#BURN (Fever Falls Book 2)

by Devon McCormack

  “You’re an interesting character, Jace,” I noted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most guys, if I’d thrown down talk about a major endorsement deal, would have jumped at the opportunity without any hemming and hawing. They would have got down on their knees and sucked my cock to land a deal like that. Not that I would ever behave that way with a client.”

  “Oh really? That doesn’t sound like any fun.”

  “If someone’s sucking my cock, they’re doing it because they want to, not because they’re gonna get something else out of it.”

  Jace snickered. “I bet they are.”

  I would have suspected that such a comment would elicit some sort of tell from Jace. That I would at least be able to read what team he batted for, but with his eyes on the road, it was hard to make out what he was thinking.

  “You got a girlfriend?” Jace asked, seeming to address the same unspoken question that surely we both had by then. When I didn’t immediately reply, he added, “Boyfriend?”

  “Single. Not much for dating, but if I hook up with someone, it’s with a guy.” Figured it’d be best not to beat around the bush on that anymore, and I was kind of hoping Jace would put an end to my speculation.

  “Oh, that’s cool. I have a few gay friends, some even at the station.”

  “Judging by that response, I take it you’re not,” I pressed, wanting him to end my curiosity, and then I could escape some of the fantasies he roused just by being Hottie Firefighter…and a downright laid-back, intriguing guy. Even in the short time I’d been around him, I became more and more affected by this little gem of a human, who had somehow gone for so long totally unnoticed in Fever Falls, Georgia.

  “I’ve always said straight when people have asked that question, just because I’ve mostly been with women.”

  “Mostly?”

  “There was this one time in college where this guy went down on me.”

  I laughed, didn’t know why it came out as loud as it did, but at least part of it was how refreshing it was to hear him sound so at ease about it.

  “What? Is that weird?”

  “I’m just surprised you would admit that. I mean, you have to remember I’m in a biz where guys stay closeted as long as physically possible. Like, you can be inside them, and they’ll be telling you how straight they are.”

  “Why?” Jace asked, turning to me, seeming horrified by what I was saying.

  “It’s the poison of the entertainment industry. There are plenty of gay guys in it, but God forbid anyone find out and have it ruin the image they’ve crafted. It’s not ruining careers as much as it used to, but the way guys act about it, you wouldn’t know it. And to be honest, I wasn’t expecting some guy from Fever Falls to be so chill about something like that.”

  “Just shows how little you know about Fever Falls.”

  “You’re doing a good job giving me hope for this place. But seriously, you dropped that fact about that guy going down on you like it was nothing. This seems to be a running theme with you.”

  “Eh, life’s too short for bullshit. People gotta take me as I am.”

  “I’m sure people enjoy taking you exactly as you are,” I said, meaning every bit of my innuendo, and he enjoyed a laugh. It was nice that we’d discussed this aspect of ourselves.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were flirting with me, Dax Munro.”

  “If you hadn’t given me hope that it might work, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “I told you, I enjoy being persuaded.” He glanced at me long enough for a wink.

  Funny to think I’d come to Fever Falls to land a deal, but Hottie Firefighter’s natural magnetism had made me eager to land something else.

  “Well, if we’re getting close to your mom’s place, might be best to leave persuading for later. I don’t think she’d care to see what you’re doing to me.”

  “Doing to you?” he asked, seeming confused until his gaze shifted down to the crotch of my pants. “Oh!”

  He stared for a moment too long, to the point where if he’d stayed like that much longer, I would have told him to get his eyes back on the goddamn road, but he pulled his gaze back to the road, then got real quiet before saying, “Wow.”

  “I don’t imagine you’re that impressed, since I’m sure you’re working with plenty.”

  “Yeah, I just rarely meet someone who compares. Might have to whip them out and see who’s bigger.” He winked at me again, and we shared a laugh.

  I didn’t know if the conversation would ever lead to something more with him, but it was fun regardless. Jace Kruse was a charming motherfucker, no doubt about that.

  As we arrived in Jace’s mom’s neighborhood, I noticed the homes were spaced out a lot more than I was used to seeing in Los Angeles. We pulled into the drive of one of the two-story homes.

  Jace grabbed Mac and brought him with us, lifting him over the front porch steps on account of the cast on his leg, I assumed. He keyed in a code under the doorknob before leading us inside, calling out, “Nance, we’re here!” as he guided me through a short hall.

  “Oh, hey!” a woman’s voice filled the place as we rounded the corner and entered the kitchen, and then I saw her, a short blonde in a pink apron. She closed the oven and set a casserole dish on the stovetop, then flashed a warm smile my way. A guy—I figured in his late teens—wearing a sleeveless black tee and a backward baseball cap, sat on the counter beside her. He licked a spoon, then put it back in the near-empty Ragu bottle he held. He must’ve been the brother Jace had been telling me about. He glanced up, a grin spreading across his face as he set the bottle down on the counter and hurried over to Jace, fist-bumping him before reeling him in for a hug.

  Then he turned and said in a distinctively deep voice, “Hey, I’m Keegan,” and offered a firm handshake.

