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

He found the cats having a wrestling match by the desk, and scooped them up, depositing them on his bed. The change of location did nothing to calm them, and after only a few seconds they tumbled over the edge like Holmes and Moriarty over Reichenbach Falls.


Oliver grabbed a new undershirt and pair of briefs, and one of the sweaters David had asked him to try on. He refused to think about that. He threw a pair of socks on the bed, and the jeans he’d saved from the fire and that David had washed, and pressed them to his nose.


No smoke. Just some pleasant laundry smell, probably called ocean breezeor spring meadow. An inane name with no connection at all to the fragrance.


He slipped from his room, into the next-door bath, and absolutely did not think of David, the night ahead of them, or their kiss the night before, as he showered.


Chapter 17