The Perfect Neighbor (11 page)

When she heard the faint drift of his music, she smiled and let it lull her to sleep.

With his hair still wet from his morning shower, Preston sat at his own kitchen counter on one of Cybil’s stools she’d insisted he borrow. He scanned the paper as he ate cold cereal and bananas because Cybil had pushed both on him once she’d gotten a look at his cupboards.

Even a kitchen klutz—which apparently meant him—could manage to pour milk onto cold cereal and slice a banana, she’d told him.

He’d decided against taking offense, though he didn’t think he was quite as clumsy in the kitchen as she did. He’d managed to put a salad together, hadn’t he? While she’d done something incredible and marvelous to a couple of pork chops.

The woman was one hell of a cook, he mused, and was rapidly spoiling his appetite for the quick slap-together sandwiches he often lived on.

It didn’t seem to bother her that they hadn’t gone out to dinner since that first meal she’d cooked for him. He imagined she would, before much longer, tire of preparing the evening meal and demand a restaurant.

People generally got itchy for a change of pace when the novelty wore off and routines became ruts.

And he supposed they already had a kind of routine. They kept to their separate corners during the day. Well, except for the couple of times she’d dropped by and persuaded him to go out. To the market, just for a walk, to buy a lamp.

He glanced back toward his living room, frowning at the whimsical bronze frog holding up a triangular-shaped lampshade. He still wasn’t sure how she’d talked him into buying such a thing, or into paying Mrs. Wolinsky for a secondhand recliner she’d wanted to get rid of.

And rightfully so, he decided. Who the hell wanted a green-and-yellow plaid recliner in their living room?

But somehow he had one—which despite its hideous looks was amazingly comfortable.

Of course if you had a chair and a lamp you needed a table. His was a sturdy Chippendale in desperate need of refinishing—and as Cybil had pointed out—a bargain because of it.

She just happened to have a friend who refinished furniture as a hobby, and would put him in touch.

She also just happened to have a friend who was a florist, which explained why there was a vase of cheerful yellow daisies on Preston’s kitchen counter.

Another friend—of which Preston had decided she had a legion—painted New York street scenes and sold them on the sidewalk, and couldn’t he use a couple of paintings to brighten up the walls?

He’d told her he didn’t want to brighten anything, but there were now three very decent original watercolors on his wall.

She was already making noises about rugs.

He didn’t know how she worked it, Preston thought, shaking his head as he went back to his breakfast. She just kept talking until you were pulling out your wallet or holding out your hand.

But they kept out of each other’s way.

Well, there had been Saturday afternoon, when she’d invaded with buckets and mops and brooms and God knows what. If he was going to live in a place, she’d told him, at least it could be clean. And somehow he’d ended up spending three hours of a rainy afternoon when he should have been writing, scrubbing floors and chasing down dust.

Then again, he’d nearly gotten her into bed. Very nearly gotten her there, he remembered, when she’d stood in speechless shock at the state of his bedroom.

She’d gotten her voice back quickly enough and had launched into a lecture. He should have more respect for his workplace if not for his sleeping area, since they seemed to be one in the same. Why the hell did he keep the curtains drawn over the windows? Did he like caves? Did he have a religious objection to doing laundry?

He’d grabbed her out of self-defense and had stopped her mouth in the most satisfying of ways.

And if they hadn’t tripped over a small mountain of laundry on the way to the bed, he doubted they’d have ended the afternoon with a trip to the cleaners.

Still, there were advantages, he thought. He appreciated a clean space, even though he rarely noticed a messy one. He liked tumbling into bed on freshly laundered sheets—though he would have preferred to tumble on them with Cybil. And it was hard to complain when you opened a cupboard and found actual food.

Even the sexual frustration was working for him. The writing was pouring out of it, and out of him. Maybe the play had taken a turn on him, focusing now more on a female character, one with a shining naiveté and enthusiasm. A woman alive with energy and optimism. And one who’d be seduced by and damaged by a man who had none of those things inside him. A man who wouldn’t be able to stop himself from taking them from her, then leaving her shattered.