  Nance hugged Jace, then made her way over to me. “A hug’ll have to do until I get these mitts off,” she said, offering one. “Nancy, but you can call me Nance, if you want. These guys do.”

  We exchanged introductory pleasantries, and then she returned to her work at the stove. Keegan spent some time petting Mac and slipping him doggie treats Jace had given him. Nance asked for some help to get ready for dinner, so Jace and I chipped in, setting the table on the opposite side of the kitchen from the oven, while she and Keegan finished preparing the meal. As we all started to sit and Keegan began passing around the lasagna, Nance said, “So Jace told me you’re from Los Angeles and that a company wants to put him on billboards and in commercials.”

  “Mom…” Jace said in that tone that made it clear he was embarrassed by the way she presented it.

  “That’s right,” I replied to her. “They’re very interested in working with your son, so I say if we both give him a little push, he’s looking at a really stable, secure future.”

  “Who you trying to pitch this to? Me or my mom?” Jace asked, seeing right through my tactic.

  “Anyone who’ll get you to agree to this.”

  “I admire that approach, Dax,” she said. “I’ve always believed the Lord comes to the aid of those who are persistent.”

  “I have a similar philosophy,” I said. Minus the Lord stuff, though.

  “But he’d need to leave his job at the fire station?” Nance asked.

  “He’d have to get some time off, at least. And he’d be at the beck and call of the company for a year, barring the need to renew his contract because the campaign has been so successful, they want to keep using him. But if you’re worried about the money—”

  “Oh, no, no. He told me about the money. It’s just, well, Jace loves his job. I can’t imagine him being content with anything else. When he was a kid, he was always running around telling everyone he was going to be a firefighter. Went to our local college for his BS in Fire Science.” I could hear her pride in the way she spoke the words. “You know how some people just know what they’re going to be when they grow up? Well, that was Jace. All he e
ver wanted to do in the world, isn’t that right?”

  He smiled, not seeming embarrassed by her revealing this much, but rather proud of his commitment to his work. “That’s right.”

  “He hadn’t mentioned that,” I said. “Can I ask what about the job appealed to you, Jace?”

  Keegan passed the casserole dish to him, and Jace stacked some lasagna on his plate. “As I mentioned, I was in the shelter until I was ten, and the guys from the station would volunteer together and come every other weekend and spend time with us. They encouraged us to participate in group activities with them. There was this guy, Crawford, who took me under his wing.” He finished piling the pasta on his plate, then set the dish in the middle of the table. “We’d play basketball and Skee-Ball, and he’d tell me about all the adventures he had on his job, all the people he got to help. Sounded like he was a superhero, or at least, it was the closest thing I knew of to one, actually getting to run around and save people’s lives.”

  “But dangerous.”

  “Wouldn’t be much of a superhero if you were never in danger.”

  “Superman,” I muttered, reflecting on Hacksmore’s comment during our meeting.

  “More like Batman,” Keegan interjected.

  “What?”

  “Superman had superhuman abilities. He was an alien. Batman was just a regular guy.”

  “Very true,” I noted.

  “Well, if you guys insist,” Jace joked, feigning arrogance, though he was clearly being far more humble than he was letting on.

  Jace Kruse didn’t run out of admirable qualities, did he?

  “Aren’t you leaving out something about Crawford?” Nance asked.

  Jace’s pleasant smile from when he described the guy diminished. “He became my dad and Keeg’s, and introduced me to one of the most amazing women in the world.” He and Nance exchanged a fond look, though I could see the sadness in their expressions as well.

  “They must’ve been greedy for kids,” Keegan chimed in, “because they adopted me from there too, but I was too little to remember.”

  Nance smiled. “We were very greedy for those little rosy cheeks you had.”

  Keegan rolled his eyes in an overdramatic display, as though he didn’t want there to be any confusion about his annoyance. “Oh, why did I even bring it up?”

  “Crawford and I loved kids, and God blessed us with two of the best.”

  Jace must’ve seen the question in my expression because he looked at me for a moment before his gaze sank, and he said, “Our father’s not with us anymore.”

  Nance’s, Jace’s, and Keegan’s expressions all seemed to mirror one another’s as they mourned the man missing from their dinner table.

  “Crawford was a lieutenant at the station and was about to transition to the assistant chief position when he had an accident on the job,” Nance said. “I was a proud wife, and I’m a proud mama.” She clearly had every reason to be. But even as she admired Crawford and Jace, I could tell the Kruses’ mood had shifted as they reflected on the one they’d lost.

  “And I’m an exhausting brother,” Keegan followed up, seemingly trying to ease the tension. “See the kind of expectations this one sets me up for? I’m still questioning my major.”

  “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with questioning things,” Nance insisted.

  “No, no. Nothing wrong with questioning things at all,” Jace added as he gazed right at me, clearly referring to the conversation we’d shared on the ride over.

