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 sat in bed listening for the tale-tell sound of Mia’s white noise machine.


Dinner had been a surprise. A baked lemon butter Tilapia and spinach salad that was as good as anything David had ever had. Followed by a raspberry gelato he would have happily licked from Oliver’s thighs.


But, that Oliver had spent the morning at the DMV for a replacement license, and at the bank for a new debit card, and had handed him an envelope with every dime he’d borrowed before heading to his own room for the night, had felt like a disappointment.


It wasn’t that David wanted Oliver to owe him. Just that if it hadn’t been for the stolen kiss in the pantry, being paid back would have made all of it, including the night before, feel like a transaction.


David didn’t want their evening to end like that.


He understood Oliver wanting to keep it all a secret. He wasn’t particularly keen on Mia knowing the details of his sex life, either. But this was more than just sex for David.


Chapter 24