Hate at First Shift

MM Firefighter Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers, Age Gap, Authority Kink, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Workplace Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Grumpy/Sunshine, Firefighter Romance

The lieutenant who never breaks rules. The rookie who makes him break every one.

Elias Cruz is the best lieutenant at Station 14 and the loneliest man in the department. After losing his partner in a warehouse fire five years ago, he sealed himself behind walls of discipline and black coffee and a rule he never breaks: don’t get attached. Don’t feel. Don’t let anyone close enough to lose.

Ryan Parker is the chief’s nephew, the rookie everyone assumes is coasting on his family name, and the most infuriating man Elias has ever been forced to mentor. He’s cocky, impulsive, annoyingly competent—and he responds to Elias’s commands with a full-body shiver that has nothing to do with professionalism.

When a locker room fight turns into something neither of them can take back, they set rules: off-shift only, no feelings, no kissing. Elias breaks the kissing rule in under thirty seconds. The rest of the rules don’t last much longer.

But Ryan isn’t just a hookup—he’s the man who stands outside locked doors, who holds Elias through flashbacks, who says I love you on a bedroom floor and means it. And when a warehouse fire puts Ryan’s life in danger, Elias breaks the only rule that matters: he chooses love over command structure, and the fallout threatens everything.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Grumpy veteran lieutenant x cocky rookie (14-year age gap)
✅ Enemies to lovers with EXPLOSIVE chemistry
✅ Authority/praise kink (“Good boy” is a full character arc)
✅ Forced proximity in a firehouse with zero privacy
✅ Hurt/comfort that will make you sob and then fan yourself
✅ Found family crew that will steal your heart
✅ A hero who buys a couch because a therapist told him he deserves company
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Graphic, explicit, emotionally devastating heat
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink, light bondage, edging, and spanking), strong language, PTSD flashbacks, survivor’s guilt, workplace power dynamics, and themes of grief and emotional recovery. All scenes involve clear consent and negotiated boundaries. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: First Shift, Worst Impression

The coffee at Station 14 tastes like it was brewed in a boot. Always has. I drink it anyway—black, no sugar, same chipped mug I’ve used for nine years—because routine is the only thing standing between me and the kind of morning where I throw a chair through a window.

Six a.m. Equipment check. I run my hands over every coupling on Engine 14’s primary line, checking for cracks, for wear, for anything that might fail when failure means someone dies. My fingers know these fittings the way a pianist knows keys. Muscle memory earned in smoke and repetition.

The bay smells like diesel and floor wax. Overhead fluorescents hum their tuneless song. Somewhere behind me, Dex is arguing with Patterson about whether a hot dog is a sandwich, which is a conversation this crew has had at least forty times and will have forty more, because firefighters are creatures of deeply stupid habit.

I love this place. I’d cut my own arm off before I’d say it out loud.

“Cruz.” Captain Rivas appears at the bay door with his clipboard and his I’m-about-to-ruin-your-day face. I know that face. I’ve been on the receiving end of it enough times to recognize the particular tightness around his mouth that means politics are about to enter my life.

“Captain.”

“Got a minute?”

I don’t, actually. I have an equipment check to finish, a shift briefing to prep, and a life that functions specifically because I don’t deviate from my routine. But Rivas outranks me, so I set down my inspection sheet and follow him to the office.

He shuts the door. Bad sign.

“Chief Parker’s nephew starts today,” Rivas says, like he’s reading me the weather forecast instead of lighting a fuse. “Ryan Parker. Academy top ten, good marks, enthusiastic. Chief wants him at Fourteen.”

I wait. There’s more. There’s always more when Rivas shuts the door.

“He wants you as the kid’s mentor.”

The word kid lands first. Then mentor. Then the full scope of what’s being asked of me settles across my shoulders like a wet wool blanket.

“No.”

“Cruz—”

“I’m not a babysitter, Captain. Give him to Patterson. Give him to anyone.”

“Chief specifically requested you. He wants his nephew learning from the best lieutenant in the district.” Rivas has the decency to look uncomfortable. “His words.”

Ryan Parker walks into Station 14 at six twenty-two a.m., twenty-two minutes late, and the first thing I notice is his smile.

It’s a problem.

It’s the kind of smile that walks into a room and rewires the energy—bright, easy, a little reckless. Dimples. Actual dimples, like God reached down and pressed two thumbs into his cheeks and said here, have an unfair advantage. He’s shorter than I expected—five ten, maybe—with a lean build that says athlete rather than gym rat. Sandy blond hair that falls across his forehead in a way that looks artless and probably requires expensive product. Blue eyes. Tattoo sleeve peeking out from under a station uniform that fits him like it was tailored, because it probably was.

He smells like citrus and cologne. Who the hell wears cologne to a firehouse?

I am not watching any of that. I’m reviewing his file in my head: Academy scores, physical assessments, emergency medical certification. Top ten in his class. Strong marks across the board. Nothing on paper to justify the hostility I’m already aimed at him like a hose.

But paper doesn’t walk into my station twenty-two minutes late smelling like a department store, and paper doesn’t look at me like that.

I drain my cold coffee and crush the cup.

And I hate—with a ferocity that scares me—that when he looked at me in that office with all that fire in his eyes, the thing I wanted most was to find out what it would take to make him look at me like that again.

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After Hours — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

One year after Ryan’s first shift, they have Station 14 to themselves for a training night. The locker room. The shower. The apparatus bay. Every location where they stole moments in secret—revisited with zero shame, full kink, and the unhurried confidence of two men who’ve stopped hiding.

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