Pumpkin Spice and Sweat book cover by Jace Wilder

Pumpkin Spice & Sweat

MM Contemporary Romance | Forge & Field Book 1
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Praise Kink • Grumpy/Sunshine • Bi Awakening • Slow Burn • Forced Proximity • Found Family • Coach/Player • Touch Starved • Size Difference • Body Worship • He Falls First • Competence Kink • Hurt/Comfort • Small Town

He poured the perfect latte. He didn’t expect the man across the street to pour gasoline on everything he thought he knew about himself.

Milo Reyes is the kind of barista who remembers your order, draws a cat on your cup, and makes you feel like the most important person in the room—all while quietly dying inside. At twenty-nine, he’s a master of making everyone else comfortable and has no idea how to do the same for himself. He’s never touched a barbell. He’s never questioned the neat little boxes his life fits into. And he’s definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent not thinking about the grumpy gym owner across the street whose voice does something to his nervous system that he’s filed under admiration because that’s the drawer that locks.

Gage Mercer built Forge & Field with his bare hands and sheer stubbornness, and now he’s watching it bleed. The lease is climbing. The numbers are brutal. His solution: a six-week Fall Strong Challenge designed to pack the gym and prove that community-built fitness can survive in a world obsessed with apps and algorithms. He doesn’t need help. He doesn’t need a partner. And he especially doesn’t need the warm, cinnamon-scented barista from Cider & Steam who keeps writing encouraging things on his coffee cups and looking at him like he hung the squat rack and the moon.

But Milo signs up for the challenge. And Gage’s carefully controlled world—the one where he coaches without touching, protects without connecting, and never lets anyone close enough to see the cracks—starts to fracture the moment he says good in that low coaching voice and watches Milo’s whole body respond like it’s been waiting years for permission.

What follows is a slow, devastating collision: a man learning to want something he never let himself name, and a man learning that strength isn’t the same as control. With pumpkin spice lattes, 5 a.m. squats, a found family of gym misfits, and a praise kink that could melt steel, Pumpkin Spice & Sweat is a swoony, scorching MM romance about the courage it takes to stop fitting and start feeling.

You’ll Love This If You Like:

Grumpy gym owners who melt for exactly one person
Sunshine heroes who are braver than they think
Bi awakenings that feel like dawn, not a crisis
Praise kink hot enough to set off the smoke alarm
“Good boy” as a complete sentence
Found family at the squat rack
Small-town autumn vibes with pumpkin everything
A guaranteed happily ever after

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Read the Bonus Chapter

Content Note: This book contains explicit MM sexual content, praise kink, a character navigating bisexual identity for the first time, discussions of financial stress and family expectations, and a happily ever after that earns every page. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Get a taste of autumn at Forge & Field…

Chapter One: Autumn Numbers

The barbell didn’t care that I was broke.

That was the thing about iron. Two hundred and seventy-five pounds sat on the rack the same way whether my checking account had five figures or three. The knurling bit into my palms with the same indifference either way. I wrapped my hands, set my feet, unracked, and descended into a squat that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the only language my body had ever spoken fluently.

Five forty-five in the morning. Forge & Field was mine at this hour—no members, no music, no one asking me whether we carried those stupid vibrating foam rollers. Just the hum of fluorescent lights, the smell of rubber mats and chalk dust, and October pressing its cold face against the warehouse windows. The loading-dock door leaked air no matter how many times I re-sealed it, and right now that leak carried the scent of wet leaves and someone’s distant wood-burning fireplace.

I hit depth. Drove through my heels. Exhaled hard on the way up. Racked the weight. Did it again.

Four sets of five. No music. No spotter. No point in pretending this was a workout. This was the part of my day where I pretended everything was fine before fifty people showed up and I had to make it convincing.

By six-fifteen, the lights were fully on and the first wave was filtering in. Big Phil arrived the way he always did—banana bread in a foil pan, gym bag that looked like it survived the Korean War, and a greeting loud enough to rattle the plate tree.

