Good Boy Clause
MM Landlord/Tenant Romance
by Jace Wilder
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Length: ~89,000 words · Standalone · HEA
Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Age Gap, Landlord/Tenant, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Blue Collar, Only Soft For You, Hurt/Comfort
He needed a rent discount. He got a landlord who calls him “good boy.”
Mark Russo is a gruff, 36-year-old building super who inherited a crumbling six-unit apartment building and pours every dollar back into keeping it standing. He doesn’t do relationships — his ex-wife called him boring, just a handyman, and he believed her. He keeps tenants at arm’s length and feelings behind drywall.
Jamie Ellis is a broke, 23-year-old barista and freelance illustrator who moved to the city with big dreams and now can’t make rent. He’s a sunshine disaster — chatty, clumsy, chronically over-apologetic, and so desperate to be liked that he’ll set himself on fire to keep other people warm.
When Jamie falls behind on rent, Mark offers a deal: help with building repairs and chores for a partial discount. It’s practical. Impersonal. Temporary.
Except Jamie lights up every time Mark tells him he did something right. And Mark can’t stop watching the way the kid’s whole body goes soft and eager when he hears “good boy.” What starts as a work arrangement becomes something neither of them has a name for — until they have to decide whether what they’re building together is a transaction, a kink, or the real thing.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Grumpy landlord x sunshine tenant MM romance
✅ Praise kink — “good boy” as love language (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
✅ 13-year age gap with clear adult-adult dynamics
✅ Forced proximity in a shared building
✅ Blue collar hero who communicates through hardware
✅ “Only soft for you” energy from a man built like a truck
✅ Hurt/comfort that earns every tear and every repair
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink, D/s dynamics, and detailed sexual encounters), strong language, financial stress, and depictions of anxiety, people-pleasing, and the aftermath of an emotionally manipulative relationship. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: The Overdue Envelope
The notice was taped to his door like a parking ticket on a windshield — except parking tickets didn’t make Jamie Ellis’s entire digestive system rearrange itself.
He peeled the paper off carefully, as if gentleness might change what it said. Block letters, written in black Sharpie on a torn sheet of yellow legal pad. Not typed. Not printed. Handwritten, like the man had taken personal offense at Jamie’s bank account.
UNIT 3A — RENT 45 DAYS PAST DUE. SEE ME ABOUT YOUR ACCOUNT TODAY. — M. RUSSO
Today was underlined twice.
Jamie stared at the note, then at his apartment door, then back at the note, as though a third reading might reveal a hidden message. Something like: Just kidding, rent is free this month! Or: I’ve decided to become a philanthropist!
No such luck.
He let himself inside and leaned against the door, pressing the note against his chest. His studio apartment stared back at him — four hundred square feet of controlled chaos that was starting to feel less controlled and more chaotic by the week.
Forty-five days. He’d known it was bad. He hadn’t known it was forty-five-days bad.
Checking account: $47.23. Savings: $0.00. Credit card: he didn’t look. Some numbers were better left as theoretical concepts.
He needed to go downstairs. The note said today, underlined twice, and Jamie had a strong suspicion that M. Russo was not a man who appreciated being kept waiting.
He changed his shirt three times, which was ridiculous, because this wasn’t a date — it was a reckoning. He settled on a clean-ish henley, shoved his feet into his Vans, and checked his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“You’re going to go down there,” he told his reflection. “You’re going to be calm and mature and professional. You are a grown adult who can have a difficult conversation with another grown adult.”
His reflection looked unconvinced.
Jamie knocked. Waited. Considered fleeing. The door opened.
Oh, no.
Nobody had warned him. Mark Russo didn’t look like a truck. He looked like something a truck would swerve to avoid — six-foot-something of broad shoulders and heavy arms and a chest that strained the limits of a plain gray t-shirt. A tool belt hung low on his hips, and he had a smear of grease on one forearm, and his hands were enormous and scarred, and his jaw was set in an expression of absolute baseline irritation, as if the world had been mildly disappointing him for thirty-six years straight.
Jamie’s brain produced a single thought: I want to climb him like a fire escape.
“Ellis,” Mark said. Not a question. Not a greeting. Just a confirmation that Jamie existed, both facts that Mark appeared to find mildly inconvenient.
“Hi. Hey. Hello. Mr. Russo.” Jamie heard himself deploy four greetings in sequence like a malfunctioning chatbot and wished, briefly, for death. “I got your note. Obviously. Since I’m here. Because of the note. Which I got.”
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Sunday Morning Clause — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Six months after the epilogue. Lazy Sunday. Mark writes a very specific clause. Jamie earns every word on the list. Workbench, shower, the dark blue sheets — and a “good boy” that echoes through the whole building.
More from Jace Wilder
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Good Boy Clause
He needed a rent discount. He got a landlord who calls him good boy.
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He enforced the rules. I broke every one. Then he made me beg to follow them.
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Rookie on Fire
He trained me to follow orders. Then he gave me one I couldn’t resist.
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