Ellery Mountain 1 -The Fireman and the Cop (3 page)

Finn slid lower in the chair at his friend Kieran’s house and placed his boots on the small scratched table in front of him. Today was Friday. Every week he and Kieran and the currently missing Daniel would meet up for beers and boy talk. Three days out of hospital, he’d finally been cleared for going back to work this morning and his shift started in a little over an hour at freaking ten p.m.. At least he’d get a couple of hours with his friends. He couldn’t help feeling pissed, though, that he was on what Chief Mayfield had called light duties.

“Filing at night is better than going up against men with guns and drugs in the daytime,” Kieran pointed out helpfully.
Friends since kindergarten, he and Kieran had seen a lot in this town—men with guns and drugs were not something that had ever happened in either’s memory. In fact, the most exciting thing to happen in Ellery for years had been the fire at the station and Finn had been slap bang in the middle of that one. Kieran grinned at his own joke then swallowed the remainder of his beer in three swallows.
“Ass,” was all Finn could manage.
Kieran had plagued him in the hospital with his stupid jokes and never-ending teasing. Finn had grumbled back at him but at the end of the day what Kieran had done was take Finn away from the nightmare of nearly being burned to death trapped by a table in a collapsing police station.
A noise outside the window made both men turn first that way and then to the clock on the wall.
“He’s early,” Kieran commented. “That’s a first.”
The throaty roar of the Ducati silenced and Finn imagined the third of their weekly gathering climbing the steps to Kieran’s property and walking in with beers in hand and a ready grin. He wasn’t disappointed. Daniel Skylar, Finn’s first crush—windblown knight of the road—dumped beer in the fridge then pushed Finn’s feet off so he could replace them with his own as he lay back on the sofa.
“You okay?” he asked Finn.
Finn just nodded. There was no point in rehashing it all—they’d already covered most of it when Daniel had paid a couple of visits to his friend in hospital.
“Roads out of the city were shit,” he said to change the subject. “So I took the back way up past the cabins.”
“There’s some kind of car show in town. Watch for the…”
Kieran and Daniel talking faded into background noise as Finn regarded his friends closely. They were good people and he felt any tension in his body drain away as he relaxed. Maybe dying had made him realise he took them for granted, maybe he was just maudlin now he had reached twenty-five, he didn’t know, but tonight he looked at them differently. They were all the same age, product of the same school year. Where Kieran was the blueeyed blond with the grin and the glass-half-full attitude, Daniel was the bad boy with the dark hair, shades, the bike and no specific career that anyone could pin him down on.
Daniel was an ex-Marine, only six months back from his last tour of Afghanistan, and he had yet to settle to one thing as a replacement except for helping his mom around the cabins with Kieran. Finn could see changes in Daniel since he’d returned from his last tour. His friend always had a sense of freedom and living for the moment, but recently he had appeared much quieter than Finn was used to. Still, he remained directly opposite to Kieran who had a much more certain view on life. Kieran was the steady one. The one you could rely on.
Which made Finn what? If on the surface Daniel was the typical bad boy, with Kieran being the good guy, where did that put Finn? Maybe he was the not-quite-anything-inparticular guy. Not as catchy a title, he guessed. The three men had been meeting every Friday for six months. Daniel had started it. He’d come home with the bad-boy label he had earned at school reinforced with the new air of the battle warn about him. Then he’d called Finn, an on-off friend from high school.
“Dan, do you remember when you phoned me?” Finn interrupted whatever Kieran and Daniel had been talking about. Both men turned to look at Finn.
“This week?” Daniel appeared confused for a second.
“No, when you called me about meeting up. Do you remember how you explained yourself and why you wanted to talk to me?” Finn stopped talking until Daniel got with the programme.
Light dawned across Daniel’s face. “You mean the whole ‘Shit, I am gay and I know fuck-all and have suppressed it all, help me’ conversation?”
“Yeah, that one,” Finn said. He waited a second and both Daniel and Kieran stared at him expectantly.
“What about it?” Daniel finally prompted.
The question pushed Finn back to his train of thought. “You remember what I said to you about the kind of guy I like?”
“Yeah, you said…” Daniel swallowed another mouthful of beer and seemed to be recalling memories. “Tall, which ruled out midget here—”
“Fuck you, Daniel, I’m not a midget, I’m above average height,” Kieran snapped with no real heat.
“Above average for a pygmy,” Daniel snarked back.
Kieran was five nine. In Finn’s mind that wasn’t so short, but then he wasn’t a dead ringer for Officer Dibble, but the other two often called him that. There was affection in the nicknames and gentle ribbing. Daniel and Kieran were laughing and exchanging insults.
“Guys?” Finn pulled them back to what he had asked Daniel.
“Yeah, so, you said, tall, built, blond, blue eyes, although you’d take brown eyes, and preferably in uniform.” Daniel counted off each point with his fingers.
“So I met this guy.”
Silence. Kieran sat up in his seat. Even Daniel had nothing to say. This was what their Fridays were for. Somewhere for the three of them to unload their thoughts and worries, somewhere safe to talk men without fear of getting beaten up.
“In this town? In the hospital? A doctor? Who?” Kieran asked rapidly.
“Max Harrison. You know, the one who—”
“—pulled you from the fire. Oh my God, way tall and built. I’ve seen him in town.” Kieran smirked as he said this.
The biggest problem for the Ellery Mountain Fridays, as Daniel had christened them, was that Ellery wasn’t a big pot for available guys.
“There’s fresh meat in town?” Daniel asked.
“He’s off limits,” Finn explained carefully. Irritation built at Daniel’s words, only because he felt if Max ever met Daniel then Finn’s chances would be zero.
“I saw him yesterday, but let’s face it, he’s not my type.” Kieran shrugged. “I like’m less…” He waved his hands then touched Daniel’s biceps which were, Finn admitted, kind of impressive. “Less muscly.”
