didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he slipped his hand behind her head, cupping it.
For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her again and she could have sworn that the wattage at Red went down several notches as the very room grew dark. She struggled to hang on to her consciousness.
“Sure you are,” Jorge told her. “I can see it in your eyes.”
The very remark coaxed a smile to her lips, whether out of nervousness or just because being so near to this dynamic, gorgeous man made her want to smile all over, she really didn’t know. For the moment, she didn’t care, either. What mattered was the proximity. She wanted to remain this close to Jorge for as long as humanly possible without having to resort to handcuffs.
God, she was babbling and her lips weren’t even moving.
Things like this didn’t happen to people like her, she thought again. And while it was happening, she was just going to go with it and enjoy it.
Because she knew it was never, ever going to happen again.
“If you say so,” Jane answered, her voice deliberately low to keep it from cracking.
Did she have any idea how sexy she sounded, Jorge wondered.
He had a feeling that she didn’t, that Jane Gilliam had probably gone through her whole life seriously underestimating herself. It didn’t take a student of women to pick up on that. He could tell by her body language and by the very way she wore her clothes. She dressed nicely, but there was no sign that there had been any extra fussing, any extra care taken. The same applied to her makeup.
He caught himself wondering about her. Really wondering about her as a person, not a conquest.
Leaning his head against Jane’s, he looked into her eyes, then he shifted so that his lips were near her ear. “Who are you, Jane Gilliam?” he asked her quietly.
His breath sent warm shivers up and down her spine, and she was afraid he’d see how very inexperienced she was—he’d probably already guessed that anyway.
Why had he kissed her, she wondered again. A man like this wouldn’t have been alone any night of the year, especially not one that was considered to be the most important. She curbed the urge to ask, sensing that the answer might send her plummeting to the ground.
Jane felt as if she were trapped inside some kind of bubble—and bubbles always burst. There was no getting away from that. But not just yet.
Not just now.
Jane ran the tip of her tongue along her bottom lip. What was he asking her?
“Do you mean what do I do for a living?”
“That’s as good a start as any,” he acknowledged, aware that any one of a number of women he knew would have taken the question and given him some sort of existential, philosophical answer. Jane, apparently, was grounded.
His mother, he realized, would love her.
Jorge quickly glanced around, hoping that Maria Mendoza wasn’t standing somewhere close by, taking all this in. She’d misunderstand immediately, especially since Jane was not like any of the other women he kept company with.
“I work for Red Rock ReadingWorks,” Jane told him, tripping over the alliteration for the first time since she’d joined the organization. If she wasn’t careful, any second she was going to start sounding like a chatty fool. “That’s a nonprofit organization that—”
Jorge held up his hand to stop her before she launched into a lengthy description of Reading-Works and all the services that it offered.
“I’m familiar with ReadingWorks,” he told her.
She clamped her jaw shut to keep it from dropping in surprise. “You are?” The next moment, Jane realized her oversight. “Of course you are. You said that Isabella was your cousin.” And the pretty thirty-year-old dropped by the storefront building where ReadingWorks was housed often enough. Isabella probably had mentioned the place to him once or twice.
Jane felt self-conscious. She always did when attention was focused on her. She made an attempt to deflect it back to him. Besides, she really did want to find out a few things about this man who had set her on fire.
“What do you do?”
He glanced at the glass on the table, the one he’d initially offered to fill. “Well, tonight, I’m a bartender.”
She sincerely doubted that bartending was Jorge’s sole occupation. He looked far too vital, far too intelligent to be satisfied with mixing drinks and wiping down a counter.
“And other nights?” she prompted. “And days?” Jane added quickly when she realized what her initially innocent question had to sound like to him.
Broad shoulders shrugged casually beneath his royal blue shirt. His easygoing grin nonetheless created a knot in the pit of her stomach.
“A little of this, a little of that.” He saw the curiosity in her eyes. She really wanted to know, he thought. Most women just wanted to see the size of his billfold—among other things. “I’m an entrepreneur,” he added.
“That sounds interesting. Tell me about it.”
She actually sounded genuinely interested, he thought. Before he knew it, he began talking about his latest venture.
Oh man, what an operator Jorge was, Ricky Jamison thought, standing over in a corner and watching his idol’s every move. Because he was so far away and there was so much noise, Ricky couldn’t hear what was being said, but he could certainly see what was going on. Within the space of a few minutes—and, from the looks of it, one hell of a kiss—Jorge had brought the bookish woman to a melting point.
Ricky sighed, shaking his head. His friend Josh and Josh’s girlfriend, Lindsey, had their heads together over in the corner, sharing something private. Ricky felt a pang as he wished he had that kind of ability, to make girls fall for him.
When he was older, Ricky thought wistfully, he wanted to be exactly like Jorge Mendoza. The man was a god in his eyes.
Patrick Fortune rang in this New Year’s the very same way he rang in all the others since he’d met his bride: by kissing Lacey.
His arm rested comfortably around his still-beautiful wife’s shoulders as he surveyed the very crowded banquet hall. He recognized almost all the faces here, and that was his own doing—his and Maria Mendoza’s. It wasn’t every New Year’s Eve that he managed to gather together so many members of his family under one roof. Sadly, not all of his five children and their spouses could make it. But on the bright side, his brother William and William’s five children were all here, as well as Cynthia’s children.
Bolder than sunlight, Cynthia had always marched to a different drummer and made her own rules, usually as she went along. Still, he wished she’d taken him up on the invitation and come. He wanted all his siblings here, all his nieces and nephews as well as his own children. Not because he had any special announcement to make, but just because he felt the need for their presence.
Family was everything.
The
