A Lot like Love (FBI/US Attorney #2)(25)
“Feel free to send me all the suit-buying customers you want. And I think you’ll be pleased with the results.” His tone turned sly. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Jordan. I have a feeling it’s going to be a good one for you.”
Right, she thought as she hung up the phone. Because Nick was her date. And of course any woman spending Valentine’s Day with a date who looked like Nick was guaranteed a night of endless great sex.
Hot, scruffy-jawed, throw-me-down-on-the-table, mindblowing sex.
Probably with dirty words.
Perhaps not a horrible way to spend Valentine’s Day, she conceded. But it wasn’t in the cards for her.
Jordan let herself into the store and hung her coat in the back room. She changed out of her snow boots and turned on the lights and music. She loved opening the store—that time of day more than any other was when it truly felt like hers.
Mornings were typically slow until about eleven, so she had a good hour to put out the shelf talkers and signs for the closeout sale, do inventory, and clean up. She doubted, however, that much cleaning would be necessary. Martin had closed the night before, and he tended to be as much a neat freak as he was a wine snob. Not an unwelcome quality in an assistant manager.
She checked the sales receipts from the night before and saw that they’d had a good night. In addition to regular sales, they’d added four new customers to their wine club.
The wine club was something she’d started two years ago. As often as customers asked for her and Martin’s recommendations, it had seemed to be a worthwhile endeavor. Each month, she and Martin selected two wines with a combined value ranging from one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars. She’d hesitated at first at the price, and had asked Martin whether they should consider offering more budgetfriendly wines. She’d worried that at those prices, people wouldn’t be willing to sign up for memberships.
“If I pick it, they will come,” Martin had whispered dramatically.
She’d given him six months to prove he was right.
He had been.
With nearly eight hundred members, the wine club was a huge success. They sometimes took a gamble with the wines they chose—excellent in quality, but often from boutique, lesser-known wine makers. And Martin, a traditionalist, always insisted on choosing one Old World wine, despite the fact that research indicated consumers preferred New World wines because of their user-friendly labels. Yet no one in the wine club had complained thus far.
“They love you. Seriously, when are you going to open your own store and run me out of business?” she’d teased Martin one day.
“It’s not me. It’s you,” he replied matter-of-factly.
“Hardly—you deserve the credit. If it had been up to me, this wine club would’ve been ninety percent California cabs. Ten-dollar New Zealand sauv blancs in the summer.”
“And you still would’ve had eight hundred members,” Martin said. “Let’s be honest, Jordan. Rich people like what other rich people like. They buy the wines I pick because you tell them to.”
She had immediately opened her mouth to object—the conversation was sounding far too The Emperor’s New Clothes for her tastes—but part of her suspected that Martin wasn’t entirely off the mark. Market share-wise, she knew a vastly greater proportion of wealthy Chicago wine buyers frequented her store. She may have been financially independent, but her father’s money was there nevertheless, and with that came a certain level of fascination from others.
“You’re sort of like the Paris Hilton of wine,” Martin had offered.
She’d nearly keeled over in horror.
“If you promise to never, ever make that analogy again, I’ll let you pick two Old World wines for next month,” Jordan had said.
Martin had rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Can I make one of them a Brunello di Montalcino?”
“You always say the quality of the Brunellos is erratic.”
“And for a lesser man, that might pose a problem,” Martin had said. “I’m telling you, Jordan, with your name and my impeccable taste, I think we can really go places with this store.”
So far, he hadn’t been wrong.
Nine
NICK PARKED HIS car a half block from Jordan’s house and walked the short distance in the cold. He opened a tall wrought-iron gate and stepped onto a front patio and garden area.
He had assumed her home would be nice—very nice—and hadn’t been incorrect. The brick house stood two and a half stories above the ground, with elegant Juliet balconies curved around the arched glass windows of the main level. A large brick and limestone balcony, part of what he guessed was the master suite, looked over the front patio from the second floor.
As he climbed the stairs to the front door, he caught himself wondering if Jordan’s father had bought the house, or if she made enough money to afford it on her own. Not that it was any of his business, he was just . . . curious.
He rang the doorbell and could hear its melodic chime through the door. When a minute or two passed without an answer, he reached up to ring the bell again.
The door flew open.
“Sorry,” Jordan said breathlessly. “Zipper problems.”
Nick tried not to show any reaction as he just . . . stared. From where he stood, he saw no problems whatsoever.
The deep purple fabric of her dress hugged all the curves of her slender frame. She wore her hair up, and a few errant blond chunks swept across her smoky-lined, ocean-colored eyes—eyes that sparkled even more radiantly than the diamonds in her ears.