The Perfect Neighbor

The Perfect Neighbor is a 1999 Silhouette Special Edition romance by Nora Roberts, published as a 251-page paperback and also issued in large print.

Preston McQuinn is a brooding loner who has arranged his apartment as a reflection of a life he has decided to keep closed, and Cybil Campbell is the neighbour who arrives with the opposite disposition and refuses to be discouraged by his manner. The turning point of the premise is her proposition: she wants to hire him as her date, which converts a private dislike of company into a paid obligation. Neither of them treats the evening as work, which is where the arrangement begins to come apart.

The novel's joke is that Preston believes he has shut the door on love while behaving in ways that suggest otherwise, and the book spends its length on that contradiction. The MacGregor titles are designed as a family series with recurring figures and a patriarch whose matchmaking is treated as a running joke, and this volume applies the formula to a pair who meet as neighbours rather than through his intervention.