Page 39 of Skins Game

“The blues.”

“Yeah,of course,you would play from the back tees.” And now, she would discover whether he had earned the right to play from the tips or was just a hacker faking it. “I play from the women’s, so it’s the greens for me.”

“So, you do play,” Kingston said.

“Well, I hack around the course. Some days are better than others. But why wouldn’t I play?”

Seriously, why not?

He said, “You’re a mat-sci engineer. You don’t need to play the game to optimize the material science specs on a club. Youcan design a car for Lamborghini but drive a BMW or ride a bike.”

“No, I play.”

He smiled. “I see that now. Would you like the honors?”

“Sure, I’ll tee off first.”

Nicole clicked on the green tees on the computers and grabbed her driver, the longest club in her bag, settling a ball on the tubular range tee.

The heady mixture of chocolate, sugar, and sexual attraction sped through her veins.

With a quick check to make sure Kingston was standing back far enough that she wasn’t going to uppercut him with the driver and knock out all his teeth, she swunghardat the ball.

She ripped it, all right.

But it was a fat banana-slice to the right. “Oops.”

“Mulligan,” Kingston said. “Breakfast ball. Drop another one.”

She did, and she sliced it again. “Um, rats. You go ahead and hit while I think about this.”

He went back to the computer, changing the settings so that the fairway on the screen stretched a hundred more yards, and then he brought his driver into the simulator. “It’s like walking out a door into a summer day, but with air conditioning. And no marine layer. The last time I played Pebble, the fog was so thick, we had to use orange balls.”

“Right?” Nicole stood back and away from him, twisting her body and looking at her backswing for whatever the heck she was doing so very wrong. “It’s fun.”

Kingston teed up a ball and ripped it—nay,smashedit—dead-center down the middle of the fairway, and it landed just an easy chip from the green. He said, “Sure is.”

Okay, she needed to remember to keep her eyes on her own game, and that golf is a game you play against yourself, notagainst the other players, because evidently Kingston was going to beat her as badly in golf as he had in arm wrestling. “How many strokes are you going to give me?”

He half-turned and looked back over his broad shoulder. His voice was low, sultry, as he asked, “How many strokes do you want?”

Nicole’s whole body flushed hot as if the bright sun on the screen above had turned to an August-summer sizzle. She’dmeantit in a golf way, but now she couldn’t get the image of his hands on her bare skin out of her mind.

“Two per hole,” she choked out. “Eighteen per side.”

He laughed. “Fine. So what isreallydifferent about the Mojave clubs?”

She explained it to him, eventually clicking out of the golf sim software so she could sketch equations. “And that variable right there,that’sthe whole reason you get five extra yardsand yetthey’re more accurate.”

He grinned at her. “That’s really amazing.”

She drew herself up a little. “Yeah, I suppose it is.”

“It’s astonishing that all that math is necessary to design a better golf club. It’s golf club design, not building a nuclear submarine.”

She felt slightly patronized-to, like he thought her job wasn’t important enough to use advanced math. “Yeah, the value of the golf industry is eleven-point-one times the size of the nuclear submarine industry, so I guess we get to use the math, too.”

“That’s an oddly specific number.”