Burn It Down

by Jess Anastasi

  He started to push by him to get to the door, but Kevin caught him and pulled him in. The guy was built like the linebacker he was—all bulging muscles and intimidating strength. Easily outweighed him by fifty pounds. Kevin had a tight grip on the collar of the shirt Troy had given him as he dragged him closer, and for a panicked second he thought the bastard was going to kiss him. But Kevin stopped when he was a mere inch away, nostrils flaring.

  Oh shit.

  “This isn’t your shirt, is it? You’d never own a flannel shirt.” Possessive anger tightened Kevin’s features. “And you smell like you’ve been—”

  “Get off me!” He wrenched himself out of Kevin’s hold and took advantage of his surprise to shove him back a step.

  “What were you out doing tonight, Jared? Or should I say who?” Kevin asked in a low, menacing voice that told him he already knew.

  “It’s none of your fucking business, Kevin.” He turned his back on him, but as he went to reach for the door it wrenched open and light flooded out, framing Del as he stepped across the threshold. Thank God.

  “What the hell is going on out here?” Del demanded, glancing between them and then settling a glare on Kevin.

  “Who that fuck is this?” Kevin demanded, clearly building up into a full froth of rage. “Your boyfriend? You leave him at home while you go out and fuck other guys? I knew it. You were fucking around on me, too, weren’t you? I always knew you were a slut—”

  Del surged forward and grabbed two fistfuls of Kevin’s shirt to shove him violently into the wall next to the door.

  “Say one more fucking word about my brother. I dare you.” Del was the same height as Kevin, though didn’t have as much bulk. His training as a Texas Ranger, however, would probably ensure he could subdue Kevin if he decided to fight back.

  As Kevin and Del stared each other down, Jared reached out a cautious hand and cupped Del’s shoulder. “He’s not worth it. And he was leaving.”

  Del shoved himself off Kevin. His brother reached into his back pocket and flipped open the slim wallet holding his ID. He shoved it in Kevin’s face, and he looked ready to piss himself when he saw the silver star of the Texas Ranger insignia.

  “Get the fuck off our porch before I go find my gun and call my buddies.”

  “This isn’t over, Jared,” Kevin said, even as he stumbled toward the porch stairs in his haste.

  “Like fuck it isn’t!” Del yelled, taking a few strides forward, making Kevin practically fall down the last few steps.

  Jared clapped a hand over his mouth to stop a hysterical laugh escaping as he watched Kevin sprint across the street and scramble into a truck parked there, then pull away from the curb with a squeal of tires.

  “Kevin, I presume.” Del turned to face him with a concerned expression once Kevin’s truck was out of sight.

  He nodded, emotions smashing down on him from all directions as the adrenaline he’d been riding drained away fast.

  “What the hell was he doing here?”

  “Apparently he wants to get back together.” His voice came out strangled, and he swallowed down the tightness in his throat. The need to see Troy, to feel his arms around him, to press his face into his chest, came at him hard on a wave of longing that crashed over him.

  “Are you all right?” Del asked, brow creasing with worry.

  He shook his head, knowing he wouldn’t be able to say anything else without losing his shit. But even staying quiet didn’t save him as tears spilled out of his eyes and down his cheeks.

  “Oh, Jared. Come here.” Del pulled him into a bear hug. It was nice. Better than standing there trying to hold himself together. But it didn’t bring him the same comfort and relief he instinctively knew he would have found with Troy. “That asshole. I can’t believe he just turned up here after everything he did to you and actually thought you’d take him back.”

  Though the pair had never met before tonight, Del was the only one who knew the full ugly truth of what’d happened with Kevin, and only because he’d been there that day and helped him scrabble all his shit together and get out of there before Kevin came home again.

  “How about we go inside and you take a shower before you go to bed? No offense, but you smell like—”

  He gave a watery laugh and pulled back from his brother, self-consciously putting several steps between them.

  “I know. Jesus.”

  Del arched an eyebrow at him. “Troy the hot park ranger, huh? Seems like you had a satisfying evening with him.”

  “You have no idea.” Even just talking about the guy made him feel a million times better. Maybe he was falling too fast for a man he barely knew, but after seeing Kevin tonight and being reminded how bad things could be, Troy seemed even more tempting. All his kindness, honesty, and unquestioning support.

  Your feelings aren’t invalid, Jared.

  God. That had been the moment. The very second he knew he was in trouble even though he only met the guy three days ago. No one had ever said anything so simple that meant so much to him. No one had ever given him that kind of permission to be who he was and feel whatever he felt. No one had ever offered such selfless support without expecting anything in return.

  Sure, Del and Tate had always been there for him without question, and he wouldn’t have gotten through the situation with Kevin without Del. But they were his brothers, and even though they 100 percent had his back, it wasn’t quite the same as being able to rely on someone the way he wanted to rely on Troy.

  “You going to be okay?” Del asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” he replied honestly, because he wasn’t going to give Kevin one more second of power over him. “I will be. I am.”

  “We’re going to need to have a conversation about what to do if that jackass won’t quit.” Del crossed his arms, clearly ready to fight however he needed to.

