Hard Wood, Soft Landing

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

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Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Second Chance, Forced Proximity, Renovation Romance, Single Dad, Small Town, Grumpy/Sunshine, Found Family, Praise Kink, Blue Collar, Body Worship, Competence Kink

The house needs a foundation. The designer needs a reset. Neither man is prepared for the contractor who still remembers the first time they almost kissed.

After a divorce, a public design disaster, and the death of the grandmother who loved him best, Miles returns to Pine Ridge to sell the crumbling lakeside inn he inherited. The plan: renovate it fast, make it presentable, and disappear before anyone sees how badly everything fell apart.

Then he hires Callum Bennett.

Cal is the contractor Miles almost kissed at eighteen — and the man who’s spent the last two decades getting broader, gruffer, better with a tool belt, and far too good at seeing through him. He’s also got an eight-year-old daughter who thinks Miles is “too pretty to be trustworthy,” a dog he rescued from a job site, and zero interest in helping Miles turn Heartwood House into another glossy project with no real foundation.

But the inn is hiding secrets. Someone wants it sold cheap. And as Cal and Miles strip the house to its bones, the past they never finished starts demanding a second chance.

Rebuilding an old house is one thing. Learning to stay is another.

You’ll Love This Book If You Enjoy:

✅ Former almosts who get a second shot twenty years later — and earn every inch of it

✅ A polished designer who falls apart beautifully and a grounded contractor who catches him

✅ Blue-collar/white-collar dynamics with real tension, not aesthetic

✅ A single dad whose eight-year-old daughter runs background checks via evidence notebook

✅ Forced proximity in a carriage-house apartment with one bedroom and a couch that’s too short

✅ Heat 5/5 — guest room, workbench, kitchen counter, the room they built together

✅ Found family with co-parenting done right, a foreman who saw it coming, and a grandmother who played the longest game

✅ HEA with a business partnership, a bronze plaque, and a ghost named Gerald

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including penetrative sex, oral, praise kink, body worship), strong language, a previous emotionally controlling marriage (off-page, in backstory), public professional failure and online harassment, property sabotage by a corrupt developer, and depictions of anxiety and shame. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter 1: The Porch Step

The porch steps gave under my weight on the third one up.

Not a dramatic collapse — no splintering crash, no cartoon plunge through rotten wood. Just a slow, sick yield, my right foot sinking two inches deeper than it should have, the board groaning like it had been holding its breath for years and finally decided to stop.

I stood there with my car keys in one hand and a gas-station coffee in the other, one foot on solid ground and one foot in the skeleton of my grandmother’s porch, and thought: This is about right.

Heartwood House looked like it had been waiting for me to see it fail.

The last time I’d been here — four years ago, maybe five, a weekend visit I’d cut short because David had called with a tone that meant come home now or we’ll be having this fight for six days instead of two — the inn had still held its posture. Faded, sure. Quieter than the summers I remembered. But upright. Proud the way old buildings are proud, like they know something about endurance that newer construction hasn’t earned.

Now the wraparound porch sagged at both corners. Three of the front windows had been boarded over with plywood that was itself starting to rot. The paint — Eleanor’s signature sage green with cream trim — had peeled away in long, curling strips that hung from the clapboard like shed skin. The old wooden sign above the entrance, Heartwood House Inn — Est. 1921, tilted at an angle that would have been charming in a photograph and was decidedly less charming when you were the person responsible for the building underneath it.

I extracted my foot from the broken step, climbed the rest of the porch with exaggerated care, and unlocked the front door.

The smell hit me first.

Not rot, exactly. Not yet. But the ghost of rot — damp and dust and the particular mustiness of a house that had been closed up for six months in an Adirondack winter without anyone to run the heating or crack the windows on mild days. Underneath it, if I concentrated, I could still catch lavender and old wood polish and the barest trace of Eleanor’s perfume, something French and expensive that she bought in tiny bottles and applied like holy water.

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The Dock at Midnight — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Miles planned a moonlit dock date with hurricane lanterns, the good blanket, and no underwear. Cal reinforced two pilings on Tuesday. Neither of them planned for what happened next — but Cal’s a contractor. He anticipated the load.

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