Justine Davis - Backstreet Hero

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Cover Page

Title Page Backstreet Hero Justine Davis www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author Justine Davis lives on Puget Sound in Washington. Her interests outside of writing are sailing, doing needlework, horseback riding and driving her restored 1967 Corvette roadster – with the top down, of course. Justine says that years ago, during her career in law enforcement, a young man she worked with encouraged her to try for a promotion to a position that was at the time occupied only by men. “I succeeded, became wrapped up in my new job, and that man moved away, never, I thought, to be heard from again. Ten years later he appeared out of the woods of Washington state, saying he’d never forgotten me and would I please marry him. With that history, how could I write anything but romance?”

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Copyright

Justine Davislives on Puget Sound in Washington. Her interests outside of writing are sailing, doing needlework, horseback riding and driving her restored 1967 Corvette roadster – with the top down, of course.

Justine says that years ago, during her career in law enforcement, a young man she worked with encouraged her to try for a promotion to a position that was at the time occupied only by men. “I succeeded, became wrapped up in my new job, and that man moved away, never, I thought, to be heard from again. Ten years later he appeared out of the woods of Washington state, saying he’d never forgotten me and would I please marry him. With that history, how could I write anything but romance?”

It was, Lilith Mercer thought as she rubbed at her shoulder, her own fault. She hadn’t been paying attention, and had walked right into some kid’s practical joke. And had landed ungracefully on her backside.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

She smiled at her concerned neighbor. “Except for my bruised dignity, I’m fine.”

“That was horrible,” Mrs. Tilly said. She’d come rushing out at the no doubt embarrassingly loud thud Lilith had made hitting the landing outside her front door. “You could have fallen all the way down those stairs.”

That fact hadn’t escaped Lilith. If she hadn’t managed to grab the stairway banister, the tumble down the concrete steps would have been ugly. Exiting her second-floor condo in a Monday morning rush with her hands full as usual, her mind already on the busy day ahead—also as usual—she hadn’t seen the thin, silver wire strung tight across the top of the stairs.

“Lucky my reflexes are okay,” she said, although to herself she was wondering just how sore the shoulder she’d wrenched in the process was going to be in a couple of days.

“It has to be that Wells boy,” Mrs. Tilly said. “He’s going to be the death of us all. The other day I saw him with a barbecue lighter, trying to start a fire on their patio.”

Personally, Lilith found the apparent booby trap clearly intended to cause injury—if not worse—a bit more unsettling than a young boy’s typical fascination with flames, but in Southern California, a state with a deadly yearly fire season, nothing to do with fire was taken lightly.

“It’s a good thing you’re a youngster and can bounce,” Mrs. Tilly said grimly.

Lilith thought that at forty-four, she’d officially left being a youngster behind some time ago, but she supposed to her seventy-five-year-old neighbor that was a relative thing. And the implication was painfully true; had the older woman been the one to discover that wire the hard way, the results could have been horribly different.

“Someone needs to talk to Callie again,” the woman said sternly.

The implication that, as usual, that someone should be her didn’t escape Lilith. Martha Tilly hated confrontation and had decided—deservedly so, Lilith thought—that at her age avoiding it was her right. She didn’t really mind; Mrs. Tilly was nothing if not blunt, sometimes to the point of rudeness, and Lilith wasn’t sure that was the right approach with their downstairs neighbor. Especially just now.

“She has her hands full being a single mom with two kids, one of them a toddler,” Lilith said. “I hate to pile more on her.”

She also suspected, although she’d never spoken of it, that Callie had escaped the hands of an abusive husband, which put Lilith soundly on her side for more reasons than Mrs. Tilly knew.

“But that boy’s getting out of hand,” Mrs. Tilly said. “Why, you could have been killed!”

“I’ll speak to her,” Lilith promised, knowing that if she did, at least it wouldn’t be a formal confrontation that would put the harried young woman on the defensive.

Reassured, Mrs. Tilly at last let her continue on her way, although not without a promise to give young Billy Wells a piece of her mind if she saw him.

As she got into her car, Lilith felt a little tug in her shoulder, and, she noted ruefully, a spot on her backside that she was sure would be sore by tomorrow. She might well spend tomorrow working on her feet, she thought.

By the time she got to her office in the Research and Development division of Redstone Inc., she’d almost forgotten the incident. The huge task that still lay before her took her full concentration, and her determination to fix this situation for Josh Redstone demanded she give it just that. That Josh of all people, the most generous and loyal man she’d ever known, had been the victim of industrial spying rankled her beyond belief. She would find every last detail of what had happened and salvage everything that could be salvaged, no matter how long it took.

She sat down at her desk—a U-shaped arrangement that was more functional than decorative—and booted up her computer, still feeling the surge of energy that hit her every day when she arrived at Redstone Headquarters. She had a very proprietary feeling about Redstone, and about its brilliant founder, Joshua Redstone. She’d known him for better than twenty-five years now, and he had soared past even her own stellar predictions for his future.

As an eighteen-year-old teacher’s aide, she hadn’t been fooled by the languid drawl; even at fifteen the intelligence in those gray eyes had fairly snapped at her. She’d guessed early on that the air some mistook for laziness was merely boredom with a curriculum that didn’t challenge him, and she’d taken it upon herself to provide that challenge, guiding him toward more advanced work that he could undertake on his own.

And eventually, toward getting his G.E.D. and getting out before his seventeenth birthday; he was already so far beyond high school she didn’t think he’d survive two more years, and was only where he was because his small family—himself, his father and his older brother—had moved around a lot.