Wilde Fire (Forever Wilde 3)

I’m coming home, Otto. Please god find a way to get out of the navy and come home to me.

Until we meet again,

Walker

(Unsent)

It was decided. I was not going to do anything at all to implicate the Walker family in those fires. If having Seth’s family safe and stable was important to him, then by god, that’s what was going to happen. But I’d be damned if I was going to let some teenaged arsonist think he could light a fire whenever he damned well wanted to. If I found out Hal had set those fires, I’d give him a piece of my mind without holding back.

In the meantime, I’d totally lied to Walker.

I’d told him I was painting walls at my sisters’ place when in reality I was working on an idea I’d come up with on the drive to Dallas.

When Walker and I were ten years old, our elementary school had gone on a field trip to the Museum of the American Railroad in Frisco. We’d both fallen head over heels in love with the place and spent hours and hours after that creating the elaborate model train setup we were going to have in our house one day.

Because there was never a question that we were going to be together forever. Even in those early days, we just said we were going to be roommates and to heck with any girls. The two of us knew right away there would be no wives involved. Obviously, we didn’t know there would be husbands or lovers instead, but we knew we wanted to share our lives together and that included a mega-impressive model train collection.

Oh, and Oreos. Lots and lots of Oreos.

So I’d spent the weekend in Dallas with my sisters gathering the supplies I’d needed to start our model train village. It was a miniature Hobie complete with a sheriff’s office, the Pinecone, Sugar Britches, Ritches Hardware store, and several of the other places lining the town square. Winnie had also squealed like a pig when she’d found the perfect little gazebo that looked just like the Hobie one in the square.

Hudson had been like a kid in a candy store. He’d even spent the night over at MJ’s apartment with me so we could work on the project late into the night. With his OCD tendencies and attention to detail, we’d had the storefronts painted and the landscaping all glued before Seth had called me back home.

But I’d lost track of time after unloading it all from the car when I arrived home from Dallas. It had all been sitting out on my table in the middle of the cabin when he’d arrived. It was too important of a gift to have ruined by him seeing it in unassembled piles like that, so I’d lied and said I had a headache. My hope was to find out if Jolie had an extra key to Walker’s lake house and would let me in so I could set it up later in the week and surprise him.

But that all went to shit later that night when someone set fire to my own damned cabin.

Luckily, after Walker had left, I’d lost track of time again working on the train project. I may have been a bit of a train geek myself because four or five hours went by in a flash. It was around two in the morning when I finally realized I truly did have a headache. I’d been squinting at tiny pieces and parts in the light of only one dim lamp for god knew how long when I realized how late it was.

I remembered having gotten up to use the bathroom at one point and turning out all the lights before double-checking the locks on the door. I’d changed into sleep shorts and then decided to check one more thing on the train set. Next thing I knew, it was the middle of the night and my head was killing me. That’s what I got for working so long with only one dim lamp.

I dropped my face into my palms and rubbed my face while giving myself a mental lecture on staying up so late. That’s where I was when the kitten came tearing out of the bedroom toward the front door just as I heard the sound of glass breaking. I followed the sound quickly toward my bathroom where I saw a sudden blaze of light and heard the muffled whomp of flames. I quickly backtracked to the kitchen and found the extinguisher under the sink, grabbing it and racing back to the bathroom to douse the flames. Towels and the shower curtain were igniting each other, lighting up the room like it was the middle of the day. The heat rushing from the tiny space pushed me back, but I was able to direct the hose of the extinguisher and put out the fire faster than I expected.