Quiet, Please

A Construction Worker/Librarian Romance
by Isla Wilde

📚 Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: M/F
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Built to Last #1
Tropes: Blue Collar Hero, Forced Proximity, Slow Burn, Grumpy/Sunshine, Secret Relationship, He Falls First, Praise Kink, Size Difference, Workplace Romance

She built her life around silence. He’s about to demolish it.

Clara Vance has spent three years as the youngest Head Archivist in the Sterling Athenaeum’s history. She keeps her desk immaculate, her blouse buttoned to the throat, and her desire locked behind the glass doors of the restricted erotica collection. Control is the architecture of her survival—and silence is its foundation.

Knox Rourke is the construction foreman hired to renovate the Athenaeum’s crumbling rotunda. He’s loud. He’s covered in dust. His crew plays classic rock at 9 a.m. And he has no intention of apologizing for any of it.

Separated by a plastic curtain and a century of architectural philosophy, they should have nothing in common. But when Clara catches Knox leaving his thumbprint on her most explicit manuscript—and when Knox catches Clara reading it—the barrier between their worlds starts to crack.

What begins as professional friction becomes something neither of them can control. Secret encounters in the stacks. His hand over her mouth while patrons study twenty feet away. Her body against his scaffolding sixty feet above the reading room floor. Every rule she’s built her life around, broken. Every wall he’s constructed around his heart, demolished.

But when the Dean threatens the collection Clara has spent her career protecting and the renovation deadline compresses to an impossible timeline, both of them must decide: is what they’ve built together strong enough to survive when the plastic curtain comes down?

Quiet, Please is a 120,000-word high-heat contemporary romance featuring a blue-collar hero who says it in oak because he can’t say it in words, a librarian who keeps her desire in a locked cabinet, forced proximity in a century-old building, a slow burn that detonates spectacularly, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Book One in the Built to Last series. Contains explicit content and two people who discover that the loudest things are the ones you’ve been keeping quiet.

⚠️ Content Notes

This book contains explicit M/F sexual content including: encounters in semi-public spaces, hand-over-mouth kink, praise elements, scaffolding sex, oral sex, emotional intimacy during sex, and a climactic vault scene. Also includes: parental hoarding/dysfunction themes (heroine’s backstory), institutional politics, deadline pressure, and a hero processing his father’s death. All content is between consenting adults. Guaranteed HEA.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Chapter One: The Vibration

The foxing had spread overnight.

Clara Vance held her breath and lowered the magnifying loupe, studying the constellation of brown spots creeping across the lower margin of the 1743 folio page like a slow infection. Foxing was iron oxidation meeting humidity meeting time—a quiet catastrophe that could devour a manuscript over decades if you didn’t catch it early. She’d caught this one. She always caught them.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the heat level?
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (5/5 flames). This book contains multiple explicit scenes including encounters in library stacks, scaffolding sex sixty feet above the reading room, hand-over-mouth kink, and a grand finale vault scene that breaks every rule the characters spent the book establishing. The heat builds with the emotional connection.

Is this a slow burn?
Yes. The first physical contact doesn’t happen until Chapter 7, the first kiss in Chapter 10, and the first full scene in Chapter 11. But the tension starts on page one and never lets up. When the burn finally ignites, it’s worth the wait.

Is there a happy ending?
Always. Full HEA including independent funding secured for the collection, Knox’s name on a brass plaque as master craftsman, a maintenance contract that keeps him at the Athenaeum permanently, and a custom bookshelf built for the woman he loves. No cliffhangers.

What’s the “restricted collection”?
Clara is the custodian of the Athenaeum’s rare erotica collection—historical explicit manuscripts that are part of the library’s holdings. The collection becomes both a metaphor for Clara’s hidden desires and a plot element when the Dean threatens to eliminate it.

Is this part of a series?
Quiet, Please is Book One in the Built to Last series. Each book features a member of Knox’s construction crew finding love. Book Two, Wired, features Mack the electrician. Each book is a complete standalone romance with a guaranteed HEA.