“I like strong guys,” Daniel pointed out.
Finn couldn’t call Daniel on that. To his knowledge he’d been so far back in the closet for so long that he had even stopped talking about guys let alone having a type.
Finn leant forward. “Strong? Hell, he lifted me and carried me out of the building.” He sat back as Kieran raised his eyebrows and Daniel smirked. Finn wasn’t small. Yes, he was a couple of inches shorter than Max’s six foot and then some, but he was slimmer, more of a runner than a fighter, but still, finding someone who could manhandle you was something both he and Kieran liked in a guy.
“I’m leaving you girls to talk and getting more beer,” Daniel said. He moved off to the kitchen and Finn heard his friend rummaging about for the dips and chips that Kieran always had in the cupboards for their Friday meet-ups.
“Not for me, I’m on duty in an hour,” Finn said.
“Hurry up then and tell me more,” Kieran prompted. “He lifted you. Like.
Lifted
you?”
“Fireman’s carry I assume, and then, jeez, this is so embarrassing, I came on to him when I was with the paramedics. I don’t remember, though. Well, I kind of recollect blue eyes, I think.” Finn concentrated on what he could recall. A lot of that night was lost in imaginings too terrible to contemplate, but he wished he could remember what he had said. “So he tells it, I said something about not being able to find any gay fireman in small-town Tennessee.”
“I’m impressed.” Kieran smirked.
“I may have mentioned something else about bodies and the size of his hose.”
Kieran snorted beer then called out to Daniel, “Did you hear that, Dan, our boy here complimented the new guy in town on the size of his hose.”
“Is it big then?” Daniel said. He dropped snacks on the small table and passed Kieran another beer.
Finn groaned into his coffee and grabbed a handful of Pringles. He was on shift ten tonight until six in the morning and he was already way into snack and caffeine mode. Shifts played havoc with metabolism and only the gym stopped him from turning to real-life doughnut in the space of a month. Thankfully working hard made his stomach flat and his body spare. Just the way he liked to be. He wondered if Max preferred his partners slim and agile, or short, blonde and funny similar to Kieran, or tall, dark and broody, similar to Daniel. Did Max top? Finn was up for switching but he really loved to be manhandled.
Oh, God. He was back to that again.
Even thinking of Max’s muscles and strength made Finn hard in his pants. He wondered if the fireman was out to his colleagues. Finn was to his. When he’d become a cop and come back home he had been moving to a place that had known he was gay since he’d come out at sixteen. A supportive family and friends made it, if not entirely easy, at least bearable.
Not so Daniel and Kieran. Daniel, who’d got stuck with the bad-boy label and never really came to terms with himself, then slipped into the equally restrictive forces world of DADT. He’d not even told his mom, and Finn and Kieran were not going to break that confidence. Then there was Kieran, whose parents supported him but all the time his dad remained mayor of Ellery they preferred he kept it on the down low. Being the son of the civic leader played havoc with the sex life of any horny teenager or guy in his twenties.
“I haven’t seen his hose, or him, since I was in hospital.” Finn said. Then he realised the new gate he had opened for questions.
“He came to visit you there?” Kieran sat forward with a raptly interested expression on his face.
Daniel interrupted. “Did he bring you a gift? Flowers? Chocolates? Condoms and lube?”
Finn decided to treat the comment with the contempt it deserved and instead gave his friend the finger.
“Routine stuff,” he said. “I mean, we have a meeting at some point with the forensics on the fire. But he wasn’t at the hospital for that. He pulled me out of the building, risked his life for me, probably feels responsible for me and shit. Then he gave me his number and said he’d see me again.”
“He is so out of your league,” Kieran quipped. “I think he needs a short blond showing him around town.” Finn frowned and Kieran held his hands up in mock defence. “I was joking. Hey, a thought, though… You say that he is your fantasy? What if
his
fantasy is a cop tying him to the bed with handcuffs?”
“Handcuffs hurt,” Daniel interrupted. “I’ve been on the wrong end of those things one too many times when I was arrested as a teenager.”
“He’d have to order in softer handcuffs from the city,” Kieran informed them both. He had an air of knowledge about him that made Finn look at his friend appraisingly. “I can give you a web address. I get volume discount on all kinds of cool stuff.”
“You know way too much about that for me to feel comfortable,” Finn said.
Kieran just laughed and shrugged it all away with a wink.
Catching sight of the time, Finn knew he had to put an end to this particular Friday. He had exactly thirty minutes to get from the cabins to the new cop area inside the mayor’s office, and that was doable unless the road got blocked by a freaking bear, like the last time he’d left here. “I’m gone,” he announced.
Daniel stretched lazily on the sofa, as he had literally two minutes to walk to the next cabin and it didn’t look like he was going anywhere fast. Kieran appeared equally settled and for the first time since they’d begun meeting on Fridays Finn hated that he had to leave early. They might well have decided to meet up because they had the gay thing in common, but that had long since been surpassed as a trio of guys making their way through the world with each other’s support. He needed his friends as much as they did him.
Finn had so many questions tonight. How the hell could he consider climbing all over the fireman when said man was a local now? Not only that, but maybe Max was a man who promised sin but kept that part of himself hidden.
How did you start an affair? What did you do? He was twenty-five and mostly had experience of quick fucks—trips to clubs in the city and meetups in no-tell motel rooms. Of course, he also had his two years with Neil-the-controlling-bastard at college, but he pushed that from his thoughts. He should leave this alone and not be dragged in by thoughts of hot sex in secret locations.
A bear did not shit on his own front step.
Or something like that.

