Praise Him, Counselor
MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder
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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Praise Kink, Sex Therapist/Client, Age Gap, Touch Starved, Control/Surrender, Forbidden Romance, Emotional Healing
He couldn’t feel anything — until someone told him he was good.
Marcus Hale is the most successful person he knows — and he can’t feel a single thing. Not joy, not satisfaction, not pleasure. Sex works mechanically. Orgasms arrive on schedule and mean nothing. He’s built a billion-dollar company from the inside of a body that operates without an operator.
Dr. Leo Rivera is a twenty-eight-year-old sex therapist whose “experiential coaching” practice is built on one belief: pleasure is a human right. When Marcus walks into his office and admits he’s never felt genuine enjoyment from anything — including sex — Leo sees a man who isn’t broken. He’s locked. And Leo is very, very good at finding keys.
The key turns out to be praise. Marcus’s body responds to Leo’s voice the way a plant responds to sunlight — desperately, involuntarily, after decades in the dark. Every session escalates. Guided touch becomes hands-on therapy becomes something that no consent form can contain. Leo is crossing every professional line he swore he’d hold, and Marcus is becoming addicted to the only person who’s ever made him feel alive.
When the clinical framework collapses under the weight of what they’re actually doing, they’ll have to decide: walk away from the most intense connection either of them has ever experienced, or burn every professional boundary to the ground and build something real from the ashes.
Praise Him, Counselor is a high-heat MM romance featuring explicit praise kink, guided intimacy that blurs every line, a CEO who learns to surrender, and a therapist who learns that the man who heals everyone else needs healing too. Standalone, HEA guaranteed.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Praise kink so intense it rewires both characters
✅ Therapist/client forbidden romance with real ethical stakes
✅ Age gap (28/38) where the younger man holds the power
✅ A CEO who discovers he’s wired for submission
✅ Guided sex scenes that ARE the plot, not interruptions to it
✅ Touch starvation + emotional healing through structured kink
✅ Full role reversal — both men learn to give and receive
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink, guided intimacy, light restraints, edging, and D/s dynamics), strong language, themes of emotional numbness and anhedonia, professional boundary violations, and depictions of touch starvation and emotional healing. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Dead Inside (Beautiful Outside)
The man underneath Marcus was doing everything right.
Objectively, empirically, by every metric Marcus knew how to measure — the guy was a ten. Late twenties, dark curly hair, shoulders that filled out his tuxedo jacket like it had been sewn onto him at the gala three hours ago. He’d tasted like champagne and ambition when Marcus kissed him in the elevator, and he’d gone to his knees on the marble foyer of Marcus’s penthouse before Marcus had even loosened his tie.
Now they were in bed — the California king, the twelve-hundred-thread-count sheets, the city skyline glittering sixty stories below through the floor-to-ceiling glass — and the man was riding Marcus with genuine enthusiasm, head thrown back, abs flexing, making sounds that belonged in a studio apartment with thin walls, not a soundproofed luxury condo.
Marcus gripped his hips. Thrust up on rhythm. Made the right noises at the right intervals.
And felt absolutely nothing.
Not pain. Not discomfort. Not even boredom, exactly — boredom implied he’d once been entertained and the entertainment had stopped. This was something else. This was watching a movie he’d already seen through a window, in a language he almost understood, with the volume turned to one.
His body worked. That wasn’t the problem. He was hard. Had been hard since the elevator, because his body responded to stimulation the way a car engine responded to a key — mechanically, reliably, without opinion. The man on top of him was beautiful, and Marcus could appreciate that the way he appreciated a well-designed interface: clean lines, intuitive functionality, aesthetically pleasing. He could note the heat of skin against skin, the friction, the rhythm. He could catalog it all.
He just couldn’t feel it.
He wondered, not for the first time, if he was missing a receptor. Some neural pathway that connected friction to joy. Like being colorblind, except instead of red and green, he couldn’t see the point.
So Marcus came. It was like sneezing. A pressure that built to a mechanical threshold and released. His hips jerked, his breath stuttered, and something happened in the general vicinity of his groin that technically qualified as an orgasm the same way a fluorescent light technically qualified as illumination. Present. Functional. Utterly without warmth.
I am the most successful person I know, he thought, and I cannot feel a single fucking thing.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Final Homework — A scene TOO HOT for retailers
Six months into their relationship, Leo assigns Marcus one last piece of homework. But this time, Marcus rewrites the assignment — and the therapist becomes the patient. Blindfolds, praise worship, and the filthiest session that never made it into the case file.
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