Backstreet Hero

by Justine Davis

  “Yes, he did.” He turned his attention back to the road. “He asked what I really wanted. I told him.”

  “And thus a match made in heaven.”

  He didn’t dare look at her again. “Something like that.”

  “And you’ve been happy?”

  “Yes.” Except when it cost someone I was just falling in love with her life.

  That the feelings he’d had then were minuscule compared to what he was feeling now was something he didn’t want to think about, didn’t dare think about, not now.

  And they still hadn’t gotten to it. They had, however, reached the hotel where the gala was to be held.

  “Sorry I can’t have the valets park it,” he said as he turned away from the booth outside the hotel lobby. “There are some things in this car we wouldn’t want the hassle of explaining. All with permits, but convincing the police of that would be…time-consuming.”

  She merely nodded. He found a spot, parked, shut the car off, then turned in the driver’s seat to look at her.

  “Tonight,” he began, determined to finish it now.

  “You’re not security,” she repeated dutifully. “So what are you?”

  “Your date.”

  She stared at him. To his chagrin, color flooded her face. He heard her take a quick, deep breath. Obviously he’d shocked her, although he couldn’t help thinking she should have seen this as the most logical approach.

  Her reaction needled him, and for the second time tonight he overreacted, knowing he was doing it even as he spoke.

  “Or,” he said, drawing the words out and accompanying them with the smile of invitation he used only when working, “if you’d rather, your lover.”

  Chapter 12

  Lilith told herself it was her imagination, that not everyone in the room was going quiet and staring at them, but she was having trouble convincing herself when heads kept turning.

  She was still a little breathless from that moment in the car when Tony had uttered the words that had stolen her breath in the first place.

  She’d felt hot and cold and tangled inside, and only years of practice had allowed her to face him with any semblance of calm and ask levelly, “And just how should I introduce you?”

  “Antonio Diego Alvera Bernard,” he’d said, throwing the name out as if it were some sort of challenge.

  As, perhaps, it was.

  Now that they were inside and walking through the ballroom, she realized she was so off-balance from what he’d said that she was probably acting exactly as he’d wanted her to. And was fairly sure that had been his plan—to make her act like a woman out for an evening with a lover, perhaps a new one, on edge and a little uncertain. Which, she knew, was how most people would interpret the tension between them.

  Except for those wondering what a guy like Tony Alvera was doing with a woman old enough to be…

  She’d forgotten the demise of her doting aunt analogy, and she wasn’t sure what to put in its place.

  A woman old enough to be very foolish will probably do nicely, she told herself sternly.

  If she’d known this was going to be the approach tonight, that they would be masquerading as two people on a formal date, she would have had time to think of what to say. But she hadn’t, so now she had to think on the fly. The temptation to just play up the facade, to play it as if it were true, to act as if there was truly something between them, was so incredibly tempting that she knew it was dangerous.

  …if you’d rather, your lover.

  She felt a sudden rush of heat, and feared she must be as red as her dress.

  “Lilith! You look wonderful.”

  She turned to see Alicia Cramer, a woman she knew from the organization this fund-raiser was for. The woman was a five-foot powerhouse who had done more to bring research money into the field than anyone except Josh himself, and for that Lilith was willing to overlook her somewhat haughty manner. Most of the time.

  But right now she was eyeing Tony Alvera like a person who’d just seen something impossible. True, she had always come to this function alone, in fact had never brought anyone who wasn’t a business relationship or someone she’d hoped would respond to the fund-raising aspect of the evening, but there was much more to Alicia’s avidly curious inspection.

  And so it begins, she thought.

  “Alicia, how are you?” she said with every evidence of delight, hoping her tone would foster reality.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Alicia said, but she was still eyeing Tony. And there was a hint of doubt in her gaze, something that wasn’t quite puzzlement and wasn’t quite distrust, but some combination leavened with a touch of fear that made Lilith feel defensive. She looked as if she were wondering if someone had left a door open somewhere, letting him wander in off the street.

