Plain Jane and the Playboy

by Marie Ferrarella

  Damn shame, Darr thought again.

  As he secured the tank, he was suddenly jostled from the side. Turning, he saw a brown-haired woman run past him. She’d obviously broken through the barricade that had been hastily put up.

  The damn fool looked like she was running straight for the burning building!

  “Hey, hold it!” Darr yelled after her. “You can’t go in there!”

  Jane didn’t even slow down to look at the firefighter. “I have to. He’s in there. I know it. I have to find him,” she cried.

  Suddenly, she felt herself being grabbed around the waist by a powerful arm and lifted off the ground in one swift, seemingly effortless movement. The firefighter swung her around 180 degrees away from the restaurant entrance.

  “Lady,” Darr said as patiently as he could. “I understand how you feel, I really do, but you can’t go in there.”

  She wasn’t going be talked out of it. “I have to. I can’t let him die in there.” She was struggling not to cry, not to let her imagination go any further than it was right at this moment.

  “Him?” Darr asked. According to the person who’d called in the fire, one of the patrons, the few people in the restaurant dining area had fled.

  “Jorge,” she cried. She tried to move past Darr, but he merely blocked her again. “Jorge Mendoza.”

  The guy whose father owned the place. Darr was vaguely aware that Jorge Mendoza had some kind of a reputation for being a class-A Romeo. He clearly had to be one hell of a lover if this one was willing to risk burning to death trying to find him.

  Trying to be gentle, Darr pushed the woman back to the barricade.

  “Saving him is my job,” he told her, trying to get her behind the sawhorse. “Let me do it.”

  Just then, a bedraggled, soot-blackened busboy staggered out through the front door. Coughing madly, he gasped in gulps of air. Unable to stand, he collapsed to his knees.

  Darr made his way to the boy. The brown-haired woman darted past him, running to the fallen busboy.

  Dropping to her knees beside the gasping Juan, Jane cried, “Is Jorge in there?”

  The boy nodded vigorously, still trying to drag in enough air to answer her. “He…pointed…the…way…out…for…me,” he finally managed to get out.

  That was all she needed. Jane scrambled up to her feet, about to run to the double doors.

  Again, Darr stopped her. “Murphy!” he yelled to one of the other firefighters.

  About to run to the building, the heavyset man, who looked as if he’d be more at home on a football field, responded to his name and turned to look at Darr.

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep an eye on this one before she’s burned to a crisp,” Darr ordered, physically taking hold of Jane by the shoulders and moving her over to Murphy.

  “But you don’t understand.” She tried to wiggle out of the firefighter’s grasp and couldn’t. “He’s in there. I’ve got to get to him.”

  “You won’t do him any good dead,” Darr told her matter-of-factly, hurrying to the restaurant. “I’ll tell him you’re waiting,” was his parting comment to her.

  Double-checking the last of his equipment, the stocky, muscular firefighter charged into the burning inferno.

  And it was just that. An inferno.

  It was hard to see, hard to move. The interior of the dining room looked like it was one continuous sheet of flame.

  To the left of the entrance were the rest rooms. That avenue hadn’t been discovered by the roaring fire yet, but it was only a matter of seconds before it was.

  Darr pushed open the door closest to him. It led to the men’s room. “Anyone in here?” he shouted, his voice made surreal by his mask.

  The doors all appeared to be unlocked. A quick scan of the floor told him that the area was unoccupied.

  Most likely, any patrons or help this close to the entrance had bolted the second they’d heard cries of “Fire,” he thought.

  About to move on to the dining room, Darr decided to give the ladies’ room a quick check first. Just in case. He shouldered the door opened and yelled out the same question. He received the same answer. Nothing.

  But just as he began to withdraw from the room, Darr saw her. Or rather, he saw her legs, peering out from beneath the last stall.

  Hurrying over, he shoved open the door and found a young woman on the floor. It looked as if the smoke had gotten to her.

