Hooking Up with My Bully

MM Bully-to-Lover Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bully Romance, Forced Proximity, Small Town Return, Enemies to Lovers, Blue Collar, Renovation Romance, He Falls First, Hurt/Comfort, Size Difference, Touch Starved, Control/Surrender, Slow Burn

He made my life hell. Now he’s rebuilding my grandmother’s house — and I can’t stop letting him in.

Marcus Hale made Eli Turner’s life a living hell in high school. Two years of verbal abuse, physical intimidation, and the kind of targeted cruelty that leaves scars — including a real one on Eli’s chin. Eli left Millfield the day after graduation and never looked back.

Ten years later, Eli’s grandmother dies and leaves him her Victorian house. It needs a full renovation. The only licensed contractor in Millfield? Marcus Hale. The boy who broke him is now a man who builds things — broad-shouldered, rough-handed, and looking at Eli with an intensity that has nothing to do with construction.

Marcus shows up at seven every morning. He’s careful with the walls. He sands the banister by hand. He finds a vintage doorknob at a salvage shop because it matches the originals. And every time he gets too close, Eli’s body can’t decide if it wants to run from him or run into him.

The anger is real. The attraction underneath it is worse. And when the tension finally detonates — against a kitchen counter, on a couch in the rain, in a bed that still smells like both of them — neither of them can pretend this is just physical. What Marcus did can’t be undone. But what he’s building now might be strong enough to hold the weight of what they’re becoming.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Bully-to-lover with real teeth (not playful rivals)
✅ Forced proximity — he’s literally inside the walls
✅ Blue-collar contractor hero who builds things instead of breaking them
✅ Scorching hate-sex that slowly, painfully becomes something real
✅ Full grovel, earned forgiveness, real accountability
✅ Touch-starved men who don’t know how to ask for what they need
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, depictions of past bullying (verbal, physical intimidation, and emotional abuse), references to parental domestic violence, and complex power dynamics. The bully’s past actions are acknowledged and never excused. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Ghost in the Doorway

The house looks like it’s holding its breath.

I pull into the driveway and kill the engine, and for a long moment I just sit there with my hands on the wheel, staring at it through the windshield. The Queen Anne Victorian on Sycamore Street, with its wraparound porch and its gingerbread trim and its paint peeling in long, tired strips like skin after a sunburn. The left side of the porch sags. One of the second-floor shutters hangs crooked, held on by a single hinge. The garden is a riot of overgrowth — Grandma’s roses have gone feral, climbing the trellis and spilling over the railing in a tangle of thorns and pink blooms that nobody’s pruned in months.

Six months. That’s how long she’s been gone. Six months since the call, since the drive, since the funeral in the rain with twelve people and a minister who pronounced her name wrong. Six months since I stood in this driveway and swore I’d come back to take care of it.

I’m here now. Better late than never.

The car is packed tight — two suitcases, my monitor box, a bag of groceries, and a coffeemaker I bought at a rest stop because I know for a fact the one inside is from 1983 and makes coffee that tastes like pencil shavings. I grab the groceries first. The porch steps groan under my weight, and the screen door sticks when I pull it, the wood swollen from humidity. The front door is easier. I turn the key and push, and the smell hits me like a wall.

Lavender. Dust. Old wood. The ghost of a hundred Sunday dinners.

I stand in the foyer with a bag of groceries in my arms and my throat closes up so fast I can’t breathe.

The house is exactly how she left it. Her coat on the hook by the door — the green one, the one she wore to the farmers’ market every Saturday. Her reading glasses on the hall table, folded neatly on top of a crossword puzzle she never finished. Sixteen across is blank. I look at the clue without meaning to: Place of safety (6 letters).

Refuge. The answer is refuge.

I set the groceries down on the kitchen counter and press my palms flat against the tile and breathe until the knot in my chest loosens enough to let air through. I’m not going to cry in the kitchen. I’m not going to cry in the kitchen. I’m going to unload the car and set up my workspace and make a list of everything this house needs, and I’m going to do the thing I came here to do.

Two days in, and I’ve established a routine that mostly involves not thinking about anything too hard.

I sleep on an air mattress in the guest room because I can’t sleep in her bed. I work from a folding table in the parlor, dual monitors propped on a stack of her encyclopedias, my office chair the only piece of furniture in the room that was manufactured after 1975. I take calls from the design agency with my camera off because the backdrop is floral wallpaper and a curio cabinet full of ceramic cats and I don’t need that energy in a client meeting.

The house needs work. That’s the understatement of the decade. The electrical is a nightmare — I tripped a breaker twice on my first day just running my monitors and the coffeemaker at the same time. The plaster is crumbling in the upstairs hallway, and there’s a soft spot in the bathroom floor that I’m afraid to investigate. The kitchen cabinets are original, which sounds charming until you open them and realize they’re held together by paint and stubbornness. And the bathroom has carpet. Carpet. In a bathroom.

I called three contractors. The first one is booked through November. The second one never called back. The third one — the only licensed contractor actually based in Millfield — answered on the second ring, asked for the address, and said he could come Tuesday for a walkthrough.

Tuesday is today.

