House Rule: No Excuses
MMM Contemporary Romance
by Chase Power
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MMM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Single Dad + Live-In Nanny, Best Friend to Lovers, Found Family, Forced Proximity, Slow Burn, Touch Starved, Praise Kink
Three men. One house. No excuses.
Jonah Mercer is a single dad running on fumes. His ex-wife is in Denver, his babysitter just quit via text, and his five-year-old son Luca is the only thing keeping him upright.
Eli Reed is the live-in nanny who’s far too competent to be “just help.” He fixes the deadbolt, updates the fridge schedule, and gets Luca to eat broccoli on day one.
Drew Hale is Jonah’s best friend who keeps showing up with groceries, tools, and a willingness to stay late. He’s been in love with Jonah for fifteen years. He didn’t expect Eli. He didn’t expect to want Eli too.
What starts as survival — childcare, dinners, bedtime routines, and a strict “no excuses” household rule — turns into the softest kind of intimacy: shared responsibility, shared sleep, and eventually shared love.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ MMM domestic romance with a single-dad center
✅ Live-in nanny + best friend to lovers
✅ Found family built one dinner at a time
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotionally anchored)
✅ A five-year-old who sees everything and draws family portraits
✅ Competence as foreplay (cooking, cleaning, fixing things)
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MMM scenes), strong language, themes of parental anxiety and self-doubt, and a brief emotional crisis arc. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Jonah
The text came in at 6:47 a.m., thirteen minutes before Jonah needed to be pouring cereal and twenty-three minutes before he needed to be in the truck.
Hey so I know this is bad timing but I can’t do Tuesdays and Thursdays anymore. Actually I can’t really do any of it anymore. I’m sorry. You’re a great dad and Luca’s awesome. I just got a full-time offer and I have to take it. I hope you understand.
Jonah read it twice. Then a third time, standing in the kitchen in boxers and a T-shirt with drywall dust still in the collar, his coffee not yet made, his son not yet awake, and the last reliable structure in his week dissolving on a four-inch screen.
He set the phone facedown on the counter.
“Okay,” he said to nobody.
He made the coffee. He poured the cereal — Cheerios, because Luca had decided two weeks ago that every other cereal was “suspicious.”
Jonah walked down the hallway, dodging the plastic dinosaur graveyard. Luca was starfished across the bed, his stuffed orca — Captain Teeth — wedged under his armpit.
Five years old and he slept like he owned the world.
One eye opened. “No.”
“Cheerios.”
Both eyes opened. “Okay. But only because Cheerios.”
He had a framing job starting at eight. A five-year-old who needed to be at Riverside Elementary by 8:15. No evening coverage, no backup, no parents in town, and — as of thirteen minutes ago — no sitter.
His ex-wife, Megan, lived in Denver now. She was not, in any practical sense, here.
He was so tired he could feel it in his teeth.
He called the nanny agency. “I have someone who might work. His name is Eli Reed.”
The doorbell rang at 5:45. Jonah opened it and found a man standing on his porch. Late twenties, lean, dark hair, glasses with thin frames, a face that was quiet and watchful and immediately, uncomfortably easy to look at.
His hands were the first thing Jonah noticed. Steady. Still at his sides, no fidgeting, just resting.
They sat at the kitchen table. Eli said, “Tell me about Luca.”
Not tell me about the job. Tell me about Luca.
“Does the back door lock properly? I noticed the deadbolt looked loose when I came up the walk.”
“I can start Monday. You look like you could use the help.”
Jonah should have been offended. Instead, he felt relief hit him like a wave.
“Yeah. I could.”
He heard Drew’s truck before he saw it. Drew climbed out grinning, six-two, broad, built like a man who’d been hauling wire and climbing ladders since he was nineteen.
“So? The nanny. How’d it go?”
“Good. He starts Monday.”
“He cute?”
“Drew.”
Drew slung an arm around Jonah’s shoulders. “You’re doing good, Mercer.”
“I’m surviving.”
“Same thing, most days.”
Monday. Eli Reed would be here Monday. Something that felt like the first crack in a wall he’d spent two years building.
He’d hold the wall a little longer. He’d been holding everything else.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
No Excuses After Dark — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
It’s the anniversary of Eli’s move-in day. Jonah and Drew have planned something. Candles, the hallway where it all started, a brass key on a chain, and the most intimate night of their lives.
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