  “Lady, lady wake up,” Darr ordered.

  Her eyes remained closed. He had no time to try to get her to come around. Kneeling, Darr scooped her up into his powerful arms. His equipment felt as if it weighed a ton as he struggled to get back up to his feet. By contrast, the unconscious blonde felt as if she weighed nothing.

  “C’mon,” he quipped to the unconscious woman as he hurried out with her in his arms, “this is no place to take a nap.”

  His voice gave no indication of how grateful he was that he’d decided to check the ladies’ room.

  Jane was just about to dart under the arm of the distracted firefighter when she saw him.

  Them.

  Jorge and his father.

  The older man, sooty and coughing, was leaning heavily on his son. From where she was standing, they looked like two sides of a pyramid that should, by all rights, collapse but was determined not to.

  “Jorge!” she screamed. The next second, she broke into a run and was sprinting across the parking lot. She vaguely heard the firefighter who’d been keeping her away from the restaurant yelling after her, but she was not about to stop. Not until she had assured herself that what she was seeing was no mirage. Not until she’d satisfied herself that Jorge was alive and well, and unhurt.

  Jane reached Jorge and his father just as Murphy caught up.

  José looked as if he was barely standing.

  “Oh, my God, is he all right?” Jane cried, immediately going to the older man’s other side to help prop him up.

  Murphy took over, moving Jane out of the way and grasping the sagging José about the waist.

  “He needs oxygen,” Jorge told the firefighter, struggling to talk without coughing. It felt as if his lungs were filled with stifling ash and smoke. He gingerly relinquished his own hold on his father. “Careful,” he warned just before a coughing fit finally took over.

  “I need a paramedic here!” Murphy called out.

  Two ambulances had already arrived, butted up side by side on the extreme left of the parking lot. Two teams of emergency medical technicians came running over even before Murphy called for them. One team took charge of José Mendoza while the other two attendants turned their attention to the woman that Darr Fortune was just now carrying out.

  But all Jane could see was Jorge. It was a struggle to keep fear from taking over and rendering her useless.

  “Are you all right?” she demanded even as she ran her hands along his arms, his face, his torso. She needed to assure herself that he was whole, that she hadn’t just conjured him up out of the flames.

  Then, before Jorge could attempt to answer, she kissed him, unable to express her incredible gratitude that he was alive any other way. The next moment she pulled back as if a hot poker had speared her, afraid that she was stealing what little oxygen he’d been able to drag back into his lungs.

  He was alive.

  She felt like laughing and crying at the same time. “I had to come,” she explained, shaking. “As soon as I heard, I knew, I knew you were inside.”

  Her tears began to fall freely. Jane didn’t bother trying to stop them. What was the point? She wasn’t trying to maintain a facade or somehow guilt Jorge into reconsidering their nonexistent relationship. She was just relieved that he wasn’t a victim of the fire.

  “This doesn’t mean anything,” she said, referring to her tears. “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty or anything, I just—Oh God, you’re all right. You’re alive.” She flung her arms around him again, sobbing.

  Which was why Jane wasn’t sure she hea
rd what she did.

  There was noise all around them. The roar of the fire, the din of the firefighters as they fought the flames for possession of the restaurant. The voices of the paramedics as they were attending to the fire’s survivors, not to mention the noise coming from the onlookers who had gathered behind the barricades.

  Everything conspired to play a trick on her ears because she could have sworn she heard Jorge say, “I love you.”

  But she knew that was impossible. That went beyond wishful thinking. That came under the heading of hallucinations.

  Until she heard it again.

  And then a third time.

  Lifting her head, Jane looked at him, stunned. Bedraggled and covered with soot, he still managed to look incredibly sexy. She saw his lips form the three words a fourth time.

  Feeling as if she’d just slipped into some parallel universe of her own design, she could only stare in wonder. “Jorge?”

