It took a moment for this to sink in.

“We have to pretend to be dating?” Jordan asked. “As in, for more than just tonight?”

“Yes.”

She couldn’t help but feel as though she’d been given the bait-and-switch routine. “My agreement with the FBI was a one-shot deal. Now you’re changing the game on me.”

“Xander Eckhart changed the game,” Nick emphasized. “On all of us. Trust me, if we had known about his interest in you, we never would’ve come to you with this deal.”

Jordan bit her lip, still feeling guilty about that.

“I’m not blaming you,” he said. “I’m just trying to explain why we’re in this position. After tonight, it will look odd if you and I are never seen together again. And not looking odd is the number one rule in undercover work.”

“Okay. Let’s say that I agree to this. How long would we have to pretend to be dating?” Feeling thirsty, she got up and walked over to one of the cabinets. She pulled out two glasses. “Water?”

Nick nodded yes. “I can’t give you an exact time frame, although I don’t expect it to be very long. A week? Maybe a little longer? However long it takes for us to get the evidence we need through the bugs in Eckhart’s office.”

Jordan filled both glasses with water from the refrigerator, then set one in front of him. “So walk me through this. What would I have to do as the supposed girlfriend of a real estate investor who rents properties to college kids and people in their twenties?” She took a sip of her water.

“You’d need to have lots and lots of sex with me.”

Jordan choked on the water and began coughing.

Nick blinked innocently. “No good?”

Her watering eyes undoubtedly lessened the effect of her glare.

Nick smiled. “The answer is that we need to act, from all outward appearances, as if we’re a real couple. Xander thinks that you like me enough to spend five thousand dollars to bring me to his party, and that I’m similarly smitten enough to cancel work plans to be with you on Valentine’s Day. If that was all true, what would you do next?”

“I don’t know … I’d probably start by calling my girlfriends and meeting them for brunch tomorrow to tell them all about you,” Jordan said.

“There you go.”

She pointed for emphasis. “No way. You need my help, and … well, I agreed, so I’ll help you. But it stays between us. No bringing my friends and family into this.”

Nick thought this over. “All right. To the extent we can reasonably keep your friends and family isolated from this, I’ll go along with that. It’s not like I want to lie to them, either.” He turned oddly serious. “Speaking of family, there’s something else I have to tell you. And you’re not going to like it.”

Not exactly Jordan’s favorite lead-in. “What?”

He rubbed his hand over his jaw and sighed. “You’re really not going to like it.”

“Okay, now you’re making me nervous.”

He looked her dead in the eyes. “We can’t release your brother on Monday.”

The words fell like stones between them.

Jordan said nothing for a moment. On this subject, there would be no jokes or bullshit between them. “Tell me the truth: did you ever intend to release Kyle, or did you simply make that up to get me to take you to Xander’s party?”

“Releasing your brother was always part of the plan,” Nick said. “And it still is. Just not yet. Now that Eckhart has his eye on you and me, we have to proceed cautiously. Letting your brother inexplicably walk out of prison fourteen months ahead of schedule could lead the wrong person to ask the right questions.”

“You didn’t worry about letting Kyle out early before.”

“Before, you didn’t have a man sitting in a car outside your house, watching us and running background checks on me.”

Jordan folded her arms across her chest. “Maybe so. But my brother and I are getting the raw end of this deal. Kyle is the reason I agreed to help you. I’ve done everything you asked. I’ve even agreed to continue to pretend to be your girlfriend, which goes well beyond the original plan. And now that it’s time for the FBI to uphold its end of the deal, conveniently, there’s a problem.”

“I understand your frustration, Jordan,” Nick said quietly. “Trust me, this is not an ideal situation for anyone.”

His subdued tone took the fight right out of her. And knowing Nick, that had been his intent. She was angry and annoyed – with him, even though the rational part of her realized this wasn’t his fault; with the FBI in general; with Xander; even with Kyle. But mostly what she felt right then was tired.

She ran her hands through her hair. “I think I should show you where you’ll be sleeping tonight. It’s getting late.”