  As if, Lilith thought, he wasn’t the hottest man in the room. The defensiveness sparked.

  “Meet Antonio Diego Alvera Bernard,” she said, rolling out his full name grandly and purposefully making her voice sound as if she were introducing visiting royalty.

  Then she waited; Alicia was too smoothly polished to be rude, but Lilith expected at the least an arched brow as she contemplated the unlikely couple they made.

  If Tony was surprised at her deferential introduction, he didn’t let it show. Instead he played along with her perfectly, took the uncertain woman’s hand and gave her a courtly bow.

  “My deepest pleasure, madame,” he said, in a formal voice and an old-world inflection Lilith had never heard from him. “It is an honor to be here on such a worthwhile occasion.”

  To Lilith’s amazement, the supercilious Alicia actually blushed.

  Why are you surprised? she asked herself. He’s made you blush more than once. But for, she had to admit ruefully, very different reasons.

  Or maybe not, she thought as she watched him work on Alicia as if she were any woman he’d set out to charm. His reputation in that arena was clearly well earned. Lilith remembered Liana’s frequent jokes about the fact that all Tony’s sources in official places seemed to be female. Now that she was seeing him in action firsthand, she understood why.

  Which set her to wondering why he hadn’t used the charm he obviously had in abundance on her. Not that she would be susceptible to it; she’d learned to distrust charm the hard way. But he hadn’t even tried to beguile her into cooperating with him. He’d just ordered. Arrogantly.

  Of course, she worked for Redstone. Not that that stopped him from, however teasingly, exercising that charm on, say, Liana, even though her love for Logan Beck made her immune. And that had also been during a Redstone assignment, so that wasn’t the difference, either.

  Perhaps he just saved the charm for women closer to his own age. But then, he’d just turned it on full bore for Alicia, who was at least sixty-five.

  So maybe it’s just you, she thought.

  She nearly laughed at the glumness of her own thought; she normally wasn’t given to such absurdities. It was, she knew, most likely a combination of factors, probably including the fact that she apparently had the ability to make him angry. Why, she didn’t know, but assumed it was because he knew this was a lot of wasted time, that no one was really out to get her, and while he was tied up doing this, no doubt agents dealing with real, serious situations for Redstone could be using his help.

  But what she also didn’t know, and what unsettled her even more, was why this even mattered to her. Now, that, she told herself, was the height of absurdity.

  “Lilith?”

  She snapped back to the present with such a jolt she thought it must have been obvious to everyone. Fortunately, while she’d been lost in silly contemplation, Alicia had moved on, obviously deciding against evicting the dangerous-looking man Lilith had brought into their midst. The man who was looking at her curiously.

  “That effortless charm of yours is amazing,” she said, hoping he hadn’t read her foolish thoughts in her face.

  “That charm,” he snapped, startling
her, “is effortless because it’s meaningless. I learned it just like I learned what fork to use. I honed it because it worked. It’s as put on as this—” he tugged at one lapel of the expensive tuxedo “—is. I’m a fake, hadn’t you realized?”

  Lilith stared at him; clearly she’d finally hit a nerve. That it was this surprised her. Could he really think that learning such skills late made them any less real? Could he—

  “Lilith!”

  She turned at the hail, and found herself face-to-face with Grace O’Conner Draven.

  True pleasure rang in her voice as she exclaimed, “Grace!”

  The two women hugged genuinely. She hadn’t seen Grace much since the wedding. Not only was she still one of Redstone’s most important cogs, designer and builder of airstrips all over the world, but she had become a frequent spokes-woman for the Back to Life Foundation that was the beneficiary of tonight’s fund-raiser.

  As one of the first recipients of Ian Gamble’s incredible prosthetic foot, she was the perfect choice. No one who looked at the slender, lovely woman with the short, wispy dark hair and the vivid blue eyes would ever guess she’d been through such hell. Trapped by tons of debris after a violent earthquake in Turkey, her right foot crushed beyond repair, Grace had survived. She’d hung on long enough for the man who would eventually become her husband to reach her.

