The Perfect Neighbor by Nora Roberts

save all your emotions for your work, and can’t find the way to let them into your life. I’m sorry for you. And I’m sorry I trod on your sacred ground. I won’t do it again.”
    Before he could think of how to respond, she shut her door. He heard her locks slide into place with quick, deliberate clicks. Turning, he let himself in to his own apartment, followed her example by closing, then locking, the door behind him.
    He had what he wanted, he told himself. Solitude. Quiet. She wouldn’t come knocking on his door again to interrupt his thoughts, to distract him, to tangle him up in feelings and conversations he didn’t want. In feelings he didn’t know what to do with.
    And he stood, exhausted by the storm and sick of himself, staring at an empty room.

Chapter 5
    He couldn’t sleep, except in patches. And the patches were riddled with dreams. In them he would find himself wrapped around Cybil. His back in a corner, up against a wall, at the edge of a cliff.
    It always seemed as if she’d maneuvered him there, where there was nowhere to go but to her.
    And when he did, the dreams became brutally erotic, so that when he managed to rip himself from them, he found himself aroused, furious and filled with the memory, the taste, of her in his mouth.
    He couldn’t eat, found himself picking at food when he bothered with it at all. Nothing satisfied him; everything reminded him of that simple meal they’d shared a few nights before.
    He lived on coffee until his nerves jangled and his stomach burned in protest.
    But he could work. It seemed he could always flow into a story, into his people, when his emotions were pumped. It was painful to tear those feelings out of his own heart and have the characters he created gobble them greedily up. But he relished the exchange, even fed on it.
    He remembered what Cybil had said before she’d closed the door on him—that he used all his emotions in his work and didn’t know how to let them into his life.
    She was right, and it was better that way. There were, to his mind, very few people he could trust with feelings. His parents, his sister—though his need to fulfill their expectations of and for him was a double-edged sword.
    Then Delta and André, those rare friends he allowed himself and who expected no more from him than what he wanted himself.
    Mandy, who pushed him when he needed pushing, listened when he needed to unburden and somehow managed to care about him even when he didn’t.
    He didn’t want a woman digging her way into his heart. Not again. He’d learned his lesson there, and had kept any and all applicants since Pamela out of that vulnerable territory.
    She’d cured him, he thought, with lies, deceptions, betrayals. A man could learn a good deal at the tender age of twenty-five that held him in good stead for the duration. Since he’d stopped believing in love, he never wasted time looking for it.
    But he couldn’t stop thinking of Cybil.
    He’d heard her go out several times in the last three days. He’d been distracted more than once by the laughter and voices and music from her apartment.
    She wasn’t suffering, he reminded himself. So why was he?
    It was guilt, he decided. He’d hurt her and it had been neither necessary nor intentional. He’d been charmed by her; reluctantly, but charmed nonetheless. He hadn’t meant to make her feel foolish, to bruise her feelings. Tears could still rip at him, even knowing how false and sly they could be when they slid down a woman’s cheek.
    But they hadn’t looked false or sly on Cybil, he remembered. They’d looked as natural as rain.
    He wasn’t going to resolve the problem—his problem, he thought—until he’d settled with her. He hadn’t apologized well; he could admit that. So he’d apologize again now that she’d had some time to get those emotions of hers she was so free with under some control.
    There was no reason for them to be enemies, after all. She was the granddaughter of a man he