This thread is hilarious.
I've been in similar situations in the past, but most of the time I hesitated because I didn't have a friend of hers telling me she was interested; sometimes it can be very hard to fully tell if a person is interested in you or not, and when I was younger I also had my fair share of shyness.
This is a life lesson though, and although you can overcome it later, at some stage you are going to have to man up and put your fear of rejection to one side, so you can start to talk to different women, until eventually it's not such a big deal, and even being rejected here and there won't put you off or put you in a a bad mood. Consider it like practice, you are clearly awful at this sort of thing, but that's all you need, practice.
Rather than just walking straight up to her and asking her out, I'd try to talk to her first, then, when it's not inappropriate, ask her for her number. Communicate, let the conversation flow, see how things are going, then ask her out if you think she's game.
As others have mentioned though, you do not love her. You clearly have feelings of lust and interest, partially perhaps because her friends have mentioned that she's interested in you. Let's be realistic, you haven't even had a full blown conversation with this girl, have you? Or at any rate, not recently. You are literally judging the book by it's cover. For the sake of not feeling regret or uncertainty down the road, you owe it too yourself to give this thing a shot, if anything, regardless of the outcome, it will teach you something.