  “I love you,” he repeated again, his voice growing stronger. As if to help imprint the words into her brain, he grasped her by her arms. “I didn’t realize how much until I thought I was going to die in there. And thought about what I was losing, what I had so stupidly thrown away.” His eyes looked deep into her soul. “A chance at real happiness.”

  Oh, how she wanted to believe him. To clutch the words he was saying to her heart.

  But she knew better.

  “That’s just the adrenaline talking,” she told him gently.

  For some reason, she felt herself growing calm, as if she was the one in control of the situation. It was up to her to make it right. She wasn’t going to hold him to promises made at a time like this. It wouldn’t be fair of her.

  “No,” Jorge insisted with fervor, “it’s me talking. For the first time, it’s me. And for the first time, I’m not afraid to say it. Because I understand what it means.” God, he must sound like a loon to her. “I love you,” he repeated for the umpteenth time.

  “All I could think of in there was that I was going to die and you wouldn’t know how I felt.”

  “You made it clear how you felt,” she reminded him quietly. “The last time we were together.” She was going to say that she understood, that men like him couldn’t be captured, contained, held to promises that the rest of the world made routinely. But she didn’t get the chance.

  “That was the coward talking,” he told her with feeling. A coughing fit interrupted him for a moment. When he got his breath back, he continued. “I’m not a coward anymore.”

  “I’ll say,” Murphy, the firefighter who’d handed his father over to the paramedics said as he came up to Jorge. “If you hadn’t saved him, your dad would have died in this fire.”

  “I guess that makes you a hero,” Jane told him with pride, threading her arms around his waist and leaning against him. For now, she was content just to hold on to Jorge and not his words. She knew he’d take them back within a few minutes.

  But that was all right. It was enough for her that he was alive.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “No, no, it is not possible.”

  The vehement protest was coming from José Mendoza. Bundled in a warm blanket that was draped across his shoulders and sitting on the rear step that led into the back of the ambulance, the senior Mendoza had just pulled off the oxygen mask that the paramedic had placed on him to facilitate his breathing.

  The gray-haired fire chief did his best to remain patient in the face of all this emotion coming his way. “Mr. Mendoza,” he began again in an even voice, “it only stands to reason—”

  The sound of his father’s voice momentarily diverted Jorge’s attention away from Jane.

  But as he headed over to his father to see what was going on, Jorge took hold of Jane’s hand, silently indicating that she should come along with him to investigate. What concerned him concerned her, and vice versa.

  Now and always, he thought, hoping she would give him the second chance he longed for.

  Crossing to his father, he put his hand on the older man’s shoulder. He felt his father tense. “What’s the matter, Pop?”

  José frowned and jerked a thumb at the chief. “The chief thinks that the fire was started by one of the kitchen crew.”

  “Not on purpose,” the chief was quick to point out, although his expression indicated that he wasn’t entirely sure about that, either. “But you have to admit that grease fires happen in restaurants, Mr. Mendoza. Especially when there’s such a high volume of food being prepared.”

  “No, no, no,” José insisted with even more feeling. “My people are careful. They treat this place like their own kitchen—”

  The chief looked as if his point had just been made for him. “Mishaps happen in people’s kitchens every day, Mr. Mendoza.”

  “Not my home,” José informed him with dour finality. “There must be another cause for the fire. A faulty connection, something that was not caused by human error.”

  José was clearly issuing a challenge to the fire chief.

  His father was working himself up, Jorge thought, concerned. The old man’s heart had been through enough today. This couldn’t be good for him.

  “Pop, take it easy,” Jorge counseled. “Nobody got hurt—”

  “Except for Red,” the man said mournfully, looking over Jorge’s shoulder at what was left of the smoldering building. The fire, miraculously, was almost out. Rather than the beautiful, proud building that had stood there just this morning, there was now a half burnt-out shell, some of which was on the verge of collapse.

  All those years, just burned away in an instant.

