Rockstar & Roadie
MM Rockstar Romance
by Jace Wilder
Available at your favorite retailer
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Forced Proximity, Second Chances, Hurt/Comfort, Praise Kink, Stalker, Mutual Pining, Coming Out, Touch Starved, Power Exchange, Workplace Romance, Found Family, One Bed (Tour Bus Bunk)
Length: ~95,000 words
Series: Standalone (Book 1 of the Eclipse Tour series; sequels featuring Ryker and Kade forthcoming)
Two years on the road. One bunk. Twenty thousand strangers about to find out.
Eclipse frontman Jax Blackwood has spent nine years performing happiness onstage and grief offstage. Platinum singles. A throat tattoo of his dead mother’s name. A reputation as a self-destructive rockstar who burns out his bandmates and ghosts his lovers and never, ever stays the night.
Two years ago he slept with the band’s lead guitar tech in a hotel in Portland on the first night of the Blackout tour, looked down at the man asleep on his chest, and crawled out at four a.m. because he understood — clean, sober, terrified — that if he stayed another hour he was going to fall in love with him.
Finn Hale took the permanent gig anyway. He has spent two years in the wing of every Eclipse stage, handing Jax a black-and-gold guitar pick before every show, loving him in silence, telling himself he’d burn it out by Cleveland.
It’s opening night of the Reckoning tour. Twenty arenas. Nine weeks. One tour bus with twelve coffin bunks and Diane the stage manager has — accidentally on purpose — put Finn in the bunk directly under Jax’s.
And somewhere between Los Angeles and the Kia Forum, somebody starts hand-delivering letters to Jax about his mother that nobody but his stalker should know how to write.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
- Second-chance MM with two years of mutual longing
- Forced proximity in tour bus bunks (and on a private jet, and in a Vegas suite)
- Brooding rockstar / steady-Boston-Irish roadie pairing
- Praise kink, soft-top/sub dynamics, and one of the most intense bottoming-from-the-top scenes you’ll read this year
- Stalker plot + corrupt manager + a half-million-dollar embezzlement subplot that pays off in a hotel boardroom
- Public coming-out from the stage of Madison Square Garden during a live album drop
- Found-family band dynamics (with sequel-bait for Ryker the bassist and Kade the drummer)
- An onstage proposal in front of seventeen thousand five hundred people at the Kia Forum
- Hyphenated last names, a Brooklyn brownstone in the future, and a courthouse wedding with a Navy-chief stepfather in the second row
- HEA guaranteed (and a bonus chapter set on a redwood deck above the Pacific that is too hot for Amazon)
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit MM sexual content (graphic on-page scenes including praise kink, light kink/blindfold play, and one extended power-shift scene where the brooding rockstar bottoms for the first time in years and breaks beautifully); strong language; on-page stalking with threatening letters about a deceased family member; a hospital scene following an on-page bottle attack in a parking lot (no permanent injury, no character dies); discussion of a parent’s historical opioid overdose and the protagonist’s grief; a depiction of substance recovery and a character who chooses sobriety mid-tour; on-page management embezzlement and a civil/criminal lawsuit subplot; and one tabloid outing of the leads. Heat: 5/5. HEA guaranteed. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Soundcheck
The thing about cable runs is that everybody watches you do them and nobody watches you do them. Twenty thousand seats, four semis’ worth of gear, three stage managers screaming into headsets about timing, and I’m on my knees in front of the B-stage monitor wedge with a roll of gaff tape between my teeth, completely alone.
“Hale.” Nova’s voice, tinny in my earpiece. “You alive down there?”
I bit through the tape and smoothed it over the last stretch of XLR. “Define alive.”
“Breathing. Verbal. Not crying in a flight case.”
“Two out of three. Cables down. Band’s doing soundcheck in ten.”
I stood. My knees made that noise they made now, the one that said you’re twenty-nine and you’ve been doing this since you were nineteen and something is going to give, Finn, something is going to give soon. Crypto.com Arena stretched out around me like a cathedral that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be holy. In four hours this place would hold twenty thousand people screaming for a man I’d fucked once two years ago and hadn’t forgotten for a single day since.
