by Cara Bastone
When We First Met
A Forever Yours Novella
Cara Bastone
School’s out for the summer and public school teacher, Cat LaFievre, is ready to blow off some steam. A few nights of no-strings, mindless distraction with a sexy guy is exactly what she needs. Lucky for her, the perfect specimen lives across the hall from her. He’s gorgeous, a little ridiculous, and, according to a neighbor, very good at sex.
Quentin Foster has had a thing for Cat since they hit if off a few months ago. She’s smart, funny, and loves exploring the neighborhood—just like him. He thought he had a shot...until she admits she’s interested in hooking up with his clueless chick-magnet roommate.
Cat thought she needed a fling. But as their connection deepens, Cat realizes Quentin might be the real thing. Thing is, she may have ruined her shot with him...
Forever Yours series
When We First Met (prequel novella)
Just a Heartbeat Away
And coming soon
Can’t Help Falling
Flirting with Forever
Praise for Cara Bastone’s Just a Heartbeat Away
“An utterly satisfying and delicious read. One for the keeper shelf!”
—Jill Shalvis, New York Times bestselling author
“JUST A HEARTBEAT AWAY is gorgeous, brilliant, with characters so unique and real they leap right off the page. It’s a master class in achy breaky yearning. Don’t start this one late at night unless you don’t need to do anything the next day except for pre-ordering the next one.”
—Sarina Bowen, USA TODAY bestselling author of the True North series
“Emotionally intense and real, JUST A HEARTBEAT AWAY touches the soft place in your soul. Cara Bastone’s debut novel will warm you from the inside out and stay with you long after you finish the book.”
—Christie Craig, New York Times bestselling author
When We First Met
Cara Bastone
Also available from
Cara Bastone
and HQN Books
Forever Yours
When We First Met (prequel ebook novella)
And coming soon
Just a Heartbeat Away
Can’t Help Falling
Flirting with Forever
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Epilogue
Chapter One
CAT LAFIEVRE WAS not a loser. But she sure had been losing a lot lately.
She flopped onto the couch in her small but comfortable apartment. The morning sun was just starting to creep across her floor. That was the main reason she was glad to live in the tallest building in the neighborhood; the rest of Brooklyn didn’t block her sunshine.
At the beginning of the school year, she’d been convinced that this would be the best year ever. Everything had been coming up aces.
She’d had a miraculous stroke of luck and been given a class of only twenty students, unheard of in her school district, where the class sizes tended into the midtwenties.
Her dad’s health was finally back on track after his heart attack two years ago and she no longer felt obligated to take the five-hour train ride every weekend just to help her mom.
And she’d officially gotten over Sid.
Life was good.
But then, as it was wont to do, life decided to kick her in the ass.
Every few weeks, like clockwork, she’d gotten transfer students assigned to her classroom until she had a whopping twenty-nine students. The entire school was growing in population, more than the district had planned for, so the budget for supplies (already minuscule) was even less than it normally was. Which meant Cat was going out of pocket for a huge portion of the supplies she needed to teach her lessons.
Then, during Christmas break, Cat had walked into the grocery store around the corner from her parents’ house and come face-to-face with Sid getting frisky with one of her oldest friends in the ice cream aisle. She wasn’t Cat’s best friend, but she was definitely someone that Cat had assumed would be a lifelong friend. And now things between them were just...weird.
And then the kicker. On Valentine’s Day, her folks had been out for a romantic dinner (so cute) when her Pops had had a second heart attack (devastating). It was less serious than the first one had been, but still not good. Cat and her two sisters had divvied up the weekends, and she’d found herself schlepping up to Ithaca every third weekend.
She’d coasted to the end of the school year on fumes. She was lonely, exhausted and basically paying the public school system for the privilege of working.
Luckily for her, she knew exactly what she needed.
A fling.
A good old-fashioned love-’em-and-leave-’em-rose-between-the-teeth-handprint-against-the-window-condensation fling.
She wanted heat with some handsome man who promised her literally nothing. She wanted a few nights of mindless distraction, uncommitted companionship, something to fondly reminisce about on her eventual deathbed.
