by Camryn Eyde
The woman upstairs
By Camryn Eyde
Copyright 2015 Camryn Eyde
The Woman Upstairs
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover design by Camryn Eyde
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter One
Sticky Things
“Okay, work with me here. You’re the weed. I’m the people—person—whatever. My point is, I win, not you. I live here, you don’t. Now come out you stupid, mangy, freaking thistle.” Ricci Velez leaned back and put all her weight behind the thistle she’d spent the last five minutes struggling with. “You’re a tough little sucker,” she said, groaning as she exerted all her strength. Her gloves slipped and she hit the pavement.
Thistle: one.
Ricci: zilch.
Standing, she glared at the offending plant. “You asked for it. I’m getting my shearers.” Brushing her gloved hands against her jeans, Ricci jogged to the bricked shed at the back of the garden. Her progress was halted when she heard the doorbell of her apartment ring. The louder-than-usual buzzer shifting the thistle to a low priority.
Her boots, as muddy as the knees of her jeans were kicked off on her back porch as she dashed to the front door.
“Oof!” she grunted as she collided with the floor as her socks lost friction on the polished wood as she rounded the dining table. “That’s going to leave a mark,” she mumbled to herself as she gingerly climbed to her feet and rubbed her hip.
Pushing her curly brown ponytail back over her shoulder as she reached the door, she opened it to find the hall empty. “Hello?” she walked down the hall to the foyer at the end of the privacy wall. She caught the sight of the lift doors closing and an unfamiliar woman standing inside. She ran across the hall with a limp and slid to the doors, sticking her hand in just before they closed.
“Did you ring the door?” she asked the woman. Staring back her in shock with a severe blonde ponytail, was a tall slender woman with ice-blue eyes. Woah. Cold.
“The door around that wall?” she asked, pointing to the structure.
“Yes.”
“Then yes. I did!” The words were short and snappy, making Ricci lean back a little to wonder how someone could go from surprise to outrage in a matter of seconds.
Ricci leaned back a little and blinked. “Uh…okay. Would you mind telling me who you are?”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “I just moved to apartment five of this flea-bagged hovel.”
“Excuse me? This is a high-priced condominium!”
“So I’ve been told. Mind you, I need to get through the door to make a detailed assessment. The door is stuck, the key doesn’t work, I’m tired and I’ve had it up to here with other people’s incompetence!” The woman punctuated her words with erratic hand movements.
“You can’t get your door open?”
“Do you think I’d be down here bothering the super if I had another choice? I assure you, the first stop in this god-forsaken city was hardly your door. Now, if you could kindly go and get your husband or father or whatever to unstick my door.”
“My…?” Ricci blinked. “Oh. Right. Okay. I’ll get right on that. Five minutes. Tops.”
The woman inclined her head and pressed the button for her floor before giving Ricci a pair of raised eyebrows to tell her to move back so the doors could close.
Once they did, Ricci pulled her mobile phone from her pocket.
“Hey, babe!” answered her best friend and retail manager, Alicia Reid.
“What the hell have you made me agree to? That woman, your new boss, is a freaking nightmare!”
“What? Tara? But…didn’t she just get here? How did she manage to piss you off so fast?”
“She just arrived, and she’s already assumed I’m the little lady to the super and called my condo a flea-bagged building. What the hell, Alicia!”
“Hey, calm down. I’m sure she’s, like, jet-lagged or something. She’s efficient. All the guys in LA raved about how great she was. Really friendly. Give her a chance to settle in or something.”
Ricci groaned. There was a very good reason she screened new tenants carefully. Letting Tara Reeves take her newly vacated condo was a monumental risk and an even bigger favor. Sighing into the phone, she said, “She better calm down, or she’s getting notice.”
“Yeah. Right. Like you’d ever toss out a single, attractive woman, new to town, so she had to fend for herself on the streets.”
“There’s apartments free over on Upper West Side.”
“Your place is better.”
“Damn straight.” Another sigh. “I’d better go unstick her door. She’s currently locked out and unhappy about it.”
“Catch you later?”
“Not tonight. I have paperwork Madame Tara needs to go through.”
“Okay. Love ya, babe.”
“You too.”
Tara was pacing her foyer when Ricci arrived with her tool bag.
“Oh. It’s you again,” Tara said.
“Uh, yeah. Hubby and daddy-dearest are well…out.” And non-existent.
Tara frowned. “You live with your husband and father.”
Not likely, Ricci thought to herself. “Mmm. So, where’s the problem?”
Tara shoved a key at her. “This is ineffectual.”
Ricci took the key and inserted it into the lock. It didn’t even come close to sliding all the way in. What? Getting a torch, she shined it into the lock to find it clogged with… “What is that?”
“What is what?”
“Uh. Something’s been shoved into the lock,” Ricci said, standing with a sigh. She had a bad feeling about who had caused this. She bit her lip, debating whether to call her locksmith friend, or attempt to fix the lock herself.