Opening night. Eclipse. The Reckoning Tour.
Yeah. I needed coffee.
He came in through the house doors. That was the thing about Jax — he never came in the back. Hood up. Black jeans, ripped. Doc Martens scuffed to hell. The kind of posture that said I have not slept, I do not care, I am about to ruin somebody’s evening.
The house lights caught his face when he pushed the hood back. Two days of stubble. Long black hair pulled back in a loose knot. The thin scar on his upper lip, the one from Dublin. Ice-blue eyes swinging across the stage, across the rigging, across the monitor desk. Across me.
Three weeks since rehearsal break. I’d told myself I was over it. I’d told myself I’d been over it for two years. My body told me to shut the fuck up.
“Finn.” His voice carried across the empty seats like he’d pitched it to me specifically. “Boston.”
“Blackwood.”
He climbed up onto the stage. Didn’t use the stairs. Pulled himself up on the lip of it with one hand, boots swinging, landed three feet from me.
“Monitor’s fucked,” he said.
“Monitor’s not fucked. I tuned it twenty minutes ago.”
“Finn.” He stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell him — whiskey and whatever shampoo he was using now, something green, something that made me want to bite his neck. “It’s fucked.”
I looked at the monitor. I looked at him. “Okay, boss.”
“Good boy,” he said, low, pitched under the house PA so nobody else could hear, and my stomach dropped through the floor of the arena, down through the parking garage, down into the dirt under Los Angeles.
Two years. Two fucking years. And he could still take me out at the knees with two words.
I crouched in front of the wedge. He crouched down on the other side, eye level, and held the cable out across the top of the wedge with two fingers, and he waited. I took it. His fingers brushed mine.
“Missed you, Boston,” he said. Soft. Just for me. The Irish in his voice, the little ghost of it he only let out when he was tired or drunk or about to do something stupid. Missed yeh, Boston.
I plugged the cable in. My hands did not shake. I was very proud of my hands.
“Didn’t miss you, Blackwood.”
“Liar.”
“Monitor’s fine. Go tune up.”
He stood. “Tonight’s gonna be a good show. Stay close.” He walked off toward Ryker’s bass rig. Whistling. Whistling, the motherfucker.
Diane caught up to me in the concrete hallway outside the dressing rooms with an envelope in her hand. White. Letter-sized. No postage. Just hand-printed: JAX BLACKWOOD. ECLIPSE. PERSONAL. Hand-delivered to will-call an hour ago by a man who walked away before they got a name. I knew Jax’s rule about fan mail on show days. It was supposed to go to his assistant. Sean wasn’t in town until Wednesday. The envelope was going to sit in a box for three days.
I opened it. It was two lines.
She’d be so proud of what you made of her. Don’t let anyone else touch what’s hers.
No signature. No date. The handwriting was careful. Cramped. Somebody who’d practiced writing neatly because they were worried they’d be judged on it.
I read it twice. Then a third time. Then a fourth, and my hand started to feel cold around the paper.
I folded it in half and folded it in half again and put it in my back pocket, and then I went looking for Jax to tell him.
I didn’t tell him.
I told myself I’d tell him after the show. I told myself I’d tell him on the bus. I told myself I’d screen the next three and then tell him, so I’d have a pattern to show him, something to go on, something useful.
The truth was simpler.
The truth was that Jax Blackwood had just pressed his mouth to the side of my neck for the first time in two years, in the doorway of his dressing room, and I was not going to be the one to hand him something that would make him pull away again. Not tonight.
Not on opening night.
I was going to get through opening night.
In three hours, Jax would be standing under the lights. In four hours, the crowd would be screaming his name. In five hours, I’d be the one he came looking for.
I’d known it since I’d woken up alone in a Portland hotel room two years ago and decided to take the permanent gig anyway.
Some people are smart about the men they love.
I’m not one of them.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Big Sur — A scene too hot for Amazon
Six weeks after the Kia Forum. A redwood deck above the Pacific. A blindfold, a Bluetooth speaker, and the rough mix of Hale playing through it for the first time. The entire bonus chapter is set inside the runtime of one song. Heat: 10/10. The most surrendered Finn has ever been. The most patient Jax has ever been.
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