The Perfect Neighbor (2 page)

“You have?” Instantly caught, Jody dragged a rolling stool over to the drawing board. “When? Where? How?”

“When—dawn. Where? Heading east on Grand. How? Insomnia.” Getting into the spirit, Cybil swiveled on her stool. Her eyes danced with amusement. “Woke up early, and I kept thinking about the brownies left over from the party the other night.”

“Atomic brownies,” Jody agreed.

“Yeah, so I couldn’t get back to sleep until I ate one. Since I was up anyhow, I came in here to work awhile and ended up just standing at the window. I saw him go out. You can’t miss him. He must be six-four. And those shoulders …”

Both women rolled their eyes in appreciation.

“Anyway, he was carrying a gym bag and wearing black jeans and a black sweatshirt, so my deduction was he was heading to the gym to work out. You don’t get those shoulders by lying around eating chips and drinking beer all day.”

“Aha!” Jody speared a finger in the air. “You
are
interested.”

“I’m not dead, Jody. The man is dangerously gorgeous, and you add that air of mystery along with a tight butt …” Her hands, rarely still, spread wide. “What’s a girl to do but wonder?”

“Why wonder? Why don’t you go knock on his door, take him some cookies or something. Welcome him to the neighborhood. Then you can find out what he does in there all day, if he’s single, what he does for a living. If he’s single. What—” She broke off, head lifting in alert. “That’s Charlie waking up.”

“I didn’t hear a thing.” Cybil turned her head, aiming an ear toward the doorway, listened, shrugged. “I swear, Jody, since you gave birth you have ears like a bat.”

“I’m going to change him and take him for a walk. Want to come?”

“No, can’t. I’ve got to work.”

“I’ll see you tonight, then. Dinner’s at seven.”

“Right.” Cybil managed to smile as Jody dashed off to retrieve Charlie from the bedroom where she’d put him down for a nap.

Dinner at seven. With Jody’s tedious and annoying cousin Frank. When, Cybil asked herself, was she going to develop a backbone and tell Jody to stop trying to fix her up?

Probably, she decided, about the same time she told Mrs. Wolinsky the same thing. And Mr. Peebles on the first floor, and her dry cleaner. What was this obsession with the people in her life to find her a man?

She was twenty-four, single and happy. Not that she didn’t want a family one day. And maybe a nice house out in the burbs somewhere with a yard for the kids. And the dog. There’d have to be a dog. But that was for some time or other. She liked her life right now very much, thanks.

Resting her elbows on her drawing board, she propped her chin on her fists and gave in enough to stare out the window and allow herself to daydream. Must be spring, she mused, that was making her feel so restless and full of nervous energy.

She reconsidered going for that walk with Jody and Charlie after all but then heard her friend call out a goodbye and slam the door behind her.

So much for that.

Work, she reminded herself, and swiveled back to begin sketching in the first section of her comic strip, “Friends and Neighbors.”

She had a steady and clever hand for drawing and had come by it naturally. Her mother was a successful, internationally respected artist; her father, the reclusive genius behind the long-running “Macintosh” comic strip. Together, they had given her and her siblings a love of art, a sense of the ridiculous and a solid foundation.

Cybil had known, even when she’d left the security of their home in Maine, she’d be welcomed back if New York rejected her.

But it hadn’t.

For over three years now her strip had grown in popularity. She was proud of it, proud of the simplicity, warmth and humor she was able to create with everyday characters in everyday situations. She didn’t attempt to mimic her father’s irony or his often sharp political satires. For her, it was life that made her laugh. Being stuck in line at the movies, finding the right pair of shoes, surviving yet another blind date.

While many saw her Emily as autobiographical, Cybil saw her as a marvelous well of ideas but never recognized the reflection. After all, Emily was a statuesque blonde who had miserable luck holding a job and worse luck with men.

Cybil herself was a brunette of average height with a successful career. As for men, well, they weren’t enough of a priority for her to worry about luck one way or the other.

A scowl marred her expression, narrowing her light-green eyes as she caught herself tapping her pencil rather than using it. She just couldn’t seem to concentrate. She scooped her fingers through her short cap of brandy-brown hair, pursed her softly sculpted mouth and shrugged. Maybe what she needed was a short break, a snack. Perhaps a little chocolate would get the juices flowing.

