Jordan took a deep breath, suddenly very tired of the lies and the secret-agent games. Besides, she had to face the truth at some point. "Well, Dad, I don't know if you have to worry about Tall, Dark, and Smoldering anymore. He's not talking to me right now."
Kyle's face darkened. "Tall, Dark, and Smoldering sounds like a moron to me."
Grey nodded, his expression disapproving. "I agree. You can do a lot better than a moron, kiddo."
"Thanks. But it's not that simple. His job presents some . . . challenges."
That was definitely the wrong thing to say.
"Why? What kind of work does he do?" her father asked immediately.
Jordan stalled. Maybe she'd overshot a little with the no more lies promise. She threw Kyle another desperate look. Do something. Again.
Kyle nodded. I'm on it. He eased back in his chair and stretched out his intertwined hands, limbering up his fingers. "Who cares what this jerk does? Send me his e-mail address, Jordo-I'll take care of it. I can wreak all sorts of havoc on Tall, Dark, and Smoldering's life in less than two minutes." With an evil grin, he mimed typing at a keyboard.
Their father looked ready to blow a gasket. "Oh no-you do not get to make the jokes," he told Kyle. "Jordan and I make the jokes. You've been out of prison for four days and I seriously hope you learned your lesson, young man . . ."
As their father's lecture continued, Jordan smiled gratefully to her brother from across the table.
Kyle winked in reply. No problem.
SHE SHOULD'VE REALIZED, however, that she wasn't entirely off the hook.
"Do you want to tell me what that was all about?" Kyle asked as soon as their father left.
Jordan sighed. "I wouldn't know where to start." Something had been nagging her all evening. Yes, she was mad at Nick for not calling her back, but she'd begun to wonder if she maybe, possibly, shared just a tiny bit of responsibility for their fight.
She toyed with the stem of her wineglass absentmindedly. "Do you ever think we're not . . . open enough?" she asked Kyle. "With our feelings, I mean. I suppose we are kind of sarcastic sometimes."
To his credit, he neither laughed nor scoffed at the question. "Mom was always the expressive one. When she died, I think the three of us sort of fell into this routine." He smiled in a rare moment of sincerity between them. "But I think we get by well enough."
Jordan shared the smile. She thought her family did pretty okay, too. Federal incarceration excepted. "But what about with other people?"
Kyle shrugged at this. "I shut down Twitter after finding out that my girlfriend cheated on me. That seems pretty expressive."
"You could've just told her how hurt you were," Jordan said gently.
Kyle fell quiet in response to her comment. They'd talked a lot about the infamous Twitter incident, but not about the feelings that had caused it. She'd sensed that her brother barely wanted to admit to himself that there were any such feelings.
"Telling someone how you feel can be risky, Jordo," he finally said. "Once the words are out, there are no take-backs."
She didn't disagree with that. But if the alternative to gathering some courage and laying her feelings on the line was becoming an infamous Internet terrorist, perhaps it wouldn't kill her to be straight with Nick. Yes, he could've made things easier by not acting like a stubborn jerk, but nothing about Nick had been easy since the night they'd met. It was one of the things she liked about him. Eighty-two percent of the time.
She took a deep breath, ready to start by being honest with herself. "Kyle . . . I think I screwed up." She held up a hand, qualifying this. "Partially. Tall, Dark, and Smoldering deserves a lot of the blame. At least half. Maybe two-thirds. Of course, he's probably sulking right now, thinking that I'm the only one who's wrong here. He's kind of frustrating that way. He gets under your skin, like a tick, or a burr, or a thorn, or . . ." She looked to her brother for help. "What else gets under your skin?"
"Scabies?" he suggested.
"Scabies? This is what you come up with?"
Kyle stared at her as if she was losing it. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Jordo. But I'll say this, if you think you screwed up, there's only one question-the same one you asked me five months ago: Can you fix it?"
Jordan sighed. "I'm trying."
Her brother's gaze was firm. "Try harder."
She glared at him. "Okay." Then after a moment, she nodded in concession. "Okay."