“Morning, boss. You eat yet?”

“Coffee.”

“That’s not food.” He set the banana bread on the front counter like an offering to a reluctant god. “My wife says you’re too thin.”

“Your wife has never seen me.”

“She has instincts.” Phil dropped his bag by the deadlift platform, cracked his neck, and started loading a bar like a man who’d been doing this longer than some of my members had been alive. Fifty-eight years old, retired firefighter, pulled four-oh-five conventional and brought baked goods on Mondays like church potluck was a competitive sport.

The six-thirty crew arrived in layers of fleece and bad attitudes. Coach Karen, who’d been with me since I opened the doors five years ago, claimed her usual rack without acknowledging anyone. Junie, my newest member, set up in the back corner with the careful precision of someone who still wasn’t sure whether they’d accidentally wandered into the wrong building.

I coached the morning session on autopilot. Cued hip hinges. Corrected a rounded back. Told Marcus his depth was a hate crime against squatting and watched him laugh and drop two inches lower. Reminded the group to hydrate. Watched them leave sweating and a little more awake than when they’d walked in.

This was the part I was good at. The part where bodies moved and I could read them like sentences—this shoulder is compensating, that knee is tracking wrong, she’s holding her breath because she’s scared, he’s going too heavy because he’s angry about something that happened before he got here. I’d been reading people’s bodies since I was twenty-two and landed my first coaching cert. Thirteen years of this. The language never got old.

The spreadsheet, on the other hand, was aging me by the minute.

I locked my office door out of habit—a six-by-eight room with a secondhand desk, a wall-mounted whiteboard covered in programming notes, and a copy of Starting Strength so annotated it looked like a conspiracy theorist’s manifesto. The laptop was open to the same QuickBooks screen I’d been staring at since Sunday night.

October revenue: down eighteen percent from last year. Two corporate wellness contracts hadn’t renewed—one company relocated, the other decided yoga retreats in Bali were a better use of their employee-wellbeing budget, because of course they did. The roof above the back storage room had started leaking in September. The landlord’s email about the January lease renewal had included the phrase “market-rate adjustment,” which was landlord for “bend over.”

I could make payroll through November. December was a coin toss. January was a question I didn’t want to ask.

I ran the numbers three different ways because I’m the kind of person who thinks math will eventually tell me something different if I just rearrange the inputs. It didn’t. Forge & Field was bleeding, slow and steady, the way businesses die when nobody’s paying attention.

Except I was paying attention. I’d been paying attention since day one of this place, since I signed the lease on a gutted warehouse with exposed ductwork and a floor that smelled like motor oil, since I sank every dollar I had into rubber flooring and a squat rack and the insane belief that a neighborhood gym could survive on strength training and community in a world that wanted mirror selfies and smoothie bars.

Five years. I’d built something real. Members who knew each other’s names. Coaches who gave a damn. A 5:00 a.m. crew that would show up in a blizzard. And none of that would matter if I couldn’t make rent.

The knock on my office door was perfunctory. Dani didn’t wait for permission.

“Your face looks like that spreadsheet just insulted your mother.” She dropped into the folding chair across from me—Dani Wu, thirty-one, my assistant coach, my second-in-command, and the only person in this building allowed to walk into my office without knocking. She’d earned it by being the best strength coach I’d ever worked with and the worst person to lie to.

“Revenue’s down eighteen percent.”

“I know. I looked at it last night.” She crossed her arms. “Henderson Corp isn’t coming back. Neither is that startup. And our group-class retention dipped because three regulars moved.”

“You could have led with good news.”

“There isn’t any. That’s why I’m here.” She tilted her head. “What’s the plan?”

I leaned back. The chair squeaked. Outside my office window, I could see the gym floor—Phil pulling his warm-up sets, Junie practicing kettlebell swings with a concentration that bordered on religious, Coach Karen stretching her hip flexors with the grim determination of a woman who refused to accept she was fifty.

