Page 49 of Skins Game

And thus, he’d stood up and taken it back.

If she’d ended things there, that was the risk he’d had to take.

Had to.

“Are you bringing me a club?” he asked.

Her voice came to him through the dark room. “Just a minute. I’m—I’m thinking.”

She dawdled over at the racks for a while, half-pulling clubs from bags, regarding them, and then letting them slide back.

On the far end, she kept touching one, tapping it, but not taking it out.

Kingston stopped the game timer on the simulator and watched as she stewed about golf clubs.

Nicole walked back, her eyes sparkling, triumphantly holding up a golf club. “Okay, we’ll try this one. It’s special. Right-handed, regular-long, correct?”

A brittle shard near his heart melted a little. “Yes.”

Her eyes squinted on the ends, so coquettish, and she held the very long golf club as if she might snatch it back from him to play keep-away. “It’s the Excalibur.”

Kingston’s heart jumped. “The prototype?”

She nodded, the soft little tendrils of her hair around her face bobbing in her enthusiasm. “An early prototype. I’ve still got some refining to do, especially in the marketing aspects of the design. But this is—this isit.This is the concept. This is the idea that the final model will be made from.” She grinned up at him “I love my job.”

Nicole held it out to him on her open palms with both hands.

He half-expected her to bow like a maiden of the lake, presenting a sword to a knight before sending him off on a holy quest.

Kingston carefully took the club from her hands with both of his, because this was a rare gift and a measure of her trust.

Even in the dim light, watery holograms shimmered on the shaft and the top of the club head. “It’s beautiful.”

“I used Japanese steel-folding techniques to strengthen the metal at the top of the club head.”

“It’s like art.” It might be just a mock-up, not properly glued together. He didn’t want to take a full roundhouse swing and have the club head fly into the rafters and rattle around up there like a pinball. “Can I swing it?”

“It’s fully functional. You can hit balls with it if you want to.”

“Oh, I want to.” He smiled at her. He’d meant to leer a little, maybe a wolfish grin, but the breathlessness in his chest at standing with her in the dim room, receiving what she obviouslyconsidered precious, made him serious. “I don’t want to damage it.”

“Just handle it gently, but it’s tougher than it looks. It’s pretty close to the final design. If it can’t handle normal use, it wouldn’t be a very good golf club.”

“So if I hit a ball and it shatters?—”

“Then it’s back to the drawing board, literally. It has to be more than just pretty.”

“How much force can it take?”

“We haven’t performed those tests yet. We need to get closer to the composition of the final materials. Heck, I don’t even upload the specs to the main intranet until it’s closer to finalized.”

He swung it a little more. “Everything should be uploaded to the company’s intellectual property database as soon as it’s conceptualized in case we need to defend the patents in court.”

Nicole shrugged. “I can work on them better if I keep them private, without the lawyers poking around in everything and messing up my work. Everything is on my hard drive. Joe knew about it and said I could.”

Kingston