Page 114 of Skins Game

Meetings that included Nicole were the hardest. He was pretty good at keeping his face perfectly composed, quiet and businesslike, but he was burning inside.

She appeared as composed as he was, casually reciting numbers as she flipped through slides and ignoring him better than he would ever be able to ignore her.

After the meetings ended, she grabbed her laptop and scurried out of there as if she had more secret golf club designs on her hard drive to hide, or maybe she just didn’t want him getting his paws on it again.

Boy cooties.

Or maybe she didn’t want him to betray her again.

That was probably it.

When she left the room, her dark ponytail twitching and her black and white sundress skirt fluttering as she ran out the door,his arm cramped with wanting to lift his hand to reach after her, to explain to her that he was saving Sidewinder Golf for her.

Yes, there was Gabriel Fish’s infernal bet and Last Chance, Inc.’s money pouring into Sidewinder, but his heart knew all that was secondary.

He’d blurted out the truth at the restaurant at the Baccarat Hotel, that he was neglecting what he knew he should do to lay the company at her feet. The layoffs were needed to make Sidewinder profitable.

And he knew he was doing it again, but he couldn’t stop.

Watching his hands pack his suits into suitcases and zip his golf clubs into their travel case felt like a ghost riding a meat skeleton, but he didn’t stop. Running Sidewinder from his office at Last Chance in Connecticut would have worked just fine, yet he’d boarded Last Chance’s plane, flown over the farmland and mountains of the continent, and settled in California.

Being near Nicole was addiction and agonizing withdrawal at the same time.

He scanned her every move, analyzing the set of her sweet lips and waves of her graceful arms for an invitation, but nothing ever came.

As the glowing red dot from her laser pointer manically circled digits and traced graphs on her PowerPoint slides, as her skirt hem floated as she turned back to the data she was presenting to the room full of managers, he wondered what kind of panties she was wearing—Lace? Silk? Pink? White?—And how they would look as he hooked his finger around the ribbons around her hips and dragged them down her curvy thighs to her ankles.

With his hand spread on the conference table in the dark, he swore he could feel the heat from her breasts lingering in the wood from when he’d bent her over the edge, holding her therewith his hand clamped around the back of her neck, and taken her.

Just a few days before, he’d walked out of his office to see her standing at the door to the copy room, holding a stack of papers and badging herself inside, the pale blue hem of her sundress still waving around her knees.

Longing had choked him so hard that he’d retreated back inside his office and waited until she’d gone inside.

So when he emerged from his office that day in mid-October, looking at his watch to check the time and the unchanging San Diego weather outside the windows, he was preoccupied with ship travel times and the weather in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Golfer Magazine had sent a questionnaire about the Excalibur’s availability for pre-orders at golf shows. Marketing’s description of the driver had seemed staid. Kingston needed to swing the real thing a few times to describe it for the magazine, so he headed up to the golf simulators on the third floor.

He badged himself into the dark simulator room, and the sweet scent of jasmine and vanilla perfume set his blood on fire before he even looked up.

47

A Simulation

NICOLE LAMB

The Excalibur driver didn’t sound right when it hit a golf ball.

At least, it didn’t make the correct sound when Nicole hit a golf ball with it.

The manufacturing prototypes from Dali had arrived via FedEx the night before, and the changes they’d had to make to the club for manufacturing might have messed it up.

Not that it mattered. By spring, just in time for next season, a thousand knock-offs of the club were going to litter the retail golf stores like every drug store’s generic Advil, and no one would buy the overpriced real thing.

Nicole lined up another shot with the chubby-headed club, her hands choked down on the grip so far she was nearly holding the club’s shaft.

A description she refused to giggle about.

This was golf. This was serious business.