Between Alarms

MMM Firefighter Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MMM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Friends with Benefits to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Hurt/Comfort, Grumpy/Sunshine, Slow Burn, Found Family, Praise Kink, Only Soft For You

Three firefighters. Two hookups that were supposed to be casual. One bond forged between every alarm.

Hayden Cross is the firefighter who goes in first and comes out last. He doesn’t stay the night. He doesn’t talk about feelings. He puts his pants on before the sweat dries and walks out the door, because leaving first means no one can leave him.

Jamie Rhodes is the paramedic who sees everything. He reads people the way he reads patients — accurately, completely, without permission. He’s been sleeping with Hayden for three months under a set of rules designed to keep them safe: no talking about it at the station, no staying the night, no calling it anything. The rules are killing him.

Drew Liu is the lieutenant who shows up and doesn’t leave. After two years of careful solitude following a devastating breakup, he’s built a life of discipline and control. Then he meets two men who make the control feel like a cage — and walks into a collapsing building to prove it.

When a warehouse fire nearly kills Hayden and Drew carries him out, the thing that’s been building between all three of them becomes impossible to deny. But three firefighters in the same chain of command, in a world that wasn’t built for them, will have to decide: play it safe, or build something that holds.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ MMM firefighter romance with real emotional depth
✅ Friends-with-benefits to lovers (with a third who changes everything)
✅ Grumpy/sunshine, hurt/comfort, forced proximity
✅ “Only soft for you” energy times two
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ A man who learns to stay, a man who learns to be held, a man who learns to let go
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MMM scenes), strong language, firefighting-related injury and trauma, depictions of grief and emotional processing, and references to parental abandonment. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Hayden

The alarm hit at 2:47 AM, and Hayden Cross was off his bunk before his brain caught up with his legs.

That was the trick of it. You trained your body to move before your mind had time to argue. Feet on the floor, turnout pants up, suspenders over shoulders, boots on, coat on, helmet in hand—all of it muscle memory so deep it lived in his bones.

“Cross, Rhodes, DeSantis—Engine 4. Martinez, you’re on Ladder 2.” Captain Torres’s voice cut through the bay like it always did, clean and flat and utterly devoid of the adrenaline that was already spiking through Hayden’s bloodstream.

Hayden swung up into the rig and grabbed the bar overhead. Jamie Rhodes landed on the bench across from him three seconds later, still pulling his coat on, eyes bright even at three in the goddamn morning.

“Apartment fire. Three-story walk-up on Millbrook. Multiple residents unaccounted for.”

He didn’t think on the way to a call. Thinking was for after. On the way, there was only the weight of the coat on his shoulders and the steady, almost peaceful certainty that in a few minutes he’d be walking into a building that wanted to kill him.

He loved it. The clarity. Inside a burning building, there was no ambiguity. There was just the mission: get in, find them, bring them out. Everything else burned away.

The building was already showing. Orange glow in the third-floor windows, smoke pushing out in thick, lazy rolls. A woman in a bathrobe stood on the sidewalk clutching a toddler against her chest.

They went in. The hallway was black. Zero visibility. Hayden dropped to his knees and started crawling. Jamie was behind him, mirroring the pattern on the opposite side.

Then he heard it. Thin. High. A kid.

“I’ve got a vocal. Third floor, unit 3C. Child. I’m going in.”

A boy. Maybe five, maybe six, curled in the corner between the bed and the wall, face buried in a stuffed animal gray with smoke.

“Hey, buddy. I got you. We’re going out.”

Hayden scooped him up. The kid buried his face in Hayden’s neck and gripped his turnout coat with both fists.

Ground floor. Front door. Night air hit him like a wall of cold water. He walked the kid to the ambulance. Pried his fingers loose, one by one.

“You’re okay. You’re out. You’re safe.”

Back at the station, Jamie was in the kitchen. Scrambling eggs in the cast-iron skillet, wearing that faded green Henley that Hayden had once peeled off him with his teeth.

Jamie turned around with two plates and smiled—that easy, lopsided smile—and Hayden felt the line blur the way it always did.

His phone buzzed. Joint training exercise with Station 7 next week. Lt. Drew Liu coordinating.

“What’s he like?” Jamie asked.

“Intense,” Hayden said.

“Coming from you, that’s really saying something.”

He typed: Off at 7. Yours or mine?

Mine. Door’s unlocked.

But lately—with Jamie’s smile burned into the backs of his eyelids and Drew Liu’s voice lodged somewhere between his ribs—the waiting was starting to feel like its own kind of fire.

And Hayden Cross had never been good at not walking into those.

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The First Thanksgiving — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Drew’s mother comes for Thanksgiving at the Elm Street house. Mei-Lin brings dumplings, assesses both men with the precision of a retired chemistry professor, and delivers the approval that changes everything. And after she leaves… the celebration begins.

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