And she knew exactly who could give it to her: her neighbor Jared, who smoldered like he was constantly filming a cologne ad. He was gorgeous, a little ridiculous and apparently very good at sex.
Cat knew this because Clare, who lived a few floors down, had hooked up with him a year before when he was on a break with his girlfriend. Cat had asked Clare if it would be awkward if they slept with the same man and Clare had just laughed. “Trust me,” she’d told Cat, “Jared is not that kind of man.”
Now, Jared was apparently single again and Cat was looking for the right moment. She thought she’d found it a few months ago when Jared had invited her to a party at his house, but she’d gotten caught up in a great conversation with his roommate and the opportunity had passed her by. She didn’t count that as a fail though, because Quentin, the roommate, was so cute. He’d been attentive and funny and seemed genuinely interested in the things she was saying. She’d left that party hoping that she’d made a new friend, but ever since that promising start, it seemed like he was avoiding her.
But wait! Cat’s head popped up from the couch cushion like a prairie dog. She heard a door open in the hallway. Either that was Jared (time to flirt) or it was Quentin (time to friend). She slid on her flip-flops and raced to her front door.
* * *
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 p
referred 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.
For the first time in his life Quentin found himself dreading the summertime. Because starting this very day, Ms. LeFievre was officially on summer break, and there would be no break from her hotness.
“Hey, Quentin,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb and biting off the end of her Popsicle. She was still whispering, her eyes on the door Quentin had just closed.
“Hey, Cat.”
Her big brown eyes flicked to his for the first time since he’d turned around. “Did your superhot roomie leave for work yet?”
Quentin suppressed yet another sigh.
“I was thinking,” she continued in a low voice, “that I might try to synchronize our exits today, maybe walk him to the train.”
See, this, this right here, was exactly why Jared was an absolute numbskull. Because if he opened his eyes just the tiniest bit, he could have Cat LaFievre on a silver platter, Popsicle and all. Instead he was in there, tangled up in the sheets with a woman who’d once thrown a gyro at his head because he sat on the remote and changed the channel in the middle of a TV show she was watching.
Instead of acknowledging that Cat had the hots for his dummy of a cousin, Quentin chose to shift the subject. “Where are you off to so early in the morning? I thought you were on summer break?”
She contracted into herself, one hand on her heart and her eyes squinched closed, the Popsicle lolling dangerously in her fingers. “Oh, my God. That sounds so good it hurts. Say it again, big boy.”
Quentin pinched his lips together but couldn’t keep his cheeks from rising. She was so ridiculous. He didn’t resist the urge to play. Leaning forward, he lifted one eyebrow and used his deepest, sexiest voice. “Summer break,” he crooned.
She shivered theatrically. “That’s the stuff.”
He couldn’t help but laugh.
Smiling right back at him, she finished off the Popsicle and cracked the stick in two. “Yup. Officially on break. I was gonna head out to Fort Tilden beach this morning before the crowds descend.”
“How do you get out there?” He adjusted the strap on his messenger bag and cocked his head to the side, his interest piqued.
“The train to a shuttle bus, it’s not—oh, I see what you’re doing.”
He flushed. “What?”
“You’re totally pretending to have a normal conversation with a neighbor but actually you’re nerding out. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about your public-transportation obsession.” She ticktocked her finger back and forth and gave him a knowing look.
He flushed even more, which he knew was painfully obvious on his complexion. He had coppery hair and pale skin. Even the slightest blush and he was roughly the same hue as a can of coke. “It’s not an obsession,” he insisted, fiddling with his messenger bag again. “It’s my job.”
“Uh-huh. Says the guy with a train set in his bedroom.”
Aaaand here they were, back to the reason he’d been attempting to avoid her for the last three months.
Because after the last breakup with Lara, Jared had unilaterally decided that he was going to throw a party and invite all the hotties he knew. The hottie from across the hall had been absolutely no exception. Quentin had had the befuddling experience of coming home from work and discovering no less than twenty-two beautiful women in his apartment.
