After that, they’d passed each other on campus on numerous occasions, and even shared a sociology class. But he’d never once given her a second glance.

The summer after her sophomore year, Angela set out to transform herself into the kind of girl Max would notice. She studied the fashion magazines and bought a whole new wardrobe. She dyed her mousy brown hair a pretty shade of honey-blonde. She got herself a pair of contacts and lost ten pounds. She silently observed the girls that Max found attractive and she turned herself into one, then waited for her moment, determined to turn it into something special.

But it wasn’t to be. At the end of his sophomore baseball season, Max left college for the minor leagues, signing with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. He packed his bags and headed south for their farm system.

She knew her last chance at romance was gone, so she’d done exactly what the rational middle daughter of the Doctors Weatherby should do-she moved on. She started dating other guys and within a year, Max Morgan had become a distant memory from an all-too-foolish adolescence.

Until that night, four years ago. A night that could have changed the course of her life-except it hadn’t. “There was a moment,” Angela murmured. “With this one guy.”

Ceci leaned forward. “Really? With who?”

“With whom,” Angela corrected.

“With whom!” Ceci said.

“I was out with a coworker at a sports bar in Evanston. I came there to meet her cousin, a stockbroker. It was a blind date. Our eyes met across the bar and it was like I’d been struck by lightning. It took my breath away. We stared at each other for what seemed like forever. It was…frightening and exhilarating. And I felt like I was under some kind of…I don’t know. Spell.”

“See! You know exactly what I’m talking about! What happened?”

“Nothing. I got nervous and looked away. When I looked back, some other woman had captured his attention.”

“But this guy was your blind date,” Ceci said. “God, what a creep. He went off with another girl?”

“No!” Angela said. “My blind date was sitting next to me, rattling on about bond rates and investment strategies. This was a different guy.”

It was the only real regret she had in her life. She’d let her one last chance at Max Morgan slip away. As his career in the majors blossomed that season, he became the stuff of tabloid legend, slowly transforming himself into her archetypical smooth operator-dating a long string of models and actresses and party girls, then tossing them aside when something more interesting came along.

Angela had gone home that night and wrote her first blog, talking about what she called “White Knight Syndrome,” and her silly dream of finding the perfect man to rescue her from the horrors of single life.

Ceci reached out and took Angela’s hand. “That’s so tragic.”

Angela shook her head, lost in thoughts of Max. “No, it isn’t,” she said stubbornly. “It wasn’t meant to be. If he’d been interested, he would have walked across that bar and introduced himself.”

“And you’d be married to him today,” Ceci said.

“No!” Angela protested. “We might have gone out, had a nice time, maybe slept together, but then he would have turned out to be like all the others.”

“You don’t know that,” Ceci said.

“I do.” Angela paused, not sure of how much she wanted to reveal to Ceci. “He has a huge profile on our site. Nearly fifty women have commented. I would have been just another in a long line of broken hearts.”

“You found him on the site?”

“Actually, he’s the reason I started the blog,” Angela admitted. “We went to high school and college together and I had this massive crush on him. He never noticed me. We had that moment in the bar and I realized what a ridiculous fool I was, still carrying a torch for him after all those years. That night, I went home and wrote my first blog.”

“What’s his name?” Ceci asked, turning back to her computer. “I want to look him up.” She clicked on the search engine, then waited.

Why not tell Ceci? It’s not like she had feelings for him anymore. “He’s the Sexy Devil,” she murmured. “Chapter Five. Max Morgan.”

Ceci’s hands froze on her keyboard and she slowly turned to face Angela. “You know Max Morgan? The baseball player?” She sighed in frustration. “How many times have we talked about him? About his chapter in the book. And you never told me you knew him.”

“I don’t, exactly.” Angela shrugged. “I’ve spoken to him…once. No, twice if you count the one word he said to me when we first met. I know almost everything there is to know about him. But we don’t know each other. He’s not even aware I exist.”

“But you had a moment!” Ceci cried. “Maybe you were destined for each other.”

“Love is not about magic moments and fairy-tale endings,” Angela said. “It’s about two people willing to work hard to make a relationship succeed. Two people sharing common interests and goals. And there are few truly decent men around willing to invest the time and effort to make a relationship work.”

“You sound just like your mother,” Ceci said. “So what are you going to do? Are you going to interview him?” She frowned. “Wait a second. Is that why you didn’t go to that big charity event? The one he was hosting last month?”

“It wouldn’t have been a good place to conduct an interview. I have to get him alone and talking, without any distractions.” She swallowed hard. “And I’m not sure I want to catch him. I have several other candidates for that chapter.”

In truth, Angela had thought an interview would be the perfect opportunity to prove to herself that her feelings for Max Morgan were gone for good. She was adult now and she’d put all her teenage fantasies about love behind her. He wasn’t her Prince Charming. Max Morgan was just another serial seducer, bent on bolstering his ego with an endless supply of willing women. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes in his presence to recognize that he was not the man of her dreams.

“I think the reason you made him the subject of Chapter Five is because you want to see him again,” Ceci said. “You had a moment and you can’t forget it. And don’t bother lying to me. I’m your best friend. Whenever you lie, your face turns red.”

Angela clapped her hands over her cheeks and shook her head. “I’ll interview him. But my luck with interviews has been pretty bad lately. I can’t help it if no one wants to talk to me.”

“What if I could set you up with Max Morgan?” Ceci said.

“How would you do that?”

