Page 13 of Skins Game

Nearly bankrupting himself to put up the capital to join Last Chance had been the best decision he’d ever made. Every day, he flew around the world, making deals and making money, or he went into the office and hung out with his three best friends, his only real friends, the closest people Kingston had to family, and he had nobossexcept himself.

“Yeah, Gia is the head of trade shows and does a great job with the booths.”

“You don’t go to them?” he asked her.

“Oh, dear God, no.” A shiver shimmied her clothes.“Never.”

“But you’d pick up valuable information at those shows. Trends. Niches.”

She badged them into the lab area. “Yeah,no.I’d be too busy hiding under the tablecloths to listen to anything. Gia and the other guys give me the scoop after they get back. There are too many people at those trade shows. I don’t like peopling.”

“You don’t like people?” he asked, amused.

“I like people fine, a few at a time. When they gather in herds, they look like they’re about to stampede. I hang out in the lab all day, talking science with my friends. I love my job.”

The door opened to a tiny room with white fabric on the walls, and the scents of hot metal, bug zappers, and icy cold air flowed into the hallway. “This is the antechamber where we garb for the working lab.”

Kingston followed her example and donned hooded white Tyvek coveralls over his suit trousers and white shirt, then covered his face with plastic safety goggles and a surgical mask.

His voice was muffled, and the mask vibrated on his face when he asked, “You work like this every day?”

Papery white protective clothing and a blue square of a mask cocooned her, only her dark eyes visible beneath her plastic glasses. “Absolutely. We’re grinding and smelting heavy metals in here. You don’t want to breathe dust or fumes or get shavings in your eyes. Everything is OSHA-compliant around here. We never get violations. Glove, and then let’s go.”

He followed her into her lab as she pointed out lathes, kilns, and crucibles, feeling like an animated oak tree shambling along after a lithe elf who danced through the wilderness.

She shoved open a glass door and led him into a hallway off the central lab, where she paused to shove her safety glasses up to the top of her head and drag down her surgical mask, then unzip her suit halfway down her chest, a sultry move that Kingston couldn’t quite look away from.

“Our tech break room is down this hallway, so we don’t have to ungarb and go downstairs to get a darn cup of coffee,and here’s my office.” She flipped her hand at an almost-closed doorway as she paced by. “And down past here, that’s where our?—”

The only personal office in the hall did indeed have a nameplate readingNicole Lamb, PE, but when Kingston pushed the ajar door farther open, it wasn’t so much of an office inside as a medieval armory.“Whoa.”

The swords hanging on her walls shone in the morning sunlight filtering through the slats of the horizontal blinds. Silver-steel glistened. Black leather wrapped the grips, and glass or jewels sparkled on pommels and guards.

The little engineer had a violent streak, or at least a taste for weapons.

“Oh, yeah,those,”Nicole said quickly, walking back toward him. “Come on. We’re doing a tour. Just down this hallway are our golf simulators, where we test prototypes. We’ve got the latest ones from SkyGolf. Playing them is like standing on the eighth tee box at Pebble Beach. You can practically smell the sea breeze in your hair.Come on.”

Kingston pushed her door open farther. “Are all these swords yours?”

“Yeah.”

Her monotone voice signaled disgruntled thoughts.

He turned back. “Do you not want to discuss them?”

Her arms were crossed tightly over her chest. “Depends on how you want to discuss them.”

“Can you give me a tour? Tell me about them?”

Her arms drooped a little, and she turned her head warily as if waiting for a blow. “What do you want to know?”

“About them. Did you make any of them?”

She brightened a little and moved toward him. “Some of them. Just a few, really. Maybe half.”

Ah, yes. This collection was how he’d get her to open up and tell him anything he wanted to know about Sidewinder.

Everyone had a vulnerable spot.