Runaway Groom, Rental Husband
MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Runaway Groom, Escort/Client, Age Gap, Bi Awakening, Fake Dating, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Control/Surrender, Contract Romance, Practice Turns Real
He hired a husband. He fell for the man underneath.
Liam Reyes is fifteen minutes from walking down the aisle when he overhears his future father-in-law on the phone: Reyes is a good kid. Knows his place. Victoria will keep him managed. He bolts. Through the service exit. In the rain. In a twelve-thousand-dollar tuxedo. With no plan, no allies, and no idea what comes next.
Alex Morgan is a forty-year-old high-end escort who specializes in making powerful people believe whatever story his clients need told. When a panicked runaway groom hires him to play the role of new boyfriend, Alex treats it like any other booking: clear terms, professional distance, an NDA, and an expiration date.
The problem is Liam. Liam, who looks at Alex like the performance isn’t enough. Who asks what Alex actually wants instead of what the client is paying for. Who discovers, in a series of escalating encounters, that the hunger he’s been suppressing his entire life has a name, a shape, and a very specific pair of hands he wants on him.
What starts as a transactional arrangement becomes an education in desire. Liam learns that wanting isn’t weakness. Alex learns that being wanted for himself — not the persona, not the service, not the mask — is the most terrifying and necessary thing he’s ever experienced. And when the groom’s powerful ex-family discovers what Alex really is and threatens to destroy them both, they’ll have to decide: play it safe, or fight for the realest thing either of them has ever had.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Runaway groom who hires an escort and falls HARD
✅ Age gap (27/40) with a bi-awakening that burns the house down
✅ Fake dating that stops being fake approximately five minutes in
✅ Praise kink that rewires both men from the inside out
✅ An escort who drops the mask and a groom who sees the man underneath
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ A best friend who sends eggplant emojis and a colleague who tells it like it is
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including penetrative sex, oral, rimming, fingering, and guided sexual exploration), strong language, bi-awakening, themes of emotional manipulation and family control, depictions of anxiety and people-pleasing, and an escort/client dynamic. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
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Chapter One: The Bolt
The tuxedo cost twelve thousand dollars.
I know this because I wasn’t allowed to see the receipt. Victoria handed me the garment bag three weeks ago with the kind of smile she reserved for completed tasks — efficient, satisfied, already moving on to the next item on the list — and said, “Don’t worry about the price. Daddy took care of it.”
Daddy took care of everything. The venue, the caterer, the string quartet currently warming up two floors below me. The guest list that I saw for the first time at the same moment the invitations went to print. The honeymoon in Capri that I learned about from the travel agent’s confirmation email, forwarded to me with a note from Victoria: Pack linen. You sweat in synthetics.
I stared at my reflection in the full-length mirror of the groom’s suite and tried to find the man underneath the costume.
The tux fit like it had been painted on. Midnight navy, peak lapel, a subtle sheen in the fabric that caught the late afternoon light pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The shirt was crisp enough to cut glass. The pocket square was folded into something architectural — Victoria’s wedding planner had sent a YouTube tutorial with the subject line This fold ONLY, please — and my shoes were so polished I could see my own dead eyes staring back at me from the toe caps.
I looked perfect.
I looked like a man-shaped gift box, wrapped and ribboned and ready to be placed on the correct shelf.
My hands were shaking. I told myself it was excitement. The same way I’d been telling myself it was excitement for three years, every time my chest tightened at the dinner table or my throat closed when Richard clapped me on the shoulder and called me son in that proprietary tone, like he was confirming ownership of a new sedan.
My phone buzzed on the vanity.
Victoria: Don’t forget to smile with your eyes. The photographer charges by the hour and I don’t want to pay for reshoots.
I read it twice. Then I scrolled back through our text history — not because I was looking for something specific, but because I suddenly needed to check. She had never once texted me I love you without attaching it to a directive. Love you, don’t forget the Hendersons’ anniversary party is black tie. Love you, remind Daddy’s assistant about the seating chart.
Love you, perform this task. Love you, complete this function. Love you, stay in your lane.
Richard’s private lounge was the second door on the left. I didn’t mean to stop outside his door. But the door was cracked open and his voice carried.
“Reyes is a good kid. Knows his place. Doesn’t make waves. We’ll have him running point on Hargrove by Q3. Victoria will keep him managed.”
Managed. The word hit me somewhere below the ribs. Not like a punch — more like a key turning in a lock. Something I’d bolted shut a long time ago just swung open.
“Kids from his background — you give them a seat at the table, they don’t ask questions about the menu.”
My mother worked double shifts as a home health aide so I could go to architecture school. Richard Calder talked about her son like an acquisition.
Back in the groom’s suite, I picked up my phone. My wallet. My keys. I slid the engagement ring off my finger and set it on the dresser.
The service exit opened onto a side street. It was raining. I stood in the rain and felt, for the first time in three years, like I was breathing real air.
I got in a cab. Gave the driver the address of a hotel that wasn’t a Calder property. Turned my phone off. I was drenched, unemployed, and alone. I was the most alive I’d felt in years.
And somewhere in the wreckage of my perfectly arranged, catastrophically hollow life, a thought arrived — fully formed, terrifying in its clarity: I needed someone who could walk into a room full of Calders and make every single one of them believe that Liam Reyes had already moved on. Someone unshakable. Someone who could play husband.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Honeymoon Clause — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Two months after the proposal. A beach house. A new contract Liam wrote for the honeymoon — with very specific terms about what happens after sunset. Alex reads the fine print. Liam enforces it. The filthiest, most joyful, most liberated encounter in the series — balcony sex, ocean air, and two men who’ve finally stopped performing.
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