  And she’d survived what he’d had to do to her to save her life.

  Of course, Lilith knew there were those who would say that being married to John Draven would require more courage than either of those. Lilith wasn’t one of them; from the first time she’d seen them together she’d known they had what she’d never had, that magical, incredible connection of two people completely right for each other and deeply in love.

  “Mrs. Draven.” Tony spoke in that formal tone again, yet this time it was laced with a respect that made it sound very different than when he’d spoken to Alicia Cramer. Of course, this was the wife of his boss, the head of Redstone Security.

  And Lilith realized he’d waited until there was no one in earshot to speak, no one to hear that he knew who she was. And that he addressed her by her married name, something only those inside Redstone ever used. To the world she was still Grace O’Conner, out of the need to keep her husband’s position at Redstone as low profile as possible.

  “Mr. Alvera,” Grace answered, a teasing glint in her eyes. “My, but you do clean up nice.”

  Doesn’t he just? Lilith muttered inwardly.

  Before her thoughts could spin out of control again, there were others there, and Tony and Grace both put on a show of just having met. Grace obviously realized—or perhaps she knew, given whom she shared pillow talk with—that he was working, and had quickly caught on that he was here under-cover. Lilith knew Draven would never share details of an ongoing investigation, but he was madly, crazily in love with his wife, and Grace was a smart, perceptive woman.

  “And don’t you two make a couple?” Grace added.

  Lilith blinked. She sensed Tony going very still. Grace went on cheerfully.

  “You so golden, him so dark, and both gorgeous. It’s hardly fair to us ordinary folk. I don’t know who people are going to think got lucky,” Grace added with a teasing smile.

  More likely they’ll wonder how much I had to pay the young stud to escort me, Lilith thought dryly.

  She tried to mentally slap herself for the thought. She knew she was attractive enough, and that people rarely believed she was in her mid-forties. She told herself her uncertainty about her personal appeal was a legacy from Daniel that she needed to be rid of, but that was easier said than done.

  “I’d guess,” Tony was saying easily, “they’re all simply wondering why a classy, uptown lady like her is with a reprobate like me.”

  Grace snorted inelegantly, rolling her eyes at him. “Oh, please. I can’t speak for the males in the room, but no woman on the planet will wonder that.”

  Lilith barely stopped herself from echoing the opinion, since she’d thought it herself just minutes ago. She envied Grace her ease with the man, and supposed it stemmed from the fact that he worked for her husband. She probably knew him much better than Lilith did, although Lilith couldn’t help wondering if anyone really knew this man.

  When Grace walked away moments later, toward the raised dais where she would make her impassioned speech for the support of the foundation—and if asked, not hesitate to lift the hem of her sleek, blue satin dress to show the prosthetic foot that had, in its way, brought her here tonight—Tony spoke as if that moment of oddly still tension had never occurred.

  “Anyone who didn’t know would be stunned to learn she’d lost a foot.”

  “Which is,” Lilith said, responding to his normal tone with the best one she could manage, “the point of the evening. Ian’s work in prosthetics is cutting edge, and Josh will fund him endlessly, but getting the prosthetics to people who need them is what the Back to Life Foundation does best.”

  “Sounds like you could be up there touting,” Tony observed.

  “I could,” Lilith said. “I have. Grace is a good friend, and I admire her. She makes this issue personal for me.”

  “And personal makes you passionate.”

  She didn’t think he meant it as a double entendre but didn’t dare look at him to find out. “Yes,” she said simply.

  And with that she pulled herself together and began to do what she was here for, to work the room. As a representative of Redstone, she knew her job; in a way she was working as much here as she did in her office.