  “Hopefully your big, tough Texas Ranger routine scared him off for good and we won’t need to worry about it.” He gripped Del on the shoulder. “Thanks, by the way.”

  Del shot him a suave smile. “You never need to thank me, brother.”

  “Still, Tate and I are lucky to have you.”

  “You’ve got it the wrong way around,” Del said softly, smile slipping into something more heartfelt. But then he seemed to shake himself out of it and gave Jared a playful shove. “Anyway, why are you out so late? Doesn’t your shift at the firehouse start in, like, four hours?”

  “Don’t remind me, Mom,” he groaned, letting Del hustle him into the house.

  “That’s what you get for staying out past curfew. Loving the checked flannel, by the way. Really sets off the redneck in you.”

  “Get lost.” He laughed and took a swipe at Del. “You’re just jealous you can’t pull it off, brother-cousin.”

  Del growled at him, looking ready to pounce, so he took off toward his room and the safety of the shower, Del’s laugh following, punctuated by Tate’s drunken snores.

  As he stripped out of his clothes and hopped into the shower, he let out a long breath, forcing the last of the tension to go with the expulsion of air. Thank God Del had been home. He didn’t know what he would have done if his brother hadn’t been here. Some small voice in the back of his mind suggested he might have caved and called Troy, but the last thing he wanted was Troy anywhere near the disaster that had been his relationship with Kevin. He just hoped the guy got a clue from Del’s very effective threats and stayed away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TROY GROANED in annoyance as an insistent ringing dragged him from a very pleasant dream about a certain sexy firefighter riding him until it felt like his cock was going to explode. He pressed a palm against his aching hard-on and reached out with the other to grope for his phone on the nightstand.

  He didn’t even bother checking caller ID as he hit the Answer icon. There were only two people who ever called him this early, and they were both work-related.

  “’Ello?” he grumbled, trying to pull himself from the las
t fog of sleep.

  “Troy, sorry to wake you, but I couldn’t get ahold of Buck,” Sheriff Hayes said into the phone, sounding more awake than he had any right to be before dawn on a Saturday morning.

  “No problem, what’s up?”

  “There’s a fire in the park. EFD are on their way out there now.”

  “What?” He surged up into a sitting position and flung off the sheets tangled around his waist, completely awake now.

  “I don’t have all the details. All I know is it’s a structure along the lakeshore. Given the calm conditions, I don’t think EFD are too worried about it getting out of hand at this stage.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, Sheriff. I’m on my way now.”

  He and the sheriff told each other a quick goodbye and he scrambled to dress in a clean uniform, glad he’d taken a shower before he’d fallen into bed the night before. It was still dark when he rushed out to his SUV, but a hint of gray was visible on the eastern horizon beyond town.

  Though there was very little traffic on the road, he hit the emergency lights on his SUV and zipped around the few other vehicles on the road, making it to the park only a few minutes behind the EFD truck, according to the emergency services scanner radio on his dash.

  He followed the GPS coordinates the dispatcher gave him, driving past the rangers’ office, belatedly remembering to call Buck and leave a message to say he was on scene and they probably both didn’t need to attend.

  As he turned onto the same access track he’d driven down with Jared the night before, a weird sense of something trickled through him, but he shook it off. When he pulled his SUV into the same spot at the fork in the track behind a hulking firetruck, part of him wasn’t surprised.

  He jogged along the short trail and emerged to see eight of Everness’s finest firefighters had managed to pull a second, smaller rig almost right up to the water from a different access point and were casually hosing down the dock he and Jared had sat on to watch the sun set last night. The place they’d shared their first kiss, going up in flames.

  Usually he would think it was an odd coincidence. But after the air being let out of his tires last night? Would it be ridiculously paranoid to think the two were related? He silently scoffed at himself. Was he self-centered enough to think someone was targeting him? Now that was stupid.

  Troy shook off the ludicrous thoughts and forced himself into work mode, searching for the fire chief. Instead he spotted Jared walking around the truck, checking hose connections and some of the dials.

  “Jared,” he called out, closing in on him.

  Jared jumped and spun like he’d been startled but immediately relaxed when he saw him.

  “Oh, hi,” Jared said in a completely underwhelming way.

  He gave a quick self-deprecating laugh. “Have to say, thought I might get a more enthusiastic greeting than that after last night.”

  Maybe he hadn’t expected Jared to kiss him senseless the second they saw each other today—although he wouldn’t have complained about that—but he’d at least thought he’d earned one of Jared’s warm smiles.

  A hint of pink colored Jared’s cheeks. “Sorry, just had my mind on other things.”

  “Of course.” He stepped back, honestly feeling like an idiot now. The guy was here trying to do his job. Clearly not the time for flirting. “I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”

  Jared reached out and grabbed his wrist before he could escape. “Troy, that’s not what I meant. Don’t run off, please.”

  There was something in the way Jared asked, some hint of vulnerability in his words and expression that speared straight into the middle of Troy’s chest and made him want to fight every one of Jared’s battles, big and small, just so he never had to feel like that again. The guy was definitely out of sorts this morning. He only hoped it didn’t have anything to do with what’d happened between them, because it had pretty much been the best night of his life.