She pushed back, tucking her pencil behind her ear in an absentminded habit she’d been trying to break since childhood, left the sun-drenched studio and headed downstairs.

Her apartment was wonderfully open; aside from the studio space, that had been the main reason she’d snapped it up so quickly. A long service bar separated the kitchen from the living area, leaving the lower level all one area. Tall windows let in light and the street noises that had kept her awake and thrilled for weeks after her arrival in the city.

She moved well, another trait inherited from her mother. What her father called the Grandeau Grace. She had long limbs that had been suited to the ballet lessons she’d begged for as a child—then grown tired of. Barefoot, she padded into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and considered.

She could whip up something interesting, she mused. She’d had cooking lessons, too—and hadn’t become bored with them until she’d outdistanced her instructor in creativity.

Then she heard it and sighed. The music carried through the old walls, across the short hallway outside her door. Sad and sexy, she mused, the quiet sob of the alto sax. Mr. Mysterious in 3B didn’t play every day, but she’d come to wish he would.

It always stirred her, those long liquid notes and the swirl of emotion behind them.

A struggling musician? she wondered. Hoping to find his break in New York. Brokenhearted, no doubt, she continued, weaving one of her scenarios for him as she began to take out ingredients. A woman behind it, of course. Some cold-blooded redhead who’d caught him under her spell, stripped his soul, then crushed his still-throbbing heart under her four-inch Italian heel.

A few days before, she’d invented a different lifestyle for him, one where he’d run away from his filthy rich and abusive family as a boy of sixteen. Had survived on the streets by playing on street corners in New Orleans—one of her favorite cities—then had worked his way north as that same vicious family—headed by an insane uncle—scoured the country for him.

She hadn’t quite worked out why they were scouring, but it wasn’t really important. He was on the run and comforted only by his music.

Or he was a government agent working undercover.

An international jewel thief, hiding from a government agent.

A serial killer trolling for his next victim.

She laughed at herself, then looked down at the ingredients she’d lined up without thinking. Whatever he was, she realized with another laugh, apparently it looked like she was making him those cookies.

* * *

His name was Preston McQuinn. He wouldn’t have considered himself particularly mysterious. Just private. It was that ingrained need for privacy that had plopped him down in the heart of one of the world’s busiest cities.

Temporarily, he mused, as he slipped his sax back into its case. Just temporarily. In another couple of months, the rehab would be completed on his house on Connecticut’s rocky coast. Some called it his fortress, and that was fine with him. A man could be blissfully alone for weeks at a time in a fortress. And no one got in unless the gates were lifted.

He started back upstairs, leaving behind the nearly empty living room. He only used it to play—the acoustics were dandy—or to work out if he didn’t feel like going to the gym a couple of blocks away.

The second floor was where he lived—temporarily, he thought again. And all he needed in this way station was a bed, a dresser, the right lighting and a desk sturdy enough to hold his laptop, monitor and the paperwork that they often generated.

He wouldn’t have had a phone, but his agent had forced a cell phone on him and had pleaded with him to keep it on.

He did—unless he didn’t feel like it.

Preston sat at the desk, pleased that the little turn with his sax had cleared out the cobwebs. Mandy, his agent, was busy chewing on her inch-long nails over the progress of his latest play. He could have told her to spare the enamel. It would be done when it was done, and not a minute before.

The trouble with success, he thought, was that it became its own entity. Once you did something people liked, they wanted you to do it again—only faster and bigger. Preston didn’t give a damn about what people wanted. They could break down the doors of the theater to see his next play, give him another Pulitzer, toss him another Tony and bring him money by the truckloads. Or they could stay away in droves, critically bomb the work and demand their money back.

It was the work that mattered. And it only had to matter to him.

Financially, he was secure, always had been. Mandy said that was part of his problem. Without the need or desire for money to keep him hungry, he was arrogant and aloof from his audience. Then again, she also said that was what made him a genius. Because he simply didn’t give a damn.