Thirty-one
DEVINE CELLARS WAS ready to go promptly at ten o'clock, and so was Jordan.
Nick still hadn't called her back, but this was okay. She was pumped, recharged, and if he didn't want to take her calls, that was just fine. She'd march down to that fake office of his and tell him how she felt in person. Hopefully, there'd be some corresponding indication that he returned her feelings, but she couldn't dwell on that. This was new territory for her-the whole mushy, expressive thing-and if she thought about it too much, she might chicken out and resort to her quippy, self-protective defaults. And look where that had gotten her.
She knew from her prior conversation with Nick that Xander was meeting with Trilani that morning, and guessed that Nick would be busy until later in the day. To preoccupy herself until then, she threw herself into the store's opening tasks. When she'd blown through all of those by 10:22, she looked around for something else to distract herself with. She was debating whether to alphabetize the wines in the store within each varietal type and geographic origin when the bell chimed against the front door.
Thank God, a customer. Jordan spun around, and her smile wavered before she caught herself.
Xander Eckhart walked into her store.
Jordan quickly hid her surprise. Obviously, Xander and Trilani must have rescheduled their meeting. Since she and Nick hadn't spoken since Sunday, she was out of the loop on these things.
She deferred to her now standard method of handling situations in which she was wholly clueless-she acted normal. Or at least tried to. "Xander. It's good to see you again. It's been a couple weeks."
"Since the night of my party." Not surprising given the cold temperatures outside, he wore a dark overcoat and black leather gloves.
"How have you been?" Jordan hoped she didn't sound as unnerved as she felt. She hadn't counted on seeing Xander again before . . . well, ever, actually. Perhaps this had been wishful thinking on her part-he was a regular customer of her store, after all.
You can do this, she reassured herself. She'd managed to maintain the friendly charade during his party; she could certainly handle some small talk while he perused the store. They were so close-the FBI was nearly finished with their investigation. She wouldn't screw things up now.
Still, there were tingles at the back of her neck. Why wasn't he meeting with Trilani?
She watched as Xander walked-without pausing-past the "New and Noteworthy" wine display at the front of the store.
He always stopped and checked out that display. The snob in him couldn't resist, couldn't stand the idea that there might be some notable wine out there that he didn't know about.
Jordan swallowed hard.
With as little movement as possible, she slid her hand underneath the bar and pushed the panic button.
"How am I doing?" Xander asked. "Truthfully, Jordan, not so great. Not so great at all."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Did something happen?"
As he approached, Jordan could see that his expression was stone cold.
"Actually, something did happen. I found out that someone I thought I could trust lied to me. Betrayed me." He stopped directly opposite her at the bar.
A long silence stretched between them.
"Just tell me why you did it," Xander finally said. "But I should warn you, Jordan-if I don't like your answer, things could go very badly for you."
He reached into his overcoat and pulled out a gun. "And I have a feeling there's a really good chance I'm not going to like your answer."
NICK PACED IN his fake office, waiting for his cell phone to ring.
He'd told Huxley to call as soon as Trilani arrived at Bordeaux for his meeting with Eckhart, but he hadn't heard a word yet.
While he paced, he tried not to think about Jordan.
As a guy, he knew that he wasn't supposed to admit these kinds of things, but this whole argument with her had completely freaked him out. Over the course of just a few days, he'd gone ballistic when he'd seen her talking to the douchebag, he'd called in every favor owed him to get her felon of a brother out of prison, they'd spent a whirlwind weekend in wine country of all places, he'd actually considered changing his job for her, and then they'd had a fight and he'd stormed out of her house feeling like he'd been used for sex.
Clearly, he wasn't himself these days.
And the only way he knew to get back to being himself was to cut off the problem. To push Jordan out of his life completely.
That made him freak out even more.
Somehow, with her sneaky ways, she'd managed to get inside him and screw up all his plans. He'd been perfectly happy with his life until she'd come along with her wine and her sassiness and her sparkling blue eyes and the way she always made him laugh. He would laugh at himself for being such a sucker . . . except he hadn't so much as cracked a smile since he'd left her house on Sunday.