Brat in the Boardroom
MM Contemporary Office Romance
by Jace Wilder
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Boss/Intern, Brat/Tamer, Age Gap, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Forbidden Romance, Workplace Romance
He said “obedience.” The intern said “make me.”
Marcus Hale is the CEO of a fast-growing consulting firm on the verge of a four-hundred-million-dollar merger. Impeccable suits. Inhuman discipline. A corner office that makes people sit up straighter just walking past. He doesn’t do relationships inside the building. He doesn’t do vulnerability. And he absolutely does not notice the new intern’s mouth.
Cole Bennett is a first-gen scholarship kid who landed the internship of a lifetime and immediately decided to make it interesting. He’s brilliant, ambitious, constitutionally incapable of following a single instruction, and has been thinking about Marcus Hale’s forearms since the keynote he watched four times on YouTube.
When a stopped elevator, a grabbed wrist, and one devastating kiss turn professional tension into something that can’t be undone, Marcus and Cole fall into a filthy, secret office affair built on brat-taming, power exchange, and rules they keep breaking. But a senior VP’s billing fraud, spreading rumors, and the merger threatening to collapse force both men to choose: protect the deal or protect each other.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Boss/intern MM with real power dynamics and on-page consent
✅ Brat-tamer heat that escalates from elevator to desk to conference table
✅ Age gap (38/24) with class contrast and mutual respect
✅ Workplace forbidden romance with real professional stakes
✅ A CEO who learns that protection without permission is just control
✅ An intern who refuses to be invisible — or quiet
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ graphic, explicit, emotional — 10+ on-page scenes
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including D/s dynamics, spanking, edging, restraint, and power exchange), strong language, workplace power imbalance (handled with on-page consent and safewords), corporate fraud subplot, and emotional intensity. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
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Chapter One: First Impression
The revolving door spits me into the lobby of Hale Strategy Group at 8:51 AM, nine minutes before orientation starts on the eleventh floor, with pit stains blooming under my best dress shirt and the distinct sensation that I’m about to throw up the bodega coffee I chugged on the walk here.
Fourteen blocks. I walked fourteen blocks in August because the universe decided that today — the single most important day of my professional life — was the day my MetroCard would decline at the turnstile. So I climbed back up the subway stairs into the wet wall of Manhattan heat and I walked.
Now I’m here. Sweating. In the lobby of a building that probably costs more per square foot than my childhood home cost in total, and I have exactly seven minutes to find an elevator, find a bathroom, blot my forehead with a paper towel, and walk into that orientation room like I belong here.
I belong here. I earned this. Top of my MBA cohort. Published case study. Three rounds of interviews where I smiled until my face ached and answered every question like my life depended on it because, functionally, it did.
Eleven. Doors open. I follow the signs to Conference Room B and push through the glass door at 8:54. Six heads turn. The program director pauses mid-sentence and looks at me over her reading glasses.
“Mr. Bennett. Good of you to join us.”
The woman next to me whispers: “I’m Priya. You look like you ran here.”
“Walked. Aggressively.”
I decided immediately that Priya was my favorite person in this building.
The program director is explaining the rotation schedule when the conference room door opens and every molecule of air in the room rearranges itself.
He’s taller than the photos suggest. Six-two, maybe six-three, built like a man who treats the gym the way I treat coffee — religiously and as a matter of survival. Dark hair with silver threading through the temples that looks like a warning label. His suit is charcoal, tailored within an inch of its life.
He walks to the head of the table and the room contracts. Every person physically straightens. He hasn’t said a word yet and he’s already the loudest thing in the room.
“Good morning. I’m Marcus Hale. I founded this company twelve years ago, and I run it because nobody’s been stupid enough to try to take it from me.”
His eyes sweep the table. They move over the other interns like a scanner. Then they get to me, and they stop.
It’s probably one second. Maybe two. But I feel the weight of it in my sternum. He looks at me — not past me, not through me, at me.
I’m mid-sip. The water goes down the wrong pipe. I cough into my fist and his gaze moves on.
Christ.
He delivers his terms and leaves, like a storm that blows through and expects you to assess the damage on your own.
By noon, we have our rotation assignments. I get the merger prep team — the one working directly on the Apex Partners acquisition, the biggest deal this company has ever attempted.
“Is this real?” I show Priya the email over lunch.
“You’ll be on the executive floor. Near Hale’s office.”
“Try not to choke on any more water.”
By 7:30 I’m the last one in the building. I round the corner toward the elevator bank and walk directly into a wall.
Not a wall. A chest — broad and solid beneath a charcoal suit jacket that I recognize because I’ve been trying not to think about it all day.
His hand catches my arm. Firm, instinctive. His fingers wrapping around my bicep with a casual strength that sends an electric current straight down my spine.
“Watch where you’re going, Bennett.”
He knows my name. Out of six interns who started today, he knows my name.
“Most interns leave at five,” he says.
“I’m not most interns.”
His grip tightens — fractionally — and then he lets go. Steps back.
“No,” he says, his voice lower, rougher at the edges. “I don’t think you are.”
He walks toward his office without looking back. I stand there watching Marcus Hale’s shoulders move under that perfect suit until he disappears and I remember how to breathe.
I have one rule for this internship. Don’t fall for Marcus Hale.
I’ve been at Hale Strategy Group for twelve hours and the rule is already in trouble.
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The New Table — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
The new dining table arrives. It seats six. Marcus and Cole christen it before breakfast. Oak surface, morning light, and the filthiest, funniest, most domestic scene in the series.
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He moved in broke and broken. The man downstairs decided that was his problem now.
Sweat, Stretch, Submit
He came to sweat. He stayed to surrender.
Step Out of Line
He walked into his dad's kitchen and found the man who used to own him on his knees—proposing to his father.
Brat in the Boardroom
He said “obedience.” The intern said “make me.”
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