Kate Hoffmann: The Sexy Devil

Though she didn’t want to admit it, Angela knew exactly what Ceci was talking about. She’d experienced a moment…once, about four years ago. But it hadn’t changed her life. “Have you ever had a moment?” Angela asked, keeping her gaze fixed on her work.

“No,” Ceci admitted.

“Not even with Will?”

“Nope. It might happen, though. It doesn’t have to be the moment you meet. That’s love at first sight. For some people, it happens a little later. And sometimes it happens at different times for men and women.

My brother-in-law said he fell in love with my sister when she burned a pot roast for his birthday dinner.

She sat on the kitchen floor and cried for a half hour.

And that was the moment he knew they’d be together forever.”

Unfortunately, it had taken Angela six years to realize that she and Max would never have a moment.

She’d even wrangled an interview with him for the college paper, but she’d been so nervous, she could barely remember the questions she’d planned to ask.

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.”