QUENTIN FOSTER’S ROOMMATE was a prize idiot. The fact that Jared was also Quentin’s first cousin did absolutely nothing to redeem him.

Quentin could not believe that he was looking down at the same pair of red-bottomed high heels neatly lined up next to the front door of his apartment again. It had been months, months since Jared had last hooked up with Lara. She’d finally stopped dropping by unexpectedly, wearing trench coats with suspiciously bare legs, frowning in disappointment when Quentin inevitably answered the door instead of Jared. She’d even returned the engagement ring that had at one point been Jared’s mother’s. It had been a blissful three months of radio silence.

Quentin had just begun to dare to dream that the rest of his life might just be Lara-less.

And now, on this rainy June Monday, here he was staring down at Lara’s Louboutins once again. He grimaced over his shoulder at Jared’s closed bedroom door. Technically it was 8:15 a.m. and technically that meant that Jared should be getting ready for work. But they were twenty-six years old and Quentin wasn’t Jared’s babysitter. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to knock on any door that might be answered by Lara. He preferred his eyes un-scratched out.

His next few weeks were either going to be marked by Lara in his home every single second of the day, bogarting the remote control, filling his refrigerator with raw-juice smoothies he wasn’t allowed to drink and taking forty-five-minute showers, or by his cousin’s mopey whirlpool of misery after they broke up for the umpteenth time.

There was never any middle ground when it came to Jared and Lara.

Hearing footsteps from inside Jared’s room and fearing a run-in with the dreaded Lara, Quentin hastily scuttled out of his apartment. He pulled the door closed, safely ensconced in the hallway of his building.

“Pssst!” came a whisper from across the hall as he juggled his thermos of coffee in one hand and his bag in the other. He suppressed a sigh. He knew exactly who was “pssst”-ing him and frankly, he wasn’t sure he had the energy this morning. He knew, without a doubt, that if he turned around, he was going to see Cat LeFievre standing across the hall in her doorway in a pair of indecently short shorts.

It wasn’t the shorts he had a problem with—heck, he had fever dreams about those shorts—it was the woman currently occupying said shorts who he’d been actively trying to avoid for the last few months.

Knowing that keeping his back to her for any longer was just going to be weird, Quentin finished locking his door and turned around. He didn’t quite prevent his eyes from swooping down the length of her legs.

Not only was she in the shorts, she was also—God help him—eating a Popsicle.

During the school year, five days a week she wore demure, professional clothing to the elementary school where she worked. But on the weekends? On the weekends she liked to, as he’d once heard her say, “channel Aphrodite.” Which basically meant that she drank red wine, ate dark chocolate and wore as little clothing as legally possible.