  He gave a nod, sending Jared what he hoped was a reassuring smile. It seemed to work, as Jared relaxed a fraction and turned back to whatever he’d been doing before Troy had approached him.

  “Kind of sad, our dock burning down to the water.” Jared nodded his chin to where the firefighters were letting the old wooden planks burn themselves out, only controlling the flames to make sure the fire didn’t spread to land. He supposed it didn’t present much risk, given it was burning over water.

  And his heart definitely didn’t skip at the way Jared had said our dock.

  Fine, maybe it did just a bit.

  “What do you think happened?” he asked, crossing his arms and leaning a shoulder against the side of the fire truck as the sun finally started making an appearance.

  “Arson,” Jared said casually, like someone purposefully lighting a dock on fire wasn’t a big deal.

  “What? How do you know?” He straightened, thoughts already spinning over what the hell he was supposed to do if he had an arsonist in the park.

  “They didn’t bother trying to hide the evidence.” Jared pointed to where a couple of firefighters were taking photos of an empty bottle of bourbon and two white plastic bottles of lighter fluid tossed on the ground. “Hopefully it was just some drunk morons messing around and it’ll be a one-off. The last thing we need in this tinder-dry forest is an arsonist. We were lucky this morning. As targets go, this one did the least amount of damage.”

  “I’ll coordinate with the sheriff, see if we can’t track the culprits down.”

  Like Jared had said, hopefully it’d just been a couple of wasted idiots out pulling stupid shit last night, and this would be the end of it. He had enough on his plate with the regular levels of stupid caused by a heatwave without adding jackass vandals into the mix.

  “Troy?”

  He glanced back at Jared, automatically stepping closer at the concerned note in Jared’s voice. But when he followed Jared’s gaze to the tree line where he was staring, he spotted Lewis and Aaron standing in the predawn shadows and watching the firefighters work.

  “You don’t think—”

  “No,” he blurted out automatically, because he didn’t want to believe it and didn’t even want Jared to speak the possibility aloud.

  Jared sent him an understanding look. “We can’t rule them out.”

  Hell. Jared was right. Even he knew the thing about arsonists coming back to see their handiwork. And if he was looking for some kind of connection between the air being let out of his tires and the burning dock, then a couple of troubled teens wasn’t a very farfetched answer. Aaron had been particularly belligerent about Troy sticking his nose in their business.

  “Goddammit,” he muttered, shoving a hand through the messy hair he hadn’t bothered combing after rushing out of bed. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find he had his uniform on inside out or backward in his haste. “I’ll go talk to them.”

  Jared caught his hand before he could walk off. Jared snatched a glance around, presumably to check if anyone was watching, and then lifted his hand to press a lingering kiss into his palm. One that speared straight to his cock.

  “You want me to come with?” Jared asked in a low voice.

  He traced a thumb along Jared’s jaw, sternly reminding himself to remain detached and not shove Jared up against the side of the fire engine and jam his hands down his pants like he really wanted to.

  “No, you stay here. I’ll only be a minute. Thanks, though.”

  Jared sent him the smile he’d been waiting all morning to see, the one that warmed him from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair, rivaling the radiance of the Texas sun beginning to peek over the treetops.

  “Always,” Jared murmured in return, the single word seeming to promise so much more than either of them was willing to admit to yet.

  He made himself pull away and jogged up the short rise to where Lewis and Aaron stood.

  “Morning, boys,” he greeted, glad they didn’t run off as soon as he approached them.

  “R
anger Troy,” Lewis greeted in return, even though he’d basically told the kid every day for the past four days to just call him Troy. “What happened?”

  Troy glanced over his shoulder as some of the dock finally collapsed into the water, sending up a shower of sparks. “Someone set fire to the old boat dock down there.”

  “Someone did it on purpose?” Lewis clarified, eyes widening in a way that seemed too genuine to fake. Aaron, however, was staying stubbornly silent. His lips were pressed tight, gaze practically sparking with defiance.

  “Yeah, they did, unfortunately. Which is a pretty damned dangerous thing to do when the park is so dry and the weather’s been so hot. Wouldn’t take much for something small to turn into a wildfire.” He eyed Aaron as he spoke. The shiner from a few days ago was starting to go yellow around the edges. But there was a new shadow of a bruise coming up on his jaw that hadn’t been there when Troy had seen him yesterday. “What’ve you boys been up to?”

  “Why?” Aaron demanded, moving closer to Lewis. “You think we had something to do with this?”

  “I didn’t say that, now, did I?” he countered calmly, looking for signs Aaron’s defensiveness was anything other than typical teenage belligerence. Why had Aaron jumped to the conclusion he was implying they might be guilty? Because he was guilty? Or just the opposite? Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell either way. He knew Aaron was annoyed about his repeated attempts to get to know them and try to help their situation. Perhaps letting down the tires and setting fire to the dock was his way of acting out?

  “I notice you’re not exactly denying it, either,” Aaron said, the accusation clear.

  He shrugged, trying to downplay it, not wanting to scare them off. Now more than ever, he was more determined to gain their trust and help them. This sort of behavior was nothing if not a cry for help.