“The Duke?” It took her a second to place the name. “Are you talking about the pitcher for the Bronx Bolts? That Duke?” Even as she was saying it, she knew it to be true. Oh my God. How did I not recognize him? She didn’t follow baseball, but New Yorkers made sure everyone in the city knew the Bronx Bolts’ roster. She was too busy to care about dudes famous for hitting balls with sticks and then whining about their mansions being too small.

I guess I should crawl out from under my rock more often. Then, after reflecting on the last few moments, she thought, Better yet, I should get back under that rock and not come out.

As she and Jose walked home, she shivered against the afternoon breeze blowing off the Harlem River. Everything felt dreamlike, unreal. Jose chattered away in the foreign language of baseball while she nodded absently and tried to calm the storm in her head. She wanted to lie down on the dirty sidewalk and cry. Twice now she’d given in to irrational impulses and stepped in it. And both lapses had involved this stranger, this Duke. A professional athlete, way out of her league.

The handsome, confident man had been normal, even friendly, once he got his foot out of his mouth. And her tongue. Imagine being on a date with that guy. I bet we wouldn’t go to Wendy’s. She frowned. What’s this “we” business? He ran away without asking my name.

And it came to her. Why she had recognized his face. Not because he was a ballplayer but because his picture had been on the front page of the Bronx Times for weeks last year, something to do with getting shot in a bar, and one of his teammates had died. Also, didn’t his agent-driver person just yell, They’re on their way? Was he talking about the cops?

Thank God the guy left when he did. She’d dodged her own bullet. She did not have time for a man, but especially one who came with so much baggage and drama and who certainly saw her as a lesser being, from the wrong side of the tracks. She shivered again, this time not so much from the spring winds as from the goose that walked over her grave.

Yeah, how lucky. He didn’t want me.

Chapter Seven

“Angel.”

Her head snapped up when she heard her name. “I’m awake.”

The day after kissing a Bronx Bolt at the park, she was back to sitting at the nurse’s station, nodding off while trying to catch up on assigned reading: Health Promotion in Multicultural Populations, written by a bunch of white guys who’d clearly never left the Upper East Side.