he’s privately tutoring, the scandal could destroy everything Miles has built — including the program that’s saving Jax.

With the budget vote looming and their relationship threatening to become a weapon in someone else’s war, Miles and Jax must decide: play it safe, or fight for the library, each other, and the radical belief that second chances are real.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Grumpy librarian x tattooed bad boy MM romance

✅ Praise kink so devastating it should be classified as a weapon

✅ “Good boy” as both a kink and a healing mechanism

✅ Homework-to-orgasm reward systems (yes, really)

✅ A hero who grades your work with a red pen and then takes you apart

✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)

✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink, edging, and power exchange), strong language, references to past emotional abuse, and depictions of academic shame and self-doubt. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Quiet, Please

The library opened its doors at eight o’clock every morning, but Miles Hartman unlocked them at six forty-five.

He told himself it was practical. The budget reports didn’t read themselves, the overnight book drop needed sorting, and the self-checkout kiosks had a nasty habit of freezing if you didn’t restart them before the server cache hit capacity.

But the real reason—the one Miles would never admit to anyone, not even Noor, who could extract confessions like a dental surgeon—was that he liked the library when it was empty.

Not because he didn’t like people. He did. In theory. In controlled, manageable doses, with clear behavioral expectations and a laminated set of guidelines posted at every entrance.

No, he liked the library empty because that was when it felt the most like his.

Miles walked the floors in the gray half-light of early morning. He straightened a chair at one of the reading tables. He paused at the periodicals section to square a stack of newspapers. He ran his finger along the spine of a reshelved biography in the 920s—it was in the right spot; Derek had been getting better—and continued toward the circulation desk.

Bellhaven Public Library was not a beautiful building. It was a mid-century brick rectangle that had been renovated twice, expanded once, and re-roofed with a material the county had gotten a bulk discount on. The carpet was industrial gray. The fluorescent lights hummed at a frequency that Miles had learned to stop hearing somewhere around year two.

But it was his. His name on the door of the head librarian’s office. His system—painstakingly designed, ruthlessly maintained—that kept twelve thousand volumes organized, circulating, and available to anyone who walked through the doors.

The fourth email of the morning was from the office of Councilwoman Patricia Langford. Miles set down his coffee.

As part of the City of Bellhaven’s ongoing fiscal review, the Budget and Finance Committee is recommending a 30% reduction to the Bellhaven Public Library’s annual operating funds, effective next fiscal year.

Thirty percent. He did the math without reaching for a calculator, because Miles always did the math. Thirty percent meant cutting part-time staff by half. It meant gutting the programming budget. It meant the adult education initiative he’d spent eighteen months building would be the first thing on the chopping block.

He sat very still in his chair and breathed.

Noor Patel arrived at eight-fifteen with a tote bag full of puppet supplies. “Langford’s office sent the budget recommendation.”

“Thirty percent.”

“You can’t data your way out of this alone,” Noor said. “You need stories. You need faces.”

At two-seventeen, the predictable script was shredded, set on fire, and thrown out the window.

The front doors opened with the full-body confidence of someone who had never once considered whether he was being too loud—and a man walked in laughing.

Not chuckling. Laughing—a full, carrying, room-filling sound that rolled across the reading room like a thunderclap across a wheat field.

The man was—Miles’s brain supplied the word before he could stop it—conspicuous. Tall, broad through the shoulders, with dark hair and a left arm covered in tattoos. He wore a henley with the sleeves pushed up, jeans that had seen better decades, and boots that had no business being on library carpet.

He also had dimples.

He dropped into a chair near the magazine rack, propped his boots on the reading table—on the TABLE—and kept talking at a volume calibrated for a packed sports bar.

Mrs. Chen shot Miles a look of undisguised outrage.

Miles adjusted his glasses. Walked out from behind the circulation desk.

“Sir. You’re in a library.”

“I know. The sign out front was a big clue.”

“We also have a policy regarding phone usage in the reading room.”

The man hung up. “Better?”

“Your feet. They’re on the table.”

“Furniture is for sitting in. Not on.”

He laughed and swung his boots off the table. “You’re intense. Very committed to the bit.”

“It’s not a bit. It’s a publicly funded institution with behavioral expectations.”

He extended a hand. “I’m Jax.”

Miles did not shake it. “I’m the head librarian, and I’m issuing you a verbal reminder about our patron conduct guidelines.”

“You’re going to laminate something at me, aren’t you?”

“The guidelines are pre-laminated.”

“Okay, Library Dad. I’ll behave.”

Something about the way Jax said it—casual, teasing, with a hint of heat beneath the humor—lodged itself sideways in Miles’s chest.

“Don’t call me that. Mr. Hartman. Or ‘sir.’ Both are acceptable.”

Jax’s eyes changed. A flicker, a darkening. “Yes, sir,” Jax said. Soft. Almost sincere.

Miles turned on his heel and walked back to the circulation desk. He was not thinking about dimples. He was not thinking about the word sir.

At closing, Miles did his final walk-through. In the 500s—science and mathematics—he stopped.

There was a book on the table. GED Test Prep: Mathematics. The spine was cracked at the chapter on fractions.

He thought about Jax, sprawled near the periodicals with Popular Mechanics, and dismissed it. The book belonged to someone else. Probably.

Miles reshelved the book. 510.76, test preparation. Everything in its proper place.

He drove home and sat at his kitchen table until midnight, building a spreadsheet that would prove this library was worth saving.

He did not think about dimples. He did not think about the word sir.

The last thing that flickered through his mind before sleep wasn’t a percentage or a line item. It was a laugh. Warm and careless and entirely too loud for a library.

Miles turned off the light and told himself it didn’t mean anything.

He was sure of it.

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Six months after the epilogue. Jax makes the Dean’s List. Miles grades his transcript with a red pen. The most explicit, praise-heavy, emotionally devastating scene in the series.

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