“We need a push,” I said. “Something that brings people through the door between now and the holidays. Not a discount—discounts attract bargain shoppers who quit in January. Something with stakes.”

Dani waited. She had the patience of a sniper and the same willingness to let silence do the work.

“A challenge,” I said, and the idea crystallized as I said it. “Six weeks. Fall fitness challenge. Open to members and new sign-ups. Group training, community events, social-media push. We make it about personal growth—consistency, strength gains, showing up. Not weight loss. Not before-and-afters.”

Cider & Steam sat directly across from Forge & Field, close enough that I could see its awning from the gym’s front windows. It was the kind of café that should have annoyed me—exposed brick, Edison bulbs, a chalkboard menu with handwriting so pretty it looked typeset, seasonal drinks with names like “Maple Fog” and “The Harvest Moon Latte.” It was aggressively charming in a way that should have registered as try-hard.

It didn’t. It felt like someone’s living room, if that someone had excellent taste in espresso and a gift for making strangers feel like regulars. That was Milo’s doing.

Milo Reyes. Lead barista. The person responsible for the fact that I’d been spending eleven dollars a day on coffee I could make at home for sixty cents.

The bell above the door jingled when I walked in. Mid-morning on a Tuesday—the rush was over, and the café had settled into its between-waves hum. Two college students on laptops. An older woman reading a paperback in the window seat. The smell of fresh-ground beans and something baking that was probably going to ruin my macros.

Milo was behind the counter, sleeves of his oversized flannel pushed to his elbows, dark hair falling across his forehead in a way that suggested he’d either styled it carefully or hadn’t thought about it at all. He was pouring a latte with the kind of focus most people reserve for neurosurgery, his wrist turning in a slow arc that left a fern pattern on the surface of the foam.

He looked up when the bell rang. Brown eyes, warm and quick. The corners of his mouth moved first—always, before the full smile arrived.

“Gage. Black coffee. Boring as ever.”

“It’s efficient.”

“It’s a cry for help.” He was already reaching for a cup, but not the one I expected. He pulled a larger one from beneath the counter—pre-made, iced, the color of burnished copper through the clear plastic. He slid it across the counter toward me instead of the black coffee.

“What’s this?”

“Pumpkin cold brew with a cinnamon-oat-milk finish and an extra shot. I’m testing fall specials.” He leaned his hip against the counter and folded his arms. “You look like you need something seasonal.”

“I look like I need black coffee.”

“You look like you haven’t slept. Try it.”

I didn’t argue, mostly because arguing with Milo about coffee was like arguing with Dani about programming—technically possible, always a losing proposition. I took a sip.

It was absurdly good. Not sweet the way pumpkin drinks usually were—balanced, with a bite of espresso underneath and a warmth from the cinnamon that spread through my chest. I took another sip before I could stop myself, and Milo’s face did something complicated and pleased.

I walked back across the street with the cup in my hand and the feeling that something small and specific had just shifted in my chest—a tectonic plate moving a quarter inch, not enough to register on any equipment but enough to change the geography of everything above it.

I spent the rest of the afternoon building the challenge. Wrote the programming outline. Drafted the social-media copy—badly, because writing was not my gift and never would be. Printed the flyer on the gym’s ancient printer, which jammed twice and made colors that could generously be described as “close enough.”

FORGE & FIELD FALL STRONG CHALLENGE. SIX WEEKS. PROVE SOMETHING TO YOURSELF.

I stuck it to the front window with painter’s tape at six-thirty, after the evening crew had cleared out and the gym was empty again. Through the window, I could see Cider & Steam across the street—still open, warm light spilling onto the sidewalk, a silhouette behind the counter that I recognized by the way it moved.

I locked the front door, set the alarm, and walked home in the October dark.

I did not look back at the café.

I absolutely looked back at the café.

Ready for the collision? Grab your copy and find out what happens when the barista crosses the street…

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