AFTER LEADING NICK to the guest bedroom, Jordan left him with a polite nod good night. He heard her retreating footsteps on the hardwood floors of the hallway, then a quiet click as she shut her bedroom door.

Clearly, she wasn’t happy about the news concerning her brother, and Nick couldn’t say he blamed her. She was getting the raw end of the deal with the FBI, but sometimes that was how things went. That’s why they’d chosen her, after all. With her brother’s freedom at stake, she wasn’t going anywhere – no matter how unhappy she was that they’d changed the terms of their deal. The special agent in him knew all this and was glad the operation hadn’t completely tanked because of the curveball Eckhart had thrown at them that evening.

The man in him, however, felt like shit.

Nick closed the door and checked out the guest bedroom. His eyes skimmed over the king-sized bed with its plump, welcoming pillows and silk blue comforter. Through a doorway on his right, he found a private bathroom designed in creamy marble and well stocked with virtually every toiletry imaginable. It certainly beat the eight-by-eight-foot cell he’d slept in as part of his last undercover assignment.

Getting comfortable, he slipped off his suit jacket and made one last call for the night.

“So? Is Jordan on board?” Davis asked.

“Of course. Eckhart’s not going to slip away that easily. But there’s a catch.” Nick eased onto the bed. “I’m calling in that favor you owe me. The one that just tripled in magnitude because of this mess you roped me into.”

Davis sounded surprised. And a little suspicious. “What kind of favor?”

“Do we still have Agent Griegs in play?” Nick asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“This will involve him, too.”

Davis sighed. “I’m not going to like this favor, am I?”

“Probably not,” Nick said. “But I debated between this and having you call my mother to explain that it’s your fault I can’t make it to her sixtieth birthday party. You pick. But I should warn you: my mother is Italian. New York Italian, which is like being five hundred percent Italian.”

Davis swore under his breath. “The hell with that. I’ll get ahold of Griegs.”

  Fifteen

NICK WOKE UP the next morning not immediately recognizing his surroundings. An occupational hazard. When he felt the silk comforter brush against his bare chest in a caress, he remembered.

Jordan.

He wondered how angry she’d still be that morning. If he were an introspective person, one of those in-touch-with-hidden-emotions types – aka a woman – he would probably take note of the fact that it was much harder to blow off her dislike of him than it had been merely six days ago. And, if he were an introspective person, he might also ask himself what he’d been doing by calling in that favor with his boss last night.

Thank goodness, then, that he wasn’t such a person.

Because if he were, he would also have to tell himself to shut up and stop asking so many damn questions. He had an assignment to focus on.

He sat up and listened for any sound outside the guest bedroom, wondering if Jordan was awake. He checked the clock on the nightstand, saw that it was just past seven A.M., and figured she was still asleep after the late night they’d had.

He yanked the comforter off and made his way into the bathroom. He sped through his shower routine and threw on the shirt and pants he’d worn the night before, having no other options. Despite its other luxuries, Palazzo Rhodes didn’t come with a spare set of men’s clothes.

He looked in the mirror and decided to skip shaving. For anyone who might be watching from a black sedan out front, Nick Stanton had just spent the night rolling around in bed with a smart, sexy woman and undoubtedly had better things to do this morning than shave.

Nick Stanton was a lucky SOB.

Nick McCall, on the other hand, had work to do, starting with a few phone calls. Including one in particular he dreaded.

He went downstairs to the kitchen, found an expensive-looking espresso maker that appeared wholly unused, then poked around and saw no other machinery in the house capable of producing caffeine. This brought about a round of grumbling about damn fancy rich types and their damn fancy gadgets as he sat down at the counter and called in to the office.

“We’ve got a condo for you in Bucktown,” Davis told him. “1841 North Waveland, unit three-A. It’ll work well for you – two bedrooms and an office, top amenities. Nice enough that it won’t raise any suspicions.”

“Can’t have Jordan Rhodes’s boyfriend slumming it now, can we?” Nick grumbled.

“I wasn’t thinking so much about the girl, more that a successful property investor such as yourself wouldn’t be slumming it,” Davis said. “What’s gotten into you this morning, sunshine?”