He sat in the big room, a tall, muscular man with disordered hair the color of a well-fed mink’s pelt. Eyes of cool blue scanned the words already typed. His mouth was firm and unsmiling, his face narrow, rawboned and carelessly handsome.

He tuned out the street sounds that seemed to batter against the windows day and night, and let himself slip back into the soul of the man he’d created inside the clever little computer. A man struggling desperately to survive his own desires.

The harsh sound of his buzzer made him swear as he felt himself sucked back into that empty room. He considered snarling and waiting it out, then weighed in human nature and decided the intruder would probably keep coming back until he dispatched them once and for all.

Probably the eagle-eyed old woman from the ground floor, Preston decided as he started down. She’d already tried to snag him twice when he’d headed out to the club in the evening. He was good at evading, but it was becoming a nuisance. Smarter to hit her face-on with a few rude remarks and let her huff away to gossip about him.

But when he checked the peephole, he didn’t see the tidy woman with her bright bird’s eyes, but a pretty brunette with hair short as a boy’s and big green eyes.

From across the hall, he realized, and wondered what the hell she could want. He’d figured since she’d left him alone for nearly a week, she intended to keep right on doing so. Which made her, in his mind, the perfect neighbor.

Annoyed that she’d spoiled it, he opened the door, leaned against it. “Yeah?”

“Hi.” Oh, yes, indeed, Cybil thought, he was even better when you got a good close-up look at the face. “I’m Cybil Campbell. 3A?” She offered a bright, friendly smile and gestured to her own door.

He only lifted an intriguingly winged eyebrow. “Yeah?”

A man of few words, she decided and continued to smile—though she wished his eyes would flicker away just long enough for her to crane her neck and see beyond him into the apartment. She couldn’t very well try it when he was focused on her, without appearing to be prying. Which, of course, she wasn’t. Really.

“I heard you playing a while ago. I work at home and sound travels.”

If she was here to bitch about the noise, she was out of luck, Preston mused. He played when he felt like playing. He continued to study her coolly—the pert, slightly turned-up nose; the sensuously ripe mouth; the long narrow feet with sassily painted pink toes.

“I usually forget to turn the stereo on while I’m working,” she went on cheerfully, making him notice a tiny dimple that winked off and on beside her mouth. “So it’s nice to hear you play. Ralph and Sissy were into Vivaldi big-time. Which is fine, really, but monotonous when that’s all you hear. They used to live in your place, Ralph and Sissy,” she explained, waving a hand toward his apartment. “They moved to White Plains after Ralph had an affair with a clerk at Saks. Well, he didn’t really have an affair, but he was thinking about it, and Sissy said it was move out of the city or she’d scalp him in a divorce. Mrs. Wolinsky gives them six months, but I don’t know, I think they might make it. Anyway …”

She held out the pretty yellow plate with a small mountain of chocolate-chip cookies heaped on it, covered by clear pink plastic wrap. “I brought you some cookies.”

He glanced down at them, giving her a very brief window of opportunity to sneak a peek around him and see his empty living room.

The poor guy couldn’t even afford a couch, she thought. Then his unsmiling blue eyes flicked back to hers.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you bring me cookies?”

“Oh, well, I was baking them. Sometimes I cook to clear out my head when I can’t seem to concentrate on work. Most often it’s baking that does it for me. And if I keep them all, I’ll just eat them all and hate myself.” The dimple kept fluttering. “Don’t you like cookies?”

“I’ve got nothing against them.”

“Well then, enjoy.” She pushed them into his hands. “And welcome to the building. If you need anything I’m usually around.” Again she gestured vaguely with pretty, slim-fingered hands. “And if you want to find out who’s who around here, I can fill you in. I’ve lived here a few years now, and I know everybody.”

“I won’t.” He stepped back and shut the door in her face.

Cybil stood where she was a moment, stunned speechless by the abrupt dismissal. She was fairly certain that she’d lived for twenty-four years without ever having had a door shut in her face, and now that she’d had the experience, she decided she didn’t care for it.

She caught herself before she could pound on his door and demand her cookies back. She wouldn’t sink that low, she told herself, turning sharply on her heel and marching back to her own door.