The Audition
MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Director/Actor, Praise Kink, Performance Kink, Power Exchange, Forbidden Romance, Control/Surrender, Competence Kink, He Falls First, Forced Proximity
He wanted the role. The director wanted something else entirely.
Leo Carter is hungry.
Three years of auditions, near-misses, and bartending shifts that pay the rent but not the dream. When he lands a private audition with the most selective director in independent film, he’ll do anything to prove he’s worth the role. Anything — including following increasingly intimate direction from a man whose gaze feels less like assessment and more like possession.
Vincent Hale doesn’t direct actors. He dismantles them.
He’s spent twenty years behind the camera, searching for the one thing no amount of technique can produce: authenticity. When Leo walks into his studio and fails to hide his nervousness, Vincent sees it — the transparency, the raw responsiveness, the inability to perform when it matters most. And he wants more of it. Professionally. Then personally. Then in ways that obliterate the distinction entirely.
What starts as direction becomes something no audition can contain. Every callback pushes further. Every session blurs the line between rehearsal and reality. And the most dangerous part isn’t the escalation — it’s that Leo wants it. Wants the direction, the praise, the specific devastation of being seen by someone who won’t accept the performance.
He told me to come as myself. Then he took me apart and showed me who that was.
THE AUDITION — a high-heat MM romance about power, praise, and the devastating intimacy of being directed by someone who refuses to let you hide.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Director/actor forbidden dynamic with escalating “rehearsals”
✅ “Again. More real this time.” — praise kink meets performance kink
✅ Power exchange that reverses when the director falls harder
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ A hero who earns trust and one who learns to surrender control
✅ Dual POV with devastating emotional depth
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink, power exchange, performance kink, and possessive dynamics), strong language, emotional intensity, depictions of approval-seeking behavior and paternal emotional neglect. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter 1: The Call
The ice well was running low again, and I had exactly forty-five seconds before the bartender on main rail started giving me that look — the one that said you had one job, Leo, and it involves frozen water.
I hauled the bucket off the floor mat, shoulder screaming from the weird angle, and shouldered through the swinging door into the back hallway of Delilah’s. Ten PM on a Thursday. The place was packed with the kind of Bushwick crowd that ordered fourteen-dollar cocktails made with ingredients I couldn’t pronounce and then tipped like the drink had personally offended them.
This was not the career my BFA had promised.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket. I ignored it. Phones behind the bar were a fireable offense, and I needed this job for at least two more months.
It buzzed again. And again.
Three buzzes meant either my mother was having a crisis about something she’d seen on Facebook, or my agent had actual news. I ducked into the stockroom.
Four texts. All Dana.
Call me.
Actually don’t call me, you’re probably at work. Read this first.
Vincent Hale is casting. Privately. I got you a slot.
Tuesday 2pm. Don’t be late, don’t be weird, don’t wear that grey henley you think is your lucky shirt. It has a hole in the armpit.
I read the texts three times. Then I leaned against a stack of Modelo cases and said “holy shit” out loud to nobody.
Vincent Hale. Vincent fucking Hale.
The man had directed three films in the last decade, and every single one had detonated at festivals like a grenade tossed into a library — quiet, precise, and devastating. His actors didn’t just get noticed. They got transformed. There was a reason people in the industry talked about working with him the way people talked about religious experiences — hushed, reverent, slightly unhinged.
And Dana had gotten me a slot.
Jonah was on the couch when I got home at one-thirty AM, eating cereal out of a mixing bowl because all our regular bowls were in the sink.
“You look like you just got laid,” he said through a mouthful of off-brand Cheerios. “Or you’re having a stroke. Hard to tell.”
“Vincent Hale.”
Jonah’s spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Dana got me a private audition. Tuesday.”
“Vincent Hale. The November Light guy. The one who made Jake Altman cry on camera so hard it won a Spirit Award.”
“That’s the one.”
“What’s the role?”
“No idea. No sides, no script. He just wants me to show up.”
“That’s… intense.”
Jonah leaned back, studying me. He had that look he got when he was about to say something I didn’t want to hear.
“I’ve heard things about his process. He pushes people. Gets in your head. The guy has a reputation for — I don’t know how to say this without sounding dramatic — breaking people down to get what he wants from them. And then putting them back together on screen.”
“You’re making him sound like a cult leader.”
“I’m making him sound like a genius who knows how to find the thing you’re hiding and drag it out of you.” Jonah picked up his cereal again. “Which, honestly, you could probably use.”
He was right. And that terrified me more than anything.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
One More Take — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Six months after the epilogue, Leo visits Vincent on the set of his new film. The cameras are rolling — but so is their chemistry. A private “rehearsal” in Vincent’s trailer turns into the most explicit, uninhibited scene they’ve ever performed. No script. No direction. Just two men who’ve stopped pretending and started taking.
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