He saw the parallels well enough between what he created and what was, but he refused to worry about it.

He sipped his coffee, reminding himself to ask Cybil why his always tasted faintly of swamp water, and turned to the comic section to see what she’d been up to.

He skimmed it, frowned, then went back to the first section and read it again.

* * *

She was already at work, her window open, because spring had decided to be kind. A lovely warm breeze wafted through along with the chaos of street noise.

After her sheet of paper was set and scaled, she set her T-square back in its place in the custom-built tool area she’d designed to suit herself. She tilted her head, facing the first blank section. It was double the size of what would appear in the dailies in a couple of weeks. She already had it in her mind—the setup, the situation and the punch line that would comprise those five windows and give the readership their morning chuckle over coffee.

The elusive Mr. Mysterious, now known as Quinn, huddled in his dim cave, writing the Great American Novel. Sexy, cranky, irresistible Quinn, so serious, so intense in his own little world he was completely unaware that Emily was crouched on his fire escape, peering through the narrow chink of his perpetually drawn curtains, struggling to read his work in progress through a pair of binoculars.

Amused at herself—because in her own way Cybil knew her subtle little probes and questions on how his play was going were the more civilized version of her counterpart’s voyeurism, she settled down to lightly sketch her professional interpretation of the man across the hall.

She exaggerated ruthlessly, his good points and his bad. The tall, muscular body, the ruggedly chiseled looks, the cool eyes. His rudeness, his humor and his perpetual bafflement with the world Emily lived in.

Poor guy, she thought, he doesn’t have a clue what to do with her.

When the buzzer sounded, she tucked her pencil behind her ear, thinking Jody had forgotten her key.

She stopped to top off her coffee cup on the way. “Just hang on. Coming.”

Then she opened the door and experienced one more rapid meltdown. His hair was just a little damp and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Boy, oh, boy, just look at those pecs, she thought, and barely resisted licking her lips.

His jeans were faded, his feet bare, and his face—his face was so wonderfully serious and sober.

“Hi.” She managed to make it sound bright and easy while she pictured herself biting him. “You run out of soap in the shower? Need to borrow some?”

“What? No.” He’d forgotten he was only half-dressed. “I want to ask you about this,” he continued, lifting the paper.

“Sure, come on in.” It would be safe, she told herself. Jody would be there any minute and stop her from jumping Preston. “Why don’t you get some coffee and come up? I’m working and it’s rolling pretty well.”

“I don’t want to interrupt, but—”

“Not much does,” she said cheerfully over her shoulder as she started up the stairs. “There’s cinnamon bagels if you want one.”

“No.” Hell, he thought, and ended up pouring a cup of coffee and taking a bagel after all.

He hadn’t been upstairs before, since he’d never come over when she was working. He tormented himself by glancing into her bedroom, studying the big bed with its bold blue cover and sumptuous mountain of jewel-toned pillows, the slim rods of the white iron headboard where he could imagine trapping her hands under his as he finally did everything he wanted with her. To her.

It smelled of her, fresh, female, with seductive undertones of vanilla.

She kept rose petals in a bowl, a book beside the bed and candles in the window.

“Find everything?” she called out.

He shook himself. “Yeah. Listen, Cybil …” He stepped into her studio. “God, how do you work with all that noise?”

She barely glanced up. “What noise? Oh, that.” She continued to sketch, using a new pencil, as she’d forgotten the one behind her ear. “Sort of like background music. Half the time I don’t hear it.”

The room looked efficient and creative with its neat shelves holding both supplies and clever tchotchkes. He recognized the work of the sidewalk artist in one of the paintings on her wall, and the genius of her mother in two others.

There was a complex and fascinating metal sculpture in the corner, a little clutch of violets tucked into a glass inkwell and a cozy divan heaped with more pillows against the wall.

But she didn’t look efficient, bent over the big slanted board with her legs folded up under her, the toenails of her bare feet painted pink, a pencil behind one ear and a gold hoop in the other.

She looked scattered, and sexy.

Curious, he walked around to peer over her shoulder. An act that, he admitted, had anyone dared to try on him would have earned the offender a quick and painful death.