“Will hangs out at the Tenth Inning every Monday night with his fantasy league buddies. Max Morgan owns the Tenth Inning. And Will says that Max has been in occasionally these last few weeks. He’s back in Chicago for the summer, recuperating after some sort of surgery he had during the off-season.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Occasionally, I do listen to Will’s rambling. He even met Max last week. Got a photo of him on his phone. I’m sure if you went in there, you could talk to him.”

Angela felt her stomach flutter and she drew a sharp breath, pushing the surge of excitement aside. Ceci was right. She shouldn’t be afraid to interview Max. She could certainly maintain a professional demeanor, even taking into account her former feelings about him.

“If I’m going to interview him, we have to develop a better strategy. He can’t know he’s being interviewed. I have to find a way to meet him and then get whatever I need from casual conversation.” Angela stood. “He can’t know that this is for a book.”

“Conversation,” Ceci said. “That’s exactly what people do in a bar.”

“I know. But I’ve never been very good at that. I don’t flirt, I have a tendency to babble when I’m nervous, and I absolutely cannot hold my liquor.”

“That’s the least of your problems,” Ceci said. “First, we have to go shopping and buy you the sexiest outfit on the planet. You’re going to have to attract him first. From what I see on his profile, he doesn’t have any shortage of women wanting to sleep with him. What do you think-legs, belly or cleavage? Pick one.”

“For what?”

“It’s my mother’s rule. She always used to tell me that if your outfit only showed one of the three, it was sexy. Two of the three makes the outfit sleazy. And showing all three makes it slutty. The rule of three has served me well. So, legs, belly or boobs?”

“What do you think?” Angela asked, staring down at her rather unremarkable body.

“Legs,” Ceci said. “You have great legs. Let him fantasize about the boobs and the belly.” Ceci grabbed her purse, then pulled Angela along toward the door. “What color?”

“Does your mom have a rule for that as well?”

“No. I do. Black is boring, red is desperate. An unusual color, like chartreuse or tangerine, says you’re a strong, independent woman who doesn’t care what other people say about her weird color choices. And men think that women who wear weird colors are kinky in bed.”

“You have proof of this?” Angela asked.

“Yes.” She pointed to her own mustard-colored top. “I was wearing pumpkin-orange when I met Will. He said he knew exactly what I was like in the bedroom.”

“I’m not going to sleep with Max Morgan,” Angela said.

“Of course not. But in order to get close to him, you’re going to have to make him believe you just might.”

They stepped out of the office onto the noisy bustle of Ashland Avenue. It was barely noon and the heat was already stifling. “There’s this really nice boutique that just opened on North,” Ceci said. “Let’s start there. You’ll need a nice pair of Do-me shoes, too. The dress will be demure but the shoes will say ‘take my body now’.”

“You are not my fairy godmother and I’m not Cinderella.”

Ceci slipped her arm through Angela’s. “Honey, we all want to be Cinderella. Every single girl I know is waiting for that guy to come calling with a glass slipper.”

THE BAR WAS CROWDED for a Tuesday night. Max Morgan leaned over and motioned to Dave, his manager and big brother. “Is this a typical Tuesday night? This is the busiest I’ve seen it in ages. What’s going on?”

“It’s Ladies’ Night. Women drink for half-price on Tuesdays. And when you’re here, a lot of women show up, hoping they’ll get lucky,” Dave said, grinning. “Hey, you’re better than a promotional giveaway. The women want to date you, the men want to talk baseball with you. Just sit yourself down at the end of the bar and be your usual charming self. Or better yet, hang out by the door and take a few pictures.”

Max glanced over his shoulder. This wasn’t exactly how he wanted to be viewed, as some kind of marketing tool. God, since his baseball career had taken off, he’d become a giant marketing machine-selling athletic shoes and luxury cars and expensive watches. He couldn’t buy a pair of socks without having to think about the impact it would have on his endorsements. And every move he made in his personal life affected his ability to make money.

He hadn’t really minded the notoriety that much…until the press showed it could also be nasty. Suddenly his day-to-day life had turned into fodder for media commentators. At first, he didn’t care what was said about him because most of it had just been made up anyway. But when he’d learned his nieces and nephews were hearing about it at school, Max had decided to take a break from the spotlight.

A shoulder surgery he’d been putting off became the perfect chance to get out of the limelight, to give the media an opportunity to focus on someone else. And though he still had a few photographers waiting to catch him at a bad moment, his time in Chicago had given him a chance to really contemplate his future-after baseball.

Here, he could leave the temptations of New York and L.A. behind, the women, the partying, a nonstop glare of the camera flash. And the constant need to be selling something. “I’m just going to make a few calls,” Max said. “I’ll be in the office.”

Max had purchased the bar in the DePaul neighborhood nearly a year ago, turning it over to his brother to renovate and run. Dave seemed to have a golden touch when it came to business. Whenever Max had money to invest, he turned it over to Dave, who managed to make them both rich.

At least Max didn’t have to worry about how he was going to live after his baseball career ended. With seven years in the majors, he’d done pretty well for himself. Max smiled and shook hands as he walked back to the office, posing for a few photos along the way. When he finally closed the door behind him, he drew a deep breath and leaned back against it.

One day, he would be completely anonymous again. Max couldn’t believe he’d ever been fearful of the moment when no one recognized him. Now, all he longed for was a normal life again. Since he’d been home, Max had quietly observed his three older siblings, all happily married with kids of their own, and wondered how they’d managed to find the key to the happiness.