  Keegan and Nance didn’t seem to pick up on the insinuation, and the conversation naturally shifted away from their grief over losing Crawford, something I could tell by their mention of him, still weighed on them a great deal. Changing the more macabre subject, Jace, Nance, and Keegan caught up with one another about their days.

  Even in the short amount of time I’d spent around Jace, it was evident he really was this good ol’ boy he presented to the world…the sort who couldn’t be so easily persuaded by the spotlight and big paydays. I’d seen this before, actors or models or even average Joes trying to put on an act as though it was too much for them, in hopes of maybe getting some more money out of a deal. But in all my years in PR, I’d never encountered a Jace Kruse.

  Knowing the consequences of this sort of endorsement deal I’d come to him with made me almost feel bad for presenting him with the opportunity.

  Did he really need the toxicity that came along with all that? He’d experienced the fun part of having his fifteen minutes…or really, fifteen seconds. If he walked away, he could still keep his life intact without dealing with any of the negative bullshit—the rumors and speculation, the social-media drama, the onslaught of attacks that naturally follow stardom.

  I tried to shake the uneasy feeling. What was I thinking? If he said yes to working with Hacksmore, it was his decision.

  And if a little persuasion was all it was going to take to keep this account from Freyda Inc., I could manage that.

  6

  Jace

  “That wasn’t what I was expecting,” Dax said as we headed onto the back porch.

  He had a beer Nance had offered him, and I held on to my glass of sweet tea from dinner.

  We’d finished eating about thirty minutes earlier, Dax falling effortlessly into the conversation with Nance and Keegan as they discussed the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, which apparently, they were all fans of. I sat back and enjoyed their speculation about some of the plot twists, or what Nance kept referring to—to Keegan’s chagrin—as plot holes.

  “What were you expecting?” I asked as I walked over to the porch. It was dark out, leaving the back and the woods behind the house illuminated by the porch light I’d flipped on before we stepped out.

  Dax moseyed over to me. “More of a business meeting,” he replied as he sat. “I thought Nance was going to be a godfather-esque figure who would need to know all the details of the deal we were discussing.”

  “Yeah, that wasn’t what I meant. I just wanted her to get a read on you. And she liked you.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She doesn’t need to tell me these things. We know each other well enough that I can pick up on it. If she didn’t like you, she would have kept looking at me real distinctly. That’s how we do it—give each other signals when dealing with someone particularly awful.”

  “Glad to know she didn’t do that with me,” Dax said with a laugh.

  “Not yet, at least, so we’re good on that front, and you seem like an honest guy, Dax.”

  “Let’s get something straight, Jace. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Honest definitely isn’t a word I’d use to describe myself.”

  “Something you want to share?” The way his gaze shifted around the yard, I figured something was weighing on his mind.

  “I don’t mean that I’m some bastard who goes around lying all the time, but while we were having dinner, I was thinking, here I am, trying to convince this pretty real, cool guy to enter a world of greed and corruption, a world that thrusts people into the spotlight only to knock them down and see them get consumed by darkness.” He took a sip of his beer.

  “You think I’m cool?”

  I thought he was going to spit out his beer as he chuckled at that.

  I added, “I do have to say…I am curious. If you think that way about your industry, what the hell are you doing—”

  “—in a job that’s built around it? Well, long story short, it’s what I know. My mother always told me you needed to play to your strengths, and I do just that. Haven’t done too bad for myself for being a high school dropout.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Clearly don’t need a degree to be a successful hottie like yourself.”

  He chuckled. “It’s also not too bad since I’m not actually dealing with the consequences in this line of work, so it’s easier to manage from this side. I just see what it does to other people. It leaves them in financial, physical, or emotional ruin. Peop
le—even good people—wind up in some bad situations. It’s a lot of pressure, and sometimes they’re looking to numb the pain. They’re prey to all kinds of addictions, and they wind up in rehab, passing their kid along to strangers until they basically have to grow up on their own.”

  “Why do I have this strange feeling you’re speaking from experience?” I asked, surprised to hear him open up like that.

  He shook his head. “It’s another life away from me now. Bottom line is that the industry can be rough, and it can eat you up and swallow you alive, so when you’re considering taking the money and running, just never forget that.”

  I took his words to heart. “Fair enough. But first off, that’s something most people understand about fame and fortune. We all have TVs and watch all those specials about celebrities and stars. But also, unless you’re keeping something much worse from me, it sounds like you’re being pretty damn honest.”

  He snickered, but I could hear the sadness in his tone, the bitterness of a man who had seen the cycle he was referring to one too many times. “So what have your thoughts been on all this? You interested in working with this deal? I’d understand if you’re not. You said when I came out here that you weren’t interested in the limelight, and this would be that. And it would take you away from your work, which you clearly love even more than I was expecting.”

  “I’ve been mulling it over since our first conversation, and I was thinking about possibly taking you up on this.”

  He glared at me as though I’d said something that had not only surprised him, but offended him.

  “What’s that look for?”

  “I’m not exactly trying to sell you on it now, and here you are, wanting to go forward with it?”

  “I’m full of surprises, Dax Munro.” I winked at him, and he smiled.