A little overwhelmed, he’d been quite relieved to find himself in a friendly chat with his cute across-the-hall neighbor. “Just call me Cat. Catherine sounds like somebody who went down with the Titanic,” she’d told him.
Half an hour later, he’d been downright stoked to be chatting with her. She was whip-smart and funny. Her features were small, a ski-jump nose and a rosebud mouth, but she had this way of animating her entire body when she talked that made her presence expand and fill any space that she was occupying. She had lots of wild brown hair that had tumbled over her shoulders that night. She’d worn a big, slouchy sweater, tight jeans and mismatched socks.
They’d covered the basic subjects quickly. Where she was from—Ithaca—and where he was from—Sleepy Hollow. She’d briefly enacted headless-horseman-ing his head off when he’d told her that detail. And they’d quickly plunged on to more interesting topics. What she’d been for Halloween that year—Doc from Back to the Future—and the most ridiculous reason a kid ever gave for not turning in homework to her—apparently Santa took it as evidence for his “nice” file.
Quentin remembered every word of their conversation from that night.
When she’d asked to see his bedroom, his hands had started sweating.
Once, at a buddy’s bachelor party—the one after which Lara had briefly dumped Jared for attending—Quentin had placed a random bet at a roulette table. He’d watched in blank, stunned amazement as his number came up and he won $1,650. That moment with Cat had been exactly the same feeling.
He wasn’t altogether unfortunate when it came to women. But he was quiet and often a little shy and had only recently figured out that a short beard made his jaw look more defined. He’d gone on a few semi-successful dates over the last few months. But even so, he was plenty nervous escorting the cutest girl at the party toward his bedroom. It wasn’t something that happened very often to him.
He’d left the door open, stood to the side and shoved his hands in his pockets. Cat had come in to the room and immediately started touching stuff. She trailed a fingertip over his textbooks, bounced a few times on one corner of his bed, checked the view from his window. And then she’d turned and spotted the antique Lionel train set that was set up along the back edge of his dresser.
“You have a train set? That’s so cute.”
His stomach sank as she crossed the room to inspect it. Cute was a word with so many different connotations. When he’d inwardly labelled her as the cutest girl at the party, the connotation was that he’d very much like to make her breakfast after she slept over. When she looked at his train set and called him cute, he feared the connotation was that she’d like to watch a rom-com with him while they sat on opposite sides of the couch. Her version of cute ha
d a distinctly nonsexual bent to it.
“Um. Yeah. I’m an urban planner, like I mentioned before. My specific area of interest is public transportation. I just graduated from NYU last year.” He didn’t usually mention his prestigious alma mater, but he felt a need to legitimize—in any possible way—the presence of the toy train in his room. “I guess it’s always been an interest of mine.” He cleared his throat. “My grandfather was a train conductor for Amtrak. We had a love of trains in common.”
“Wow. That’s so sweet.”
He was still trying to figure out if sweet was any better than cute when she’d come up beside him and peeked out his bedroom door toward the living room. Her face fell. “Shoot,” she’d muttered. “Guess I missed my chance!”
Quentin had followed her eye line across the party to where Jared was leading one of his more shapely coworkers into his bedroom, then firmly closing the door behind them. Understanding conked Quentin over the head with all the subtlety of a nine iron.
Cat had come to the party with her eye on his cousin.
“Oh.”
“I meant to finally make my move on your sexy roommate but you distracted me with your hot takes on breakfast sausage!” she’d playfully accused Quentin.
They had, in fact, spent a good deal of time debating whether flat or round breakfast sausage was better.
They’d chatted a few more minutes after that before Quentin told her that he was tired and she took the hint. He’d locked himself into his room that night feeling pretty stupid and deflated.
They’d run into one another in the hallway a few times since then, but as she always found a way to ask about Jared, Quentin had started trying to avoid her.
Jared was tall and good-looking. He had this sort of dark-haired vampire thing going on. He always looked to Quentin like he’d spent the night crying over his own poetry, but apparently women were into it. With or without Lara in his life, Jared didn’t need Quentin as a wingman. He could pull pretty much any woman he had his eye on.