The office was quiet. No, scratch that, the office was dead. He and the dispatcher, Kathy White, were the only people there and there was nothing on the boards. This shift was just to cover the phones and they hadn’t rung since he’d started. He’d caught up on paperwork. They hadn’t managed to get much out of the burned offices but there was enough recovered information to enable the department to get back on its feet. Noise outside the window in the parking area had him checking around his car and the other two parked cars left there for signs of a bear but there was nothing. Hell, it was a slow night when not even a bear came to say ‘hi’.

His coffee finished, he was pleased to see relief arriving in the form of a bleary-eyed colleague. Finn signed out and climbed in his car. Exhaustion stole over him and it was only necessity that had him stopping at the store for food. People asked him how he was doing— more people than he expected to be here at six-thirty a.m.. Which was why he wasn’t overly surprised to see Max in the aisle ahead of him. Suddenly incredibly tongue-tied, for a second he stared, and when Max turned and saw him Finn smiled. Max returned the smile and crossed to him by the apples in two strides.

“Hi,” he said. “How you doing?” He stood, shifting the basket from left to right hand. “Good.”
“Your hand okay? Chest better? Breathing good?” Max asked solicitously. Finn knew he meant from the effects of the fire, and yes, he felt fine, but hell, breathing

at all at the moment was hard work. This was freaking stupid. He was a twenty-five-year-old cop, not some kid. But to stand there in front of Max, who ticked every single one of his ‘right here right now’ boxes, and form words was hard. Come to think of it, that wasn’t the only thing that was hard.