The Perfect Neighbor by Nora Roberts Page B

his imagination. Her body hadn’t trembled with quick, hard little shock waves. Her hands hadn’t clawed their way up into his hair to fist while she moaned pure pleasure into his mouth.
    He yanked her back, but only to see if her eyes had gone dark, if heat had climbed into her cheeks the way he felt it climb through his system. She only stared at him, her breath coming short and fast through parted lips, her hands still clutched in his hair.
    “Next one’s on me,” he murmured, and took her under again.
    A horn blasted. Someone cursed. There was a rush of displaced air from a passing car. Someone shoved an apartment window open and let out a stream of blistering rock music and the acrid smell of burned dinner.
    She might have been on a deserted island with crystal-blue waves crashing at her feet.
    When he drew her away the second time, he did so slowly, with his hands skimming down from her shoulders to her elbows, then back in a gesture that stopped only a hint short of a caress. It gave her enough time to feel her head revolve once, like a slow-motion merry-go-round, before it settled weakly on her shoulders.
    He wanted to lap her up on the spot, every inch of that flushed, lovely skin. To devour her innate—and, to him, misplaced—cheerfulness that shone out of her like sunlight. He wanted all that impossible, unflagging energy under him, over him, open to him.
    And he had no doubt that once he had, he’d leave them both bitter.
    Now the hands that lingered on her shoulders eased her back off her toes. Steadied her. Released her. “I think that ought to do it.”
    “Do it?” she echoed, staring up at him.
    “Satisfy Mrs. Wolinsky.”
    “Mrs. Wolinsky?” Absolutely blank, she shook her head. “Oh. Oh, yeah.” She blew out a long breath and decided her system might settle sometime before the end of the next decade. “If it doesn’t, it’s hopeless. You’re awfully good at it, McQuinn.”
    A reluctant smile flitted around his mouth. The woman was damn near irresistible, he thought, and, taking her arm, turned her toward the front of the building. “You’re not half bad at it yourself, kid.”

Chapter 4
    Cybil sang as she worked, belting out a duet with Aretha Franklin. Behind her, the open window welcomed the cool April breeze and the amazing noise that was the downtown streets in brilliant sunshine.
    The stream of light was no sunnier than her mood.
    Turning to the mirror on the wall beside her, she tried to work her face into a state of shock to help her with a character expression. But all she could do was grin.
    She’d been kissed before. She’d been held by and against a man before. As far as she was concerned, comparing all her other experiences to that stunning sidewalk embrace with the man across the hall was like pitting a firecracker against a nuclear attack.
    One hissed, popped and was momentarily entertaining. The other detonated and changed the landscape for centuries.
    It had left her marvelously dizzy for hours.
    She loved the sensation, adored every moment of that giddy, slack-muscled, purely feminine rush. Could there be anything more wonderful than feeling weak and strong, foolish and wise, confused and aware all at the same time?
    And all she had to do was close her eyes, let her mind wander back, to feel it all over again.
    She wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling. No one could be unaffected by an experience of that … magnitude. And after all, he’d been right there with her at ground zero. A man couldn’t kiss a woman like that and not suffer some potent residual effects.
    Suffering, Cybil decided, as her body tingled, was highly underrated.
    She chuckled; she sighed; then, bending over her work, sang with Aretha about the joys of feeling like a natural woman.
    “God, Cyb, it’s freezing in here!”
    Cybil looked up, beamed. “Hi, Jody. Hi, sweet Charlie.”
    The baby gave her a sleepy-eyed smile as Jody strode to the window with him cocked on her hip.