Cabin Fever Praise

MM Snowed-In Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Snowed In, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Grumpy/Sunshine, Praise Kink, Touch Starved, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort

One blizzard. One bed. One word that changes everything: gorgeous.

Ethan Park is a burned-out corporate lawyer who hasn’t slept through the night in three years. When HR forces him into a mandatory wellness break at a remote mountain cabin, he arrives with a laptop, a scowl, and zero intention of relaxing.

Cal Rivera is a musician, woodworker, and full-time caretaker who’s been told by every partner he’s ever had that he’s “too much.” Too warm. Too open. Too generous with his praise.

When a massive blizzard kills the power and buries the roads, Ethan has no choice but to move into Cal’s cabin. One bedroom. One bed. And a man whose praise—you’re beautiful, you’re perfect, you’re so good—keeps landing in places Ethan didn’t know were empty.

But Ethan’s last boyfriend weaponized praise to control him. And Cal’s exes said his warmth was suffocating. Now they’re trapped together, falling fast, and the question isn’t whether the cabin can survive the storm—it’s whether what they’re building can survive the real world waiting on the other side of it.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Snowed-in forced proximity with one bed
✅ Grumpy corporate lawyer × sunshine cabin caretaker
✅ Praise kink as the emotional engine of the entire romance
✅ Touch-starved hero who learns to receive love
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ 12 explicit scenes, each emotionally distinct
✅ A hero who plays guitar and carves bowls and says “goodnight gorgeous” every night
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink, sensory deprivation, and emotional intensity), strong language, depictions of burnout, panic attacks, and past emotional manipulation. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: ETHAN

The cabin looked like it was trying to kill me with sincerity.

Cedar siding. A-frame roof. A porch with two rocking chairs that no one had ever rocked in because this was a rental, not a Hallmark movie. There was a wreath on the door made of actual pine boughs, and I stood in the gravel driveway with my rolling suitcase and my laptop bag and my very last nerve, staring at it like it had personally wronged me.

Elk Ridge Cabin Retreat. Nestled in the Colorado Rockies. Peaceful. Restorative. Off-grid enough that your senior partner can’t email you seventeen times about the Henderson deposition.

That last part wasn’t in the brochure, but it should have been. It was the entire reason I was here.

Well. That and the HR department at Whitfield & Ames, which had apparently decided that logging four hundred billable hours in a single month was less of an achievement and more of a “wellness concern.” Diane from Human Resources had used the phrase “mandatory decompression period” with the calm authority of someone delivering a prison sentence, and I had sat in her beige office with my jaw clenched so hard my dentist would have wept, and I had said, “I’m fine,” and Diane had said, “Your badge access logged you entering the building at 4 AM eleven times last month,” and that had been the end of the conversation.

Ten days. Ten days of forced relaxation in a cabin I didn’t choose in a mountain range I didn’t care about, and then I could go back to my life and my desk and my slowly developing ulcer like a normal person.

I was fishing the lockbox code out of my email when I heard the truck.

It came around the bend in the access road with the easy rumble of something that had been doing this drive for years. A dark blue pickup, mud-splattered, with a dog’s head hanging out the passenger window like a furry gargoyle. The truck pulled up next to my sedan and the engine cut, and the driver’s door swung open, and the man who climbed out was—

Tall. That was the first thing. Taller than me by a few inches, with broad shoulders and forearms that suggested he did something more physical than type for a living. Dark curly hair that needed a cut, brown skin, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows despite the fact that it was thirty-eight degrees out. He had a gap between his front teeth that I noticed when he smiled, which was immediately, like smiling was his default setting.

“You must be Ethan!” He crossed the distance between us in three strides and stuck out his hand. His grip was warm and firm and calloused. “I’m Cal. Caleb Rivera. I take care of the cabins. Welcome to Elk Ridge.”

“Thanks.” I extracted my hand. “I found the lockbox code, so I should be—”

“Oh, let me give you the full tour first.” He was already reaching for my suitcase. I watched him grab it before I could protest, hoist it like it weighed nothing, and head for the porch.

I walked into the cabin and was hit with the smell of wood polish and something faintly herbal. The interior was exactly what I’d expected: open-plan living area, a couch and armchair facing a stone fireplace, a loft bedroom accessible by a steep staircase. Wood everywhere. It was aggressively rustic in a way that probably charmed normal people.

I was not normal people. I was a man who organized his sock drawer by color gradient and found emotional comfort in fluorescent office lighting.

Cal showed me the woodstove—the damper, the flue, the air intake. “It’s your main heat source if the power goes,” he said. “Storm season.” He said it casually, like other people said Tuesday.

As he was leaving, Cal stopped on the threshold and turned back, and his face did something different. The professional friendliness softened into something more genuine.

“Hey, Ethan? Good for you. Seriously. Taking time for yourself like this—most people don’t do it until it’s too late. Whatever’s going on back home that made you book this place, you’re doing the right thing by stepping away from it.”

The words landed somewhere in my chest that I didn’t have a name for. Not the usual spot where compliments from strangers bounced off the armor—lower, softer, in the place where things actually registered. I didn’t like it.

“Thanks,” I said, in a tone specifically engineered to communicate please leave now.

The truck started. Pulled away. Disappeared around the bend, and there was nothing left but wind and trees and the enormous, oppressive silence of nature.

I stood in the middle of the cabin. It was quiet. Not city-quiet. Mountain quiet. The kind of silence that says you are alone and means it.

I opened my laptop. The screen informed me cheerfully that it could not connect to the internet. I closed the laptop. Opened it again. Closed it.

By five o’clock, the cabin was getting cold. I looked at the woodstove. I had never started a fire that didn’t involve a gas burner. But I was a man with two Ivy League degrees. How hard could it be?

Very hard, as it turned out. Forty-five minutes, three failed attempts, and one near-incident with lighter fluid later, I was crouching in front of the stove with ash on my hands and smoke in my eyes.

I ate a granola bar for dinner. Sat on the couch in my jacket. Thought about Cal Rivera, standing in my doorway, saying good for you, taking time for yourself. Like it was brave.

Most people don’t do it until it’s too late.

He’d said it like he meant it. And the worst part was the way it had landed. Not on the armor. Under it.

I went to the window. The sky above the tree line was thick with stars—more than I’d ever seen, a ludicrous excess of stars that made the sky look crowded and close and alive.

I watched them for longer than I’d planned. Then I went upstairs, got into the bed that smelled like clean linen and cedar, and lay in the dark listening to the silence.

I thought about a gap-toothed smile and calloused hands and a voice that said you’re doing the right thing like it was fact and not opinion.

I didn’t sleep for a long time. But when I did, I slept deeper than I had in months, and I didn’t dream about work.

I dreamed about nothing at all, and it was the best dream I’d had in years.

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Say It Again — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Ethan comes home from Chicago with a blindfold and a request: praise me until I can’t remember my own name. Cal obliges. Sensory deprivation, edging, a mandatory “I believe you” rule, and the safeword is “damper”—because that’s where it all began.

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