“Backup in the van.”

“I’m on it.”

“Meet me at the office in ten minutes.”

“Yep.”

Nick hung up the phone, mentally running through his checklist. Ridiculously overpriced Ralph Lauren suit? Sixteen hundred dollars, all of which had better be reimbursed by the Bureau. Backup man? Technically free, although he’d be hearing about this from Pallas for a long time. Nabbing the moneyman of the city’s most notorious gangster while infiltrating an exclusive wine tasting?

Priceless.

Eight

AFTER A TEN-MINUTE pit stop at home to change her clothes and throw on some makeup, Jordan hurried out the door and walked the three blocks to DeVine Cellars. The streets were relatively quiet since most stores and businesses hadn’t opened yet. Her cell phone buzzed loudly in her purse. She saw that it was Christian and answered.

“You couldn’t at least send me a metrosexual to work with?” he asked.

She grinned at that. “How did the shopping go with Nick?”

“We survived. That’s about all I can say. You should’ve seen his expression when he saw the colors of the ties I’d pulled to go with the suit. He told me that where he comes from, men don’t do boysenberry. I shudder to think such a place exists.”

“Boysenberry? You are lucky you survived. Thanks, Christian. I appreciate your help.” Jordan made a mental note to send him a bottle of wine from the store.

“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.”