Backstreet Hero. Justine Davis

      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

      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