A his Nosy Neighbour named named Prudence

The doorbell rang.

Randy broke the kiss with a groan. Nicole’s glossy mouth followed him for half a second before she let him go, green eyes narrowing toward the hallway like the sound itself had offended her.

He hoped this was not about to become the normal way they got interrupted.

“Stay here,” he muttered, dragging his jeans back on, remote shoved in his pocket. Savannah sat up on one elbow. Bella made a face. None of them moved to hide.

He got the front door open and found Prudence on the step.

At sixty-nine she was still ramrod straight, narrow through the shoulders and sharp everywhere else. Her grey hair was pulled so tightly from her face that it seemed to tug at the corners of her eyes, and deep grooves ran from either side of a mouth accustomed to disapproval. Her cardigan was buttoned one hole wrong from top to bottom. Whether she had noticed or simply refused to care, Randy couldn’t tell.

She gave Randy barely a glance before looking past his shoulder into the hall, her eyes already moving over the strip of carpet, the shoes by the wall, the dim doorway farther back.

“Took you long enough. I heard a racket in there. Screaming, banging, God knows what else. Sounded like somebody was being murdered.”

Randy kept one hand on the door and shifted his body into the opening, forcing her view down to a narrow slice beside his shoulder. “We’re fine, Prudence.”

“Don’t ‘Prudence’ me.” She leaned to one side to recover the view. Randy moved with her, and she stopped, straightening with a faint tightening around the mouth. One hand remained clamped around the handles of her handbag. “There are people living on both sides of you, in case you’ve forgotten. Your parents understood that.”

“My parents aren’t here.”

“No. They aren’t.” Her eyes travelled over his rumpled shirt, his uncombed hair, then dropped briefly to the bare floor behind him before returning to his face. “Your mother would have been ashamed to have the whole street listening to this.”

Randy pulled the door another few inches toward him. The edge of it came between them now, a strip of painted timber separating Prudence from the hallway she was so interested in seeing. “What happens in my house is none of your concern.”

A crease deepened between her brows. “It becomes my concern when I can hear it from my kitchen.”

“Then close your window.”

That silenced her for a beat. Her jaw shifted once, but instead of answering she looked past him again, searching for something else to object to. Prudence had always looked at houses that way, as though every open curtain or neglected lawn were evidence being entered into some private ledger. A bin left out overnight, an unfamiliar car in a driveway, somebody coming home too late—she noticed it all and remembered it.

“I came over here out of decency,” Prudence said, one hand resting over the clasp of her handbag as though she had arrived on some official errand rather than crossed the lawn to pry.

Randy looked at her, then past her toward the empty street. Nothing moved out there. No curtains twitched, no doors opened. Just Prudence on his step, planted squarely beneath the porch light with the confidence of somebody who had never once considered the possibility that she might be unwelcome.

“Somebody has to,” she added.

“No," Randy corrected. "You came over because you wanted to know what was happening.”

A flush crept above the collar of her cardigan, though she kept her face composed. “I came over to tell whoever is responsible that if this continues, I’ll call someone.”

“The police?” Randy asked.

When she said, “If necessary,” he almost laughed.

“For noise?”

“For whatever is going on in there.” Her gaze had already strayed past him again, searching the narrow strip of hallway beside the door, and Randy shifted across it before she could get a better look.

Prudence drew herself up. “I don’t need your permission to be concerned.”

“You do if you want to come inside.”

“I never said I wanted to come inside,” she said, with the particular offence of someone being accused of exactly what she had been doing.

The toe of one brown shoe had already found its way over the threshold. Randy looked at it, and after a moment Prudence followed his gaze and drew the foot back beneath her skirt.

The bedroom door creaked somewhere behind him, and her attention went straight to the hall. “Who’s in there?”

Randy pulled the door closer, cutting off what little view remained. “None of your business.”

She turned back to him. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

Prudence drew herself up, handbag tucked against her ribs. “I have lived beside this family since before you were even a thought.”

“And you still live beside us, Prudence,” Randy said. “Not with us.”

That stopped her, though only briefly; her attention was already straying back toward the hallway. She still hadn’t asked whether anyone was hurt. That told Randy everything he needed to know. His hand slipped into his pocket and settled around the remote, thumb finding the button.