“So get it out,” Tara said with a significant amount of sarcasm.
“Yeah. Well. It’ll take a while.”
“Of course it will. Wonderful. Welcome to my life!” Tara paced and continued to flail her arms around.
Ricci eyed the two large bags of luggage beside the door. “Well, while you wait, did you want to fill in the tenancy paperwork? It’ll save having to do it later.”
Tara pinched the bridge of her slender nose. “What I want to do, is find some solitude and forget my life for the remainder of the day. Is that too much to ask?”
Ricci smiled in sympathy. She knew exactly how it felt. “I can fix this up here while you wait in my apartment if you like?”
Tara’s lips curled with distaste.
“You can shower, change, have a cup of tea, sleep, whatever you want. Your other option is to sit on your luggage as I try to pry goop from your keyhole.”
“Which begs the q
uestion. Why is there goop in there to begin with? It doesn’t fill me with confidence that what’s on the other side of the door matching the picture I was sent.”
“I have the place cleaned last week. I assure you it’s in prime condition.” Ricci stared back at the lock. “I hope.” Surely Mr. Carter wasn’t that malicious?
“You hope?” Tara shook her head. “What kind of establishment is your husband running?”
“My husband runs nothing. Nor does my father for that matter.”
“Look, just get the damn lock fixed. I’m going for a walk.”
Pulling a face at the retreating woman’s back, Ricci looked back to the lock. This was going to be fun, she thought with a grimace.
Tara Reeves, new district manager of the department store where Alicia worked as a manager had been transferred without notice according to rumor, and thinking she was doing the right thing by Alicia, when it took over an hour to scoop god-knows-what from Tara’s lock, Ricci wished she’d never rented the apartment out so quickly.
The Carter’s, specifically Mr. Carter had been evicted last week after an explosive divorce rendered him bankrupt. Angry at the world and all that were in it, Ricci should have seen something like this coming. Given more time to check through the apartment would have been nice, because she had a nasty feeling this goop was the least of her worries.
“Haven’t you finished yet?” Tara snapped as she returned with the sharp clip of heels on tile.
Ricci scowled at the lock and scooped out more of the grey substance shoved in there. “I hope so,” she muttered as she stood, pulling her key from her pocket. Putting it in the hole, she shut her eyes, held her breath and turned. The key turned and the lock gave a soft click as it open. Thank God. “Yes, I’ve finished,” she said to Tara. Peering into the apartment, she went to take a step forward as she said, “Perhaps I should—”
“That will be all,” Tara said, pushing past her and clipping Ricci’s ankle with one of her rolling suitcases. Tara shut the door in her face with a scowl, leaving Ricci blinking at the wood just in front of her nose.
That self-righteous bitch! “Hey!” Ricci called out, banging on the door with the flat of her hand.
“What is it?” Tara said, opening the door again.
“Hate to break it to you, sister, but you haven’t signed any documents giving you any rights to this apartment. In fact, as of this moment, it is still under the control of Velez Estates, who are quite within their rights to evict you before you even get to move in.”
“I am not your sister.”
Ricci dropped her jaw open slightly. Was she being serious right now? That’s all she got from that little rant? “Ah, no, you’re not, but—”
“Tell whoever is the manager of this subpar establishment that I will attend to the paperwork later. Right now, I’m tired, irritated, and in dire need of hard alcohol.”
Ricci took a step back when the door shut firmly in her face again. She growled and clenched her fists. That’s it. She’s being kicked to the curb, she thought with a scowl on her face as she stomped back to her apartment. Alicia was about to get a very nasty phone call.
Chapter Two
Wet
“No, Alicia,” Ricci said as she shoved the pot into the dishwasher harder than necessary. The loud metal clang improved her mood, so she shoved it again.
“Come on, Ricci, she’s—for God’s sake! What’s all that noise!”
Ricci turned to the phone on the counter currently residing in its techno-savvy dock and said, “I’m doing dishes.”
“Sounds more like you’re beating up your kitchen with a skillet.”
Ricci shrugged to herself.
Alicia sighed before continuing her shiny review of one Tara Reeves. “She’s one of the best managers in the company and Hannah said she’s the best boss she ever had.”
“Hannah?”
“You know, Derek’s old flame. Blonde, breasts that could fill a shopping cart, moved out west a year ago?”
Ricci squinted as she accessed her memory bank of Alicia’s co-workers. “Oh! The midget?”
“She’s as tall as you, Ricci.”
Ricci shrugged again and picked up a plate, putting it into the dishwasher with a little more finesse.
“Anyway,” Alicia drawled out through the speakers. “Hannah hates bosses. Even Jezza.”
That gave Ricci pause. “She hated Jerry?” Jerry Jezza Graham was an absolute teddy bear that let his departmental staff run riot. He was simultaneously the best and worst boss anyone could have. Too lenient, and not strict enough all at once.
