Plain Jane and the Playboy / Valentine's Fortune. Marie Ferrarella

questions all melded together into one cacophony of voices and noises as Jane leaned over the table and plucked the card from the basket. She felt as if she were moving in slow motion.

      “New Year’s Eve ended much too soon,” the card said. “With affection, Jorge.”

      “With affection,” Joyce echoed, looking over her shoulder at the card she’d already read. A huge sigh followed. “You’ve been holding out on us,” she accused Jane.

      “Yeah,” Harriet chimed in. “Not very nice of you, Jane. Give.”

      And five sets of eyes turned their eager faces toward her.

       Chapter Six

      Unlike her former beauty queen mother—or maybe because of her—Jane had never liked being the center of attention. It made her uncomfortable.

      “There’s nothing to ‘give,’” Jane told Harriet.

      The women exchanged exasperated looks with one another, as if they thought she was holding out on them.

      “Oh, come on, Jane,” Cecilia Evans, the oldest of the group, pressed. “A man doesn’t send flowers and sign his name ‘with affection’ if something isn’t going on. Especially not a hunk like Jorge Mendoza.”

      Cecilia drove the point home. “How does he know you work here?”

      Jane looked back at the flowers. They would have had her floating on air—if she didn’t know what she knew. She almost wished she hadn’t overheard those boys gossiping.

      Most likely, Jorge had sent the flowers because he’d had qualms of conscience.

      But then, she backtracked, why should he if he didn’t know that she knew?

      This was all getting very complicated. All she wanted to do was get to work, do what she did best, and forget about everything else.

      Some people were meant to have romance in their lives and some weren’t. She belonged to the “weren’t” group and she was just going to have to learn how to deal with that and accept it.

      More than anything, Jane didn’t want to talk about Jorge or the flowers or anything that had to do with why they might have been sent. But she had never learned how to be rude or cut people off. She’d certainly never learned how to tell them to butt out.

      So she lifted her shoulders in a vague shrug and admitted, “I told him where I work.”

      “When?” Joyce demanded excitedly. “When did you tell him?” The slender blonde shook her head when information didn’t immediately come spilling out of Jane’s mouth. “If I’d met Jorge Mendoza, every single last detail would have been up on my blog three minutes after I got home. Maybe two.”

      “I don’t blog,” Jane said, seizing on the stray item.

      “You don’t talk much, either,” Cecilia grumbled. Two of the other women chimed in their agreement.

      Jane pressed her lips together, suppressing a sigh. It wasn’t her intention to seem secretive about the matter. It was just that she knew that these flowers, didn’t really mean anything and honest though she was, she certainly wasn’t about to tell her friends that Jorge had kissed her on a bet.

      Some things you just didn’t talk about. To anyone.

      Looking at the circle of eager faces surrounding her, she decided to give them just the bare bones and hope they’d be satisfied with that.

      “I met him at the New Year’s Eve party I went to at Red, the one Emmett Jamison and his wife threw for the Fortune Foundation. I went representing ReadingWorks,” she added quickly, in case any of them thought she had a special in with the elite circle of people the Fortunes usually associated with. As the one who had worked at ReadingWorks the longest, she’d been the logical one to invite. “I was afraid if I didn’t go, it might insult Mr. Jamison.”

      They all knew that the Foundation had given ReadingWorks sizable grants in the last couple of years, and it was largely because of the Foundation that ReadingWorks’ doors were opened to the children whose parents could not afford to pay for private tutoring.

      “Right,” Harriet said, waving her hand at Jane’s explanation. “Get to the good part,” she urged. “How did you meet Jorge?”

      “Is he as good looking as his pictures?” Sally asked.

      Jane had to be honest. She always was. There were times when she considered it almost a congenital defect. “Better.”

      “So? Get on with it,” Sally begged. “There had to be a lot of people there.”

      “There were.” It had been so crowded and so noisy that she had trouble concentrating on her book when she’d taken it out.

      “So how did you two meet?” Cecilia wanted to know. “Don’t skip anything,” she ordered before Jane could say answer.

      “He asked me if I wanted to freshen up my drink—he was tending bar for his parents,” Jane explained.

      She knew she was being disjointed, that the facts were tumbling out like grains of rice from a hole in the bottom of the box, but it was hard for her to collect her thoughts under all this scrutiny. Especially since she was still having trouble reconciling herself to the fact that the single greatest experience of her young life was tied to a bet, making her—in her mind, at least—the butt of a cruel joke.

      The fact that Jorge had sent a note like that with flowers just served to confuse and complicate everything that much more.

      “And then?” Sally urged when Jane didn’t elaborate. “This is like pulling teeth,” she complained. “What did you do to get him to send you flowers?”

      “I didn’t do anything,” Jane protested. Except run away.

      Maybe that was it, she thought. Maybe he was feeling guilty because she’d bolted and he suspected that she knew about the bet.

      Joyce frowned. This obviously wasn’t making any sense to her, or the others. “So that was it? He asked you if you wanted your drink freshened and then he just disappeared?”

      “Well, no.” Jane thought about the way he’d looked at her and a smile curved her mouth involuntarily. “We talked a little. And then it was midnight and—”

      The mere memory made her body tingle.

      Joyce’s eyes widened. “He kissed you?”

      Jane nodded her head. For a split second, a wave of heat washed over her as, despite her best efforts to block it, the memory replayed itself in her head.

      “Yes.”

      “And? What was it like?” Sally demanded.

      Jane had never mastered the art of nonchalance. Besides, there had been nothing nonchalant about the way Jorge kissed. He had literally made the earth move beneath her feet. No matter what his motives were, she had to give him his due in that department.

      “Pretty terrific.”

      “And you’re seeing him again,” Sally assumed eagerly, skimming her fingertip down along a plump, pink rose petal.

      Despite everything, a sliver of sadness skewered through Jane as she answered. “No.”

      The other women looked at each other.

      “But he sent flowers,” Harriet insisted. “How can you not see someone who sent you flowers?”

      Because he doesn’t want to see me. He just doesn’t want to feel bad.

      Jane kept the words to herself, searching for some kind of plausible answer that would make the others back off and leave her alone. This was hard enough to deal with without pretending that she was starryeyed and walking on air.

      Just