By the Book, By the Bed

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Forced Proximity, Opposites Attract, Touch Starved, He Falls First, Slow Burn, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, Control/Surrender

He enforces the rules. He breaks every one. The library has never been this hot.

Adrian Vale is the head of Special Collections at the Bellwood Public Library — precise, private, meticulous, and untouchable. He keeps his world organized because his emotions are not. He hasn’t been touched in three years. He hasn’t been seen in longer.

Ben Carver is a bestselling romance novelist hiding behind a pen name, writing in libraries because the silence quiets his anxiety. He’s loud when comfortable, shameless when flirting, and deeply observant underneath the act. He pushes Adrian’s buttons because Adrian reacts — and Ben hasn’t felt anything real in months.

What starts as a battle over iced coffee and seating policy becomes something neither of them expected: a slow, devastating, scorching romance where the strict one learns how to let go and the messy one learns how deeply he wants to be kept. But when Adrian discovers that Ben has been writing their love story in real time — every touch, every confession, every sound he makes in the dark — the trust they’ve built shatters. And the only thing that can repair it is the truth neither of them has been brave enough to say.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Grumpy librarian x sunshine chaos writer
✅ Forced proximity slow burn that DETONATES
✅ Touch-starved hero who falls first and falls HARD
✅ “Only soft for you” and competence kink energy
✅ Scorching heat with deep emotional payoff (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, devastating)
✅ A hero who learns that control isn’t the opposite of love — it’s the infrastructure
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, depictions of anxiety and panic attacks, discussions of isolation and touch starvation, and themes of emotional vulnerability. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Adrian

The alarm went off at 5:45, same as every morning.

Adrian silenced it on the first chime. He didn’t need the second. His body woke at 5:42 like clockwork, those three minutes before the alarm a small luxury he allowed himself — lying still in clean sheets, cataloguing the day ahead.

Adrian Vale did not have a complicated relationship with routine. Routine was the point.

He showered at 5:50. Shaved at 6:02. Dressed by 6:15 — navy slacks, white button-down, sleeves he’d roll precisely twice once he reached the archive room. He made coffee in a pour-over that he cleaned every night. Two scoops. Water at 205 degrees. Four minutes.

By 6:40 he was in his car — a ten-year-old Volvo he kept immaculate — and by 6:55 he was unlocking the side entrance of the Bellwood Public Library.

The library in the early morning was his favorite version of the building. No patrons. No questions. Just the hum of the HVAC cycling on, the particular smell of old paper and binding glue that most people found musty and Adrian found sacred.

Adrian unlocked Special Collections, stepped inside, and exhaled. Order. Perfect, immaculate order.

The correspondence was personal — love letters between two men who’d served together and then spent thirty years writing to each other. Adrian handled them gently. I keep your last letter in my coat pocket. I know you’d say that’s sentimental. I don’t care anymore.

He closed the folder and labeled it and didn’t think about the fact that no one had ever written him a letter.

And then, at 10:47 AM on an unremarkable Monday in October, a man walked into the main reading room carrying an iced coffee and ruined everything.

He saw the coffee first. A large plastic cup, sweating with condensation, sitting on the oak table like an act of war. Then he saw the man holding it.

Broad shoulders in a rumpled green flannel. Brown hair pushed back from a face that was — unreasonably attractive.

“The policy is the policy,” Adrian said.

“Adrian.” He said it like he was tasting it. “I’m Ben. Ben Carver. But if the rule is the rule—” He raised the cup in a mock toast. “Then the rule is the rule.”

He drank the rest in three long swallows — Adrian watched his throat work, then immediately stopped watching his throat work.

“Which table should I use, Adrian?”

Adrian pointed to a table by the windows. “That one’s available for general use.”

“Thank you, Adrian,” Ben said as he passed, and his voice dropped half a register on the name, and Adrian felt it in his sternum.

But at 5 PM, when the library closed, tucked under the lamp, there was a note in loose, sprawling handwriting:

Thanks for the table, Adrian. Same time tomorrow? — B

He folded the note precisely in half. He put it in his pocket.

And if he unfolded the note once, standing at the kitchen counter, and read it again —

Well. That was no one’s business but his.

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After Hours — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

The library is closed. Adrian is alone with a preservation report. Then Ben walks in with a key, a bottle of wine, and a “research question” that requires verifying three specific locations: the archive room desk, the conservation stacks, and the window table where their story began.

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