  “We’ve got insurance for that, Pop,” Jorge reminded his father gently. “It’ll be rebuilt in time for the wedding reception.”

  “What wedding reception?” Both José and Jane asked at the same time, their voices blending and echoing one another.

  Jorge grinned, his eyes going from his father to his love. “Mine—and Jane’s.”

  The horror in José’s face brought on by Red’s destruction vanished instantly. Wriggling off the ambulance step, oblivious to the blanket that fell from his shoulders, he hugged first his son and then Jane with effervescent feeling.

  “Welcome!” he cried as he held on to her. “Welcome to the family.”

  Stunned by Jorge’s cavalier words, it took Jane a moment to return the older man’s embrace. She stared at Jorge over his father’s shoulder. What was going on here?

  “Did I miss something?” she asked Jorge in complete disbelief the moment she was released from his father’s embrace. “When did you ask me to marry you?”

  “I didn’t,” Jorge confessed almost sheepishly. The next second, he was back to his normal upbeat temperament. “I just thought that, well, when two people love each other, that’s what they do. They get married.”

  And as the words came out of his mouth, Jorge suddenly realized that he’d just leapfrogged right over the most important issue, taking it for granted.

  What if he was wrong about Jane’s feelings?

  He peered at her face, a hint of uncertainty in his dark eyes even as he kept his smile in place. It was a matter of projecting confidence, of willing something into existence.

  “You do love me, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Jane allowed, saying the single word slowly as if she were tasting it as it crossed her tongue.

  Was she dreaming?

  Was she the one who’d inhaled too much smoke, had fallen unconscious and was now floating somewhere between the real and the imagined?

  Why else was this most perfect of scenarios happening?

  “Hijo,” José said sharply, a disapproving frown on his face. It was clear he felt that he had failed in the education of his second born. “A woman likes to be asked such things. You cannot take them or their answers for granted.”

  The fact that he was obviously on her side made Jane smile. She’d never had this kind of support when she was growing up.

  Very lightly, she touched his
arm with affection. “Mr. Mendoza, I think I’m going to like having you for a father-in-law.”

  Despite his losses and his near-death experience, barely a quarter of an hour old, José beamed at her. “‘Pop,’ please,” he told Jane. “You must call me ‘Pop.’” He turned his dark eyes on his son. “And you must ask her properly.” Out of the corner of his eye, Jorge saw the fire chief quietly withdrawing. Thank God the man realized that they had time to discuss the cause of the fire later. Right now, this was a family matter and anyone outside the circle of his family didn’t belong.

  “Jane.” Pausing for a moment, Jorge took her hand in his. His eyes never left hers. “Will you make me the happiest man in the world and do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

  “Is this part of the bet, too?” she asked, tongue in cheek.

  “This is not a bet,” he told her. “It stopped being a bet the second I started talking to you and realized what a rare woman you were. Now, please, will you marry me?”

  “Yes, oh yes,” she cried, rising on her toes and throwing her arms around his neck.

  Jorge sealed the proposal with a prolonged, deep kiss.

  “Mr. Mendoza, we have to take you to the hospital,” the tall, wiry paramedic who had attended him was saying. He was attempting to steer the older man into the back of the ambulance.

  José shrugged the paramedic’s hands from his shoulders. “What hospital?” the older man demanded. “I am fine.” Looking at his son and future daughter-in-law with unabashed pride, he beamed. “More than fine. Especially when my Maria hears about this.”

  As if on cue, his petite, dark-haired wife came elbowing her way through the crowd and rushed up to him. The expression on her face was a mix of fear and anger. Fear at what might have happened and anger at what he’d put her through, through no fault of his own.

  There were tears shining in her dark eyes.

  “Dios mio, you are alive, old man. I knew you were too tough to die.”

  Some of the tears spilled out as she made her declaration. No mention was made of the fact that she had prayed all the way to the restaurant, terrified of what she might find once she got there.