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

In the public gym David had joined in Georgia, the shower stalls had been comprised of a two by four strip of changing space and a shower roughly the same size, all of it closed off from the rest of the locker room with a thick, opaque, curtain.


In his new apartment’s private, residents-only gym, the shower stalls had a door.


He would have been lying if he said he hadn’t fantasized about just this possibility all morning.


He pulled Oliver inside the furthest stall and locked the door.


He dropped the bag, and his armload of towels on the bench, freeing his hands to cradle Oliver’s face and kiss him, the way he’d been craving since the night before.


Oliver’s protest, what there was of one, fell away, replaced by a soft moan, that made David ache.


He dragged his mouth away, reaching into the shower stall to turn on the water, and the noise drowned out Oliver’s whimpers when David returned to the kiss, this time slipping a hand down the front of his sweats.


Chapter 26