The Fire Captain’s Favorite Rookie

An MM Firefighter Age-Gap Romance by Chase Power

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Age Gap, Praise Kink, Authority Kink, Bi Awakening, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Secret Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, He Falls First

He gave orders that saved lives. Then he gave one that changed his.

A gruff, forty-two-year-old fire captain takes on a reckless rookie who insists he is straight. Mandatory drills and station sleepovers evolve into something neither of them can control.

Captain Ethan Cole runs Station 14 the way he runs everything: with iron discipline, zero tolerance for recklessness, and a silence so deep nobody knows the man underneath. Eight years ago, he lost the man he loved in a warehouse collapse. He sat in a hospital corridor for two hours pretending to be nobody. He has not let anyone that close since.

Then Riley Santos walks through his door.

Riley is loud, charming, and reckless in ways that make Ethan’s jaw clench and his blood heat. He is also the most naturally talented firefighter Ethan has seen in years. When mandatory extra training sessions put them alone together in a dark training tower, Ethan’s praise becomes something neither of them can pretend is professional. One word. Good. And Riley’s entire body rewires around it.

Their rules are simple: behind closed doors only, absolute secrecy, Ethan always in charge. But the praise becomes a drug. The authority becomes a shelter. And the arrangement they built to contain the fire becomes the thing that burns them both down.

Because Ethan can command any fire scene. The one he cannot survive is losing Riley. And Riley has spent his whole life running into burning buildings to feel alive. Turns out, he just needed someone who made the quiet feel safe.

You Will Love This If You Like:

✔️ Grumpy fire captain / chaotic sunshine rookie with a 16-year age gap
✔️ Authority kink and praise kink as the emotional spine of the relationship
✔️ Bi awakening handled with honesty, not fetish
✔️ Forced proximity in bunk rooms, gyms, and training towers
✔️ Secret workplace relationship with real career stakes
✔️ He falls first, he falls harder
✔️ Found family with a crew that already suspected everything
✔️ 80,000 words of scorching heat with a guaranteed HEA

Buy Now

Free Bonus Chapter

Content Warning: The Fire Captain’s Favorite Rookie is a high-heat MM romance intended for adult readers (18+). It contains explicit, consensual sexual content between two adult men, authority/praise kink dynamics, restraint, edging, a 16-year age gap, firefighter trauma, a line-of-duty injury, grief from a past loss, career consequences from a disclosed relationship, and a temporary third-act separation. All intimacy is enthusiastically consensual. Guaranteed HEA.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

The ceiling was going to come down in about four minutes. A fire captain who runs his life like a controlled burn meets the rookie who will set everything ablaze. Start reading now.

Chapter One: Trial by Fire

The ceiling was going to come down in about four minutes.

I knew it the way I knew most things about fire — not because anyone taught me, but because I had stood in enough burning buildings to recognize the sound a structure makes when it is done pretending to hold. A low groan, almost human, rolling through the joists above us like a warning from something older and meaner than physics.

“Reyes, pull your line back to the doorway,” I said into the radio. Calm. Measured. The voice I had spent twenty years building — the one that did not shake, did not rush, did not betray that some part of me was always counting down. “You are not making progress on that back room. Let it go.”

“Copy, Cap.”

Marco’s voice came back steady. Good. He was reliable that way — did what he was told, did it well, did not need his hand held. I shifted my weight in the doorway of the commercial warehouse and swept my flashlight across the interior. Visibility was maybe eight feet through the smoke, which meant conditions were deteriorating faster than the first-due engine had estimated when we had rolled up twelve minutes ago.

I pulled my mask down and let the night air hit my face. Cold for October. The kind of cold that made the heat from the building feel almost good against your skin, if you were stupid enough to stand too close. I was not stupid. I stood exactly where I needed to — far enough to be safe, close enough to read the fire.

It was eating through the roof now, orange and gold against a black sky, and for one unguarded second I let myself watch it the way civilians do. Like it was beautiful. Like it was something other than destruction measured in dollars and minutes and the acrid taste of someone’s livelihood turning to carbon.

Then I shut that down and went back to work.

Back at the station, Dex told me the new probationary firefighter started tomorrow. I pulled the file: Riley Santos. Academy record was strong but flagged for “impulsivity” and “difficulty with authority.”

Great. Another cowboy.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the eight-by-ten room I had slept in for six years and stared at the ceiling. There was one personal item. A framed photograph on the desk, face-down. I had not looked at it in months, but I had not moved it either.

Tomorrow I would meet the new probie. The reckless one. The one who did not listen and thought talent was a substitute for discipline. I would train him the way I trained all of them — hard, fair, impersonal.

At 0758, there was a knock on my office door.

“Come in.”

The door opened, and Riley Santos walked into my station.

The training tower. The bunk room confessions. The word “good” that changes everything. Keep reading — The Fire Captain’s Favorite Rookie is available now.

Buy Now — Available at all major retailers