Page 111 of Saved By the Billionaire
Maybe that was why it was so easy for him to wander the hallways unchallenged.
Huh.He’d have to try that little trick more often when scoping out possible business purchases. It might come in handy.
When Jericho reached the lower level, one door led into the pro shop where he’d already been, so he turned left instead and found himself in the bag room, a staff-only area where members’ golf clubs were stored for them between rounds. Most clubs employed bag boys, the modern equivalent of the caddie, except that bag boys ferried members and clubs to the fleet of electric carts instead of carrying the heavy bags and clubs around the golf course while the members played.
The bag room smelled musty like the carpet was overdue for shampooing. The members’ clubs and bags were tucked into cubbies labeled with each member’s name and alphabetized. The clubs themselves were generally mid-range sets, adequate for a recreational golfer but certainly not a caliber designed to impress their playing partners with status or prestige. Many of the clubs’ blades were worn and scratched as if the golfers did not replace their clubs regularly.
That didn’t bode well. These members were playing golf but not spending money on it. For Jericho to increase the club’s value, he needed members who opened their wallets, not golfers who squeezed their nickels until they screamed.
“Hey!” A woman’s voice rang through the bag room. “Is anybody in here?”
Jericho continued to inspect the bags and shelves.
“Hey, you!”
He peered through the rows of shelves at a feminine figure pointing at him. “Who, me?”
“Yeah,you!Mrs. Lombardi said she has been waiting for twenty minutes for her clubs!”
Jericho ducked and looked around the room, intending to helpfully poke one of the club’s employees to alert them to the problem with Mrs. Lombardi and her clubs, but no one else was in the bag room.
So staffing was another problem at NGC.
The problems were piling up.
Jericho stepped out from between the shelves, intending to inform the unseen woman who’d called out to him that none of the staff members were available at that time, but the sight of her shapely silhouette backlit by the spring sunshine caught him off guard.
She was tall for a woman, and her form was a series of languorous curves as she braced herself with one raised arm and her hip against the doorframe. Her pinched waist balanced her hourglass figure, and her long legs that extended to the lower corners of the door made him think that she might’ve been a dancer at some point in her life.
He stopped as he came around the corner, distracted by the sinuous flow of her body as she strolled into the bag room and demanded, “Are you the new bag boy?”
As the overhead lights illuminated her, the breath left Jericho’s body, and his skin prickled from the buzz of the fluorescent lights above. Her dark eyes were lively, sharp with intelligence, and directed right at him. The room’s blue light flowed over her ebony skin as if it were too awed by her beauty to touch her, and her black hair was braided into perky cords that fell to her shoulders and bounced when she walked.
She advanced on Jericho, her heels striking the carpet in irritation, and he forgot how to speak.
“Iasked you,”she indeed did ask him,“are you the new bag boy?Mrs. Lombardi wants her clubs, and she shouldn’t be kept waiting all day. With her osteoporosis, she can’t muscle her clubs in and out of the trunk of her car. So sheneedsto be able to store them here and to have them retrieved in atimely manner.”
Oh, Jericho liked this woman very much, and not merely due to the lush swells of her breasts and hips and the velvety scarlet lipstick on her plush lips. She knew the club’s members, she knew what they needed as club members, and she was advocating for them. She held exactly the kind of information he was looking for.
That analysis shook his brain loose from the testosterone it had been mired in.
He walked toward her, his hand extended to shake. “Hello, yes, I’m Jericho Parr. And you are?”
“Tiffany Jones, assistant golf pro and PGA-certified golf instructor, and that makesmeyourboss.You look a little old to be a bag boy. Or way too young. One way or the other. Which is it?”
He reached her, his hand still outstretched. “And why is that?”
Tiffany glared at his hand waving in the open space between them, rolled her eyes, and shook his hand.
Her palm was soft and warmed from the sun, and a jolt through his body to his groin was an impulse to pull her against his chest.
What the hell was wrong with him? Jericho had seen beautiful women before. Hundreds of them, in fact. He wasn’t a dork around women.
But this woman washot.
Jericho was acutely aware that he wasn’t wearing his boxer-briefs as his dick got heavy and extended past his hip and into his pants leg. He would be sporting a boner like a teenager if he didn’t calm down.
Tiffany dropped his hand, and she squinted up at him. Her eyes were tilted up at the corners, almost fairy-like. “The bag room staff who work here are either teenagers fresh out of high school or retired guys who work a few hours in exchange for free golf. You’re not either one of those. How old are you?”
“I turned thirty last month.”
“Yeah, that’s weird. Why areyoua bag boy, JerichoParr?”
The way her lips pressed together when she said the plosive of his last name and then purred the rest was absolutely fascinating—Parr—and he wanted to hear her say it again.
And maybe again after that.