I shower, put on clean jeans and a henley, and catch myself checking my reflection in the bathroom mirror like I’m going on a date instead of getting an estimate on rewiring. I push my hair back, put my glasses on, take them off, put them back on. Christ. It’s a contractor. Get a grip.

The doorbell rings at exactly ten.

I cross the foyer, twist the knob, and pull the door open.

The earth stops.

He’s standing on my grandmother’s porch in work boots and a gray t-shirt that’s a size too small across the chest, and the recognition slams into me so hard my vision tunnels.

Marcus Hale.

I’d know that face in a pitch-black room. I’d know it in a crowd of thousands. I’d know it in my sleep, because I spent two years of my life memorizing every angle of it the way prey memorizes the shape of the thing that hunts it. The jaw. The green eyes. The way he stands with his weight forward, shoulders squared, like he’s bracing for impact or getting ready to deliver one.

He’s bigger. That’s the first thing my body registers before my brain catches up — he’s bigger than he was at seventeen, broader, thicker through the arms and chest. His hands are rough, scarred across the knuckles. His hair is dark brown, shorter on the sides than I remember, dusty with something — sawdust, maybe. There’s a faint line on his left eyebrow, a scar I don’t remember.

New damage. We’ve both got new damage.

“Eli.”

His voice is lower. Quieter. My name in his mouth sounds like something heavy being set down.

Every muscle in my body pulls tight. My pulse slams into my eardrums. My jaw locks so hard my teeth ache. I am sixteen years old in this doorway. I am sixteen and he’s walking toward me in the hallway outside the gym and I’m trying to disappear into the wall and —

I’m not sixteen.

I’m twenty-seven and this is my house and he is standing on my porch and I have every right to close this door in his face.

I don’t.

“You’re the contractor.”

It’s not a question. My voice comes out flat and controlled, which is a miracle, because my hands are shaking and I’ve shoved them into my pockets to hide it.

“Hale Construction.” He lifts his chin toward the black pickup in the driveway. His company logo is on the door — clean, professional. He looks back at me. “You want me to come in, or —”

“Yeah.” I step back. Hold the door open. Watch him cross the threshold into my grandmother’s house and try not to think about the fact that the last time Marcus Hale was this close to me, his hand was on my chest and the back of my head was hitting a locker door frame hard enough to split the skin on my chin.

I still have the scar. It’s faint now. A thin white line.

He doesn’t look at it. I wonder if he remembers.

The walkthrough takes forty-five minutes, and I’ll give him this: he’s good.

He moves through the house with a clipboard and a flashlight, checking outlets, testing switches, tapping walls, opening cabinet doors and peering inside. He’s thorough and methodical and he knows what he’s looking at — calls out the knob-and-tube wiring in the attic before I even mention it, identifies the soft spot in the bathroom floor as a subfloor issue and not structural, runs his hand along the plaster in the upstairs hallway and tells me it’s horsehair plaster, original, worth saving if we can.

I follow three steps behind him, arms crossed, maintaining the maximum distance the rooms allow. The house is a Victorian. The hallways are narrow. The doorways are narrow. Everything about this house was designed for people who were smaller and less concerned with personal space, and Marcus Hale takes up more room than any human being should be allowed to.

He’s in the upstairs hallway, testing a light switch that doesn’t work, and he reaches past me to check the one on the opposite wall. His arm crosses my line of sight. His forearm brushes my shoulder — barely, just the heat of his skin through my sleeve — and I flinch.

He notices. Of course he notices. His hand freezes on the switch and his eyes cut to mine and something moves across his face — fast, there and gone — that looks like it might be guilt.

He pulls his arm back. Steps away. Makes a note on his clipboard.

Neither of us says a word.

June picks up on the first ring.

“Tell me you didn’t hire him.”

I called her yesterday, after the contractor search yielded exactly one viable option. She Googled him before I finished the sentence. She found his website, his reviews, his one mention in the local paper for rebuilding some old woman’s porch for free.

“He just left,” I say. My voice sounds wrong. Too steady. The kind of steady that’s held together with wire.

“And he’s professional. And competent. And he knows what he’s doing. And his estimate is fair.”

“Eli.”

“And I can’t be in the same room with him without my body going into fight-or-flight.”

“Which one?”

I close my eyes. “I don’t know.”

“You know.”

“Do not hire that man. Find someone else.”

“There is no one else. Everyone within an hour is booked through fall, and this house needs electrical work before the wiring sets itself on fire.”

I pick up my phone. Pull up the number on the business card. My thumb hovers over the keyboard.

June’s voice in my head: Do not hire that man.

Grandma’s house around me, sagging and creaking and waiting.

I type the message before I can talk myself out of it.

Eli: When can you start?

The reply comes in under a minute. Like he was waiting.

Marcus: Monday. 7 AM.

I set my phone face-down on the counter and press my forehead to my knees and breathe.

Monday.

What the hell am I doing?

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The Housewarming — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Marcus and Eli host their first dinner party. June brings wine. Danny brings chaos. And after everyone leaves, Marcus christens every surface of the finished house — starting with the banister he sanded by hand.

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