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she’d
felt protected and adored and special…and she couldn’t think about that, either.
Because no matter what sort of crazy connection they’d found that night, there
was no chance for a romantic relationship for the two of them, and they both
knew it. The fellowship and her career were just too important to her; she
couldn’t compromise everything she’d worked for just because skinny little Zach
Alger had morphed into a sex god.
    Particularly in light of what had happened after. The
humiliation still made her cringe. After their mad lovemaking, they’d been
lounging on the bench seat of the boat, speechless with the lush saturation of
sexual fulfillment. Finally, Zach had tried to say something. “That
was…that…God, Sonnet.”
    She hadn’t done much better. “I think we’d better… I’m… Is
there any more champagne?”
    He reached for the bottle. He paused, and she saw him frown in
the dim light. “Shit, it was on.”
    She was still limp with pleasure. “What was on? You mean that
camera thing? No way. Oh, my God. Can you fix it?”
    He laughed. “Relax, I’m a professional.” He’d popped out the
camera’s SD card. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
    “You totally have to erase that, Zach. I don’t care if it
recorded anything or not. You have to promise.”
    “Of course I’m going to erase it,” he said. “What do you take
me for? Hey, I can do better than that.” He flicked the tiny card into the lake.
Then he had turned to her, this sexy stranger who had once been her best friend.
“Now, where were we?”
    And the mind-blowing sex had continued. Dawn had crept in, and
they’d sneaked away from the boathouse, only to encounter Shane Gilmore,
president of the local bank and the town gossip, out for his morning jog by the
lake. Her mom’s ex, of all people. And there had been no mistaking the
expression on his face.
    Sonnet cringed all over again as she reached the edge of
Central Park, heading for the subway to catch the train to the restaurant. She
emerged from the lush gardens of the park onto Fifth Avenue, where the sidewalk
was crammed with hurrying pedestrians who all seemed to be in a pointless race
with one another.
    To refocus her thoughts, she slipped her hand into her pocket
and closed it around the key. No one else in the surging stream of humanity had
any clue what the key meant to her or even why. Despite the warmth of the day,
she felt a chill.
    It was a chill of excitement. Of anticipation. The key had been
given to her by Orlando, aka the ideal boyfriend. He was one of those guys who
really was as good as he looked on paper—background, education, career path,
manners, looks. And because her father had introduced them, Orlando had arrived
in her life preapproved. And he said he was in love with her.
    He was the first man to say so. Hearing the declaration hadn’t
been the exhilarating free fall of emotion she’d imagined as a girl. It was
better than that. He was mature, he knew what he wanted, and he wanted to share
his life with her.
    As the crowd on the sidewalk halted for a traffic light, she
gave a couple of bills to a guy strumming “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on a
ukulele. A block farther, she played a secret game of peekaboo with a toddler
being jiggled on his mother’s shoulder. Oblivious, the mother gabbed away on her
phone about a fight she was having with her boyfriend. The baby had cheeks like
ripe apples and eyes that looked perpetually startled, and a wisp of blond hair
rising from his forehead like the flame of a candle.
    He looked like half the dolls Sonnet used to play with when she
was a little girl. The other dolls looked more like the little African-American
girl in the umbrella stroller a few feet away. When Sonnet got older, her mom
had explained that baby dolls who looked like Sonnet were hard to come by.
Santa’s elves, apparently, had not caught up with the times. Mixed race babies
were common enough; dolls that resembled them, not