Angela Ardis is waiting for the sucker punch.

She knows her book, Inside A Thug’s Hear (Dafina Books, $21), will tick some diehard Tupac Shakur fans off, so she’s bracing herself for a verbal — or maybe a physical — blow.

“Thug’s Heart,” which arrives on bookstore shelves Tuesday, is a collection of letters and poems Ardis and the late rapper Shakur wrote to each other when he was in prison on rape charges nine years ago.

Though Ardis is braced for critics, some Shakur fans are eager to read her book. “If I were writing a rapper in prison and he wrote me back often, I would write a book,” says Mister Mann Frisby, a former hip-hop and R&B critic turned novelist, who lives in Philadelphia. “She (Ardis) is taking advantage of something a lot of people would, and I applaud her. It’s like having had a correspondence with Elvis or Marvin Gaye. It’s a big deal.”

The correspondence started when Ardis, a 24-year-old Shakur fan, wrote him a letter after her friends dared her to do so. The petite beauty also sent a photo and her phone number. Ardis says she was surprised as anyone else when her letter inspired a nearly year-long relationship that included letters, phone calls and visits. The calls and letters started off innocently, but with time, Shakur and Ardis became lovers through steamy words — “Grab hold and hug whil e we make love/So strong it will make you cry,” Shakur wrote — and later a single tryst.

“We made a connection,” Ardis says, during an interview at Hotel St. Regis in Detroit, just blocks away from her New Center home. “Even though I know the truth, I’m waiting for someone to say ‘What do you know about Tupac? You’re just a silly groupie.’

“I’m not a groupie. It’s not like we met at a concert. It just happened. I don’t know what anyone would call our relationship. I would call it a friendship.”

Their friendship was not exclusive. Ardis dated, keeping her clandestine relationship with Shakur just that when it came to other suitors.

Shakur wrote other women. He married another one of his pen pals, so he could have conjugal visits. The two divorced by the time Shakur became free.

“I wasn’t hurt when Tupac got married,” Ardis says. “Every man has a girl. You never meet a person no one loves. I automatically assumed it would be Jada (actress Jada Pinkett Smith was Shakur’s childhood sweetheart), and then I read ‘Jet’ and found out it was someone else.”

Ardis’ relationship with Shakur gave her insight into the romantic that few people knew, and she wrote the book to introduce Shakur’s sensitive side to the world, she says.

“I would watch the news, and the media made him out to be this thug, this criminal, but that’s not the man I knew,” Ardis says. “He was a Gemini, and so am I, and we have two sides, but I didn’t meet the rapper. I met the man.”

Ardis lived in Atlanta in 1995 when she exchanged letters with Shakur, who was imprisoned at Rikers Island and later Clinton State Prison, both in New York state. Shakur served 11 months before being released on bail, pending appeal in October 1995. Soon after, he and Ardis had a one night stand, and never spoke again.

A gunman shot Shakur to death less than a year later. He was 25.

Years later, while living in L.A., Ardis decided to write a book with Shakur’s letters and poems. In the process of finishing the book, which was four years in the making, she returned to Detroit, the city where she was born.

Writing the book wouldn’t prove easy for Ardis. First, she had to get permission from Shakur’s mom, Afeni Shakur, who heads Amaru Entertainment, a company that oversees her son’s estate and intellectual property. The letters between Ardis and Shakur fell under the latter.

With Afeni’s permission, Ardis continued writing, recalling the amorous alter ego of a mythic man she came to know and love. The only problem was she had Shakur’s work, but no copies of the letters she’d sent. She re-created her letters and phone conversations from her memories. The poems she’d written for him she’d kept, and they went in the book too.

“When I wrote the book, I went through the whole thing all over again,” Ardis says, her eyes watering up. “I went through his death all over again.”

Ardis is now involved in a serious relationship with a man who supports her work and the book. She’s working on other books and projects. But she says “Thug’s Heart” will define her for life. And the letters have become so much a part of her that she wouldn’t give them to anyone, not even Shakur’s mother, she says.

“They’re mine.”

Credits:Mekeisha Madden / The Detroit News