“What are all the blue lines for?”

“Scaling, perspective. Takes a little math before you can get down to business. I work in five windows for the dailies,” she continued, sketching easily. “I have to set them on paper like this, work out the theme, the gag, the hit, so that the strip can move from start to finish in five connected beats.”

Satisfied, she moved to the next section. “I sketch it in first, just need to see how it hangs—you’d say a draft, where you get the story line down, then decide where it needs to be punched up. I’ll give it more details, fiddle a bit before I switch to pen and ink.”

He frowned, focusing on the first sketch. “Is that supposed to be me?”

“Hmm. Why don’t you pull up a stool. You’re blocking the light.”

“What is she doing there?” Ignoring the suggestion, he tapped a finger on the second window. “Spying on me. You’re spying on me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous—you don’t even have a fire escape outside your bedroom.” She looked into her mirror, made several faces that left him staring at her, then started on the third section.

“What about this?” he demanded, rapping the paper on her shoulder.

“What about it? God, you smell fabulous.” Pleasing herself, she turned and sniffed him. “What kind of soap is that?”

“Are you going to have this guy take a shower next?” When she pursed her lips in obvious consideration, Preston shook his head. “No. There has to be a line. I was oddly amused when you introduced this parody of me into the script, but—”

He broke off as he heard her front door open and slam shut. “Who’s that?”

“That would be Jody and Charlie. So you’ve gotten a kick out of the new guy?” She stopped sketching and shifted to smile up at him. “I wondered, because you hadn’t mentioned it before. You know, some people don’t even recognize themselves. They just have no self-awareness, I suppose, but I thought you’d see it if you happened to read the strip. Hi, Jody. There’s Charlie.”

“Hi.” It wasn’t an easy matter, even for a happily married woman, to keep her tongue from falling out when she was so suddenly and unexpectedly faced with a well-muscled, naked male chest. “Uh, hi. Are we interrupting?”

“No, Preston just had some questions about the strip.”

“I love the new guy. He’s really got Emily in a spin. I can’t wait to see what happens next.” She broke into a wide grin as Charlie exploded out a “Da!” and reached for Preston.

“He calls every man he sees ‘Da.’ Chuck’s a little put out by it, but Charlie’s just a guy’s guy, you know.”

“Right.” Absently, Preston ran a hand over Charlie’s downy brown hair. “I just want to get something straight about how this thing is going,” he began, turning back to Cybil.

“Da!” Charlie said again, arms extended hopefully, smile sleepy.

“Just how close to reality do you work?” Preston asked, automatically taking the baby and settling him on his shoulder.

Cybil’s heart simply melted. “You like babies.”

“No, I toss them out of third-story windows at every opportunity,” he said impatiently, then shook his head when Jody squeaked. “Relax. He’s fine. What I want to know is this business here.” Shifting the baby, he dropped the comic section on her board.

“Oh, the ‘no-scale’ bit. This is really part one. They’ll run the second half of it tomorrow. I think it works.”

“Chuck and I fell over laughing when we read it this morning,” Jody put in, relaxed again as she watched Preston absently patting the now-sleeping baby.

“You’ve got these two women here—”

“Emily and Cari.”

“I know who they are by now,” Preston muttered, narrowing his eyes at both women. “They’re discussing—they’re rating, for God’s sake—the way Quinn kissed Emily a couple days ago.”

“Uh-huh. Chuck laughed?” Cybil wanted to know. “I wondered if men would get it or if it would just hit with women.”

“Oh, yeah, he died over it.”

“Pardon me.” With what he considered admirable restraint, Preston held up a hand. “I’d like to know if the two of you sit around here discussing your various sexual encounters and then rating them on a scale of one to ten before you then give the American public a good chuckle over it with their cornflakes.”

“Discussing them?” Eyes wide and innocent, Cybil stared up at Preston. “Honestly, McQuinn, this is a comic strip. You’re taking it too seriously.”

“So all this about the no-scale is just a bit?”

“What else?”

He studied her face. “I wouldn’t like to think that when I finally get you into bed, I’m going to read about my performance in five sections in the morning paper.”