“Exactly. But Tara won her over.”
“She certainly didn’t win me over. Honestly, ‘Leesh, she’s a horrible person. Rude. Bitchy. Arrogant as hell. I don’t need someone like her living here, I don’t care how good she is at work. I have to live with these people.”
“You hardly see any of your tenants.”
“Not the point.”
“Totally the point.”
Ricci leaned her forehead on the kitchen counter. “Someone sabotaged the lock.”
“Huh?”
“Of apartment five. I think it was the previous tenant. Miss Reeves threw up a stink about it, and I’m not comfortable about letting the place out until I’ve changed the locks and done a thorough search of whatever else might be damaged.”
“You haven’t changed the locks?”
“It’s scheduled for tomorrow morning. The locksmith is booked up. If someone hadn’t called in every favor I owe them, then I would have discovered the jammed lock and had a chance to make sure everything else is okay.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.”
A loud rap boomed through Ricci’s apartment. “Gotta go. Someone’s at the door. Maybe it’s the dragon tenant.”
“Be nice.”
Ricci scoffed. “Only if she’s nice back.” Saying her goodbyes, Ricci ended the call and walked to the door being knocked insistently by the person on the other side. Her hip was beginning to ache from her earlier run-in with the tiles and she slowed with a hobble as she reached for the knob. Ricci yanked it open, unsurprised to find Tara on the other side. What she didn’t expect was to see the woman soaking wet, suds falling from her hair, and in a bath towel toting a small bag. “What the heck?”
“The water stopped, the drains are blocked and there’s a god-awful stench permeating the entire apartment!”
“Uh…” Ricci frowned. How the hell did that happen? Biting her lip, she mapped the water pipes in her head trying to figure out where they could possibly have been tampered with. She didn’t realize her unfocussed gaze had drifted down as she considered the problem until Tara wrapped her arms around her torso. Blinking, Ricci took in the sight before her. Despite the blocky shape of the towel, Tara’s shoulders were bronzed and narrow, matching the skin tone and slimness of her arms and legs. Legs that were essentially bare from her toes to the top of her thigh. Wow. Attractive.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Are you going to let me in? I need to rinse this out.” Tara gestured to her hair, making the bottom hem of the towel rise dangerously.
Ricci ignored the revealed flesh for staring dumbly at Tara. “You want to use my shower?”
“Did you not offer that very same thing earlier today?”
“Uh…yeah?”
“Then where is it?” Tara asked, stepping across the threshold and pushing past Ricci.
“To your right. Third door down.”
Tara stomped away, her bare feet slapping at the timber floor as she retreated. “When I get out, we’re going to have a nice long chat about how unsatisfactory this is.”
Ricci shut the door, letting her forehead fall against it with a thump. Attractive, but as nasty as a viper.
Pacing her annoyance out as she prepared her words of eviction to the woman in her bathroom, Ricci limped around her living room as she muttered to herself. “Sorry, Miss Reeves, you’re a problem and
I don’t want you living here,” she said quietly. “No, too subtle.” Rubbing her hand on her lip, she tried again. “Tara, you’re a first-class bitch and you can get the fu—”
“Excuse me?”
Ricci whipped around, feeling her neck crack at the movement. Wincing, she put a hand to her neck as she found Tara standing behind her with her hands on her hips glaring at her. The towel was still draped around her frame. A frame Ricci quickly scanned again avoid meeting the glaring eyes of the woman she just insulted. She wasn’t as tall as she made out to be with those sky-high heels, she thought.
“What did you just call me?”
Ricci stood up straighter and met Tara’s gaze. “A bitch. Sorry, didn’t realize your hearing was as impaired as your manners.”
Tara sneered and narrowed her eyes. “I can hear quite well, thank you.”
“Noted.”
“I would also like to inform you my manners are impeccable. Yours however…” Tara raised her eyebrows. “As for the childish name-calling, I’m—”
“It wasn’t childish. It was an accurate representation of your personality.”
“And you presume to know me well enough to know my personality intimately?”
Ricci fought the urge to let her eyes roam to the areas the word intimately brought to mind. “I don’t know you at all, but if you greet strangers with nothing but rudeness and sass, you left me little choice but to assume the worse. What’s more, I’ve decided to rescind the offer to lease the apartment to you.”
“You’ve decided?”
“That’s what I said. So, if you’ll kindly return upstairs and gather your things. I’ll organize a hotel for you.”
“No.”
“No? Would you prefer a reservation at a bed and breakfast?”
“I would prefer to stay where I am, despite the woeful condition of the place. At least for tonight.”
“Sorry, no can do. Clearly that apartment is having some technical issues, and you can’t stay there.”
“I can do what I damn well please.”
“And I say otherwise. If something else were to happen, my insurance won’t cover it or you if you were to get injured.”