  But as she went around the room, greeting those she knew warmly, encouraging them to be even more generous than last year, greeting strangers even more warmly, welcoming them to this chance to make a difference, she couldn’t help but be aware of the frequent looks they were garnering. She would have assumed the stares were for all the reasons she’d expected them, but Grace’s words made her wonder now.

  She introduced Tony by name only—forgoing now the full, grand introduction she’d given him to the haughty Alicia—and he took it from there. He was, it quickly became clear, quite capable of handling himself in this setting, of turning on that easy charm, although to her it didn’t quite mask the edgy hyperalertness.

  But after a while Lilith quit worrying and became almost amused at the way women responded with blushing pleasure and fascination, and men reacted with a wariness usually accompanied by a furrow between the eyebrows, as if they weren’t sure this man was quite domesticated.

  Occasionally she caught women—some she knew, some she didn’t—glancing at her with an expression that was unmistakably envious.

  …no woman on the planet will wonder…

  No, Lilith thought, she didn’t suppose they would. And as she gave him a sideways look, saw that unexpected dimple flash as he made another of his courtly bows, noticed yet again how devastatingly attractive he was in that perfectly fitted tux, how he managed to exude that charm and yet never lose that edginess, she caught herself wishing, for just the tiniest moment, that it was real.

  Chapter 13

  Tony smothered a yawn. He was on his third cup of coffee and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. This did not bode well.

  As he waited in the back of the small bodega, watching people—mostly older women or young ones with children in tow picking up groceries; later it would be men who migrated to the wine shop along one side—come and go, he tried to distract himself by remembering when he had come to this place himself, running errands for his mother. It didn’t work.

  He shook his head in an effort to clear it, knowing he was walking a dangerous line. The combination of endless tension and tiredness was hardly the best for someone in his line of work.

  But sleep had not been in the cards for him again last night. In fact, he hadn’t had much sleep since that blasted charity fund-raiser on Tuesday night. It was crazy, it made no sense, but going in there as Lilith’s date, knowing everyone other than Grace and perhaps a few othe
rs from Redstone assumed they were together as a couple, had somehow changed everything.

  And it wasn’t simply that his imagination had run amok, leaping from what he guessed they were thinking to his own seemingly uncontrollable fantasies. It was more that he wanted them not to be fantasies. He wanted what everyone in that room was thinking to be true. He wanted their assumptions that when he and Lilith left that glittering affair, they would do it together, that wherever they went back to, it would be together, that when they went to bed, it would be together.

  Need cramped him up yet again, and he fought it with the grim determination he’d learned at a very early age. But at that age, he hadn’t known this kind of need even existed.

  And he certainly never, ever would have pictured himself feeling like this over a woman like Lilith Mercer.

  He should, he knew now, never have taken this assignment. When she’d been safely out of his sphere, he’d been able to deal, able to laugh at himself for his ridiculous feelings for a woman so far out of his reach. But now, now that he’d spent days with her constantly in his mind if not always his presence, that barrier of distance was shattered, and he didn’t know if he could ever rebuild it.

  That he would have to, he knew. Somehow. And sooner rather than later, since there hadn’t been a trace of a problem since the trip wire four days ago.

  When his cell phone had signaled a text message early this morning, he’d been getting ready to go pick Lilith up at her condo—and postponing figuring out exactly what was going to happen this weekend. At least for today and tomorrow she would be tucked safely inside Redstone Headquarters for the day; he hadn’t even dared to ask if she had plans for the weekend.

  A sudden vision of himself playing bodyguard to Lilith on a date with some nebulous upper-crust type slammed into him, making him feel as if he’d taken a roundhouse punch to the gut. He had to fight for breath, stunned at his own reaction.

  The image played out. Dinner, maybe a movie, Lilith in that sexy red number from the Christmas party—never mind that it was hardly something she’d wear out on an ordinary night—that unknown man who looked too much like her ex-husband holding her hand as they watched some chick flick that would inspire them to go home and reenact the love scenes….