Oliver Stoll’s life has gone up in smoke. Literally. Escaping an apartment fire, he’s made it out with little more than the clothes on his back and his best friend and downstairs neighbor, Mia. With few other options, he agrees to stay with David Elliston, Mia’s older brother. David was Oliver’s first crush, first kiss, first everything. That is, until the day they broke up five years before. It hadn’t been pretty.<br><br>David Elliston is back in town. Offered the chance to oversee the Kellmen Group’s newest magazine acquisition, he isn’t going to let a years old heartbreak stop him. But being thrown together with Oliver is harder than expected. And the flicker of hope he’s long tried to bury becomes even more difficult to contain.<br><br>Ex-lovers, best friends, and angry parents don’t make the best backdrop for rekindling a romance. But it’s the lies from the past that might just extinguish any chance they have of starting over.

Big Flames and Small

David had always loved Walmart, at least before he’d run off to make himself expensive-apartment money. Now, it would probably make him cry.


“Stolen.” Oliver stretched his legs. Sitting in the front seat of David’s fancy car was so much better than sharing its backseat with Mia’s crap.


“Stolen?” David’s shock made Oliver laugh. Because, yeah, why would someone risk jail time for that piece of shit?


“I know. Just some kids. Or something.” No one ever was arrested. “Cops found it a week later, half submerged in a pond. Totaled it, of course.”


Oliver pointed, and David pulled into the Walmart parking lot.


“Four, five months ago.” Just when it was getting a little too cold for hanging out at the bus stop.


Of course Scott offered to run him around whenever he needed. Nice guy, nice smile, nice abs, Scott. But they’d already broken up and Oliver thought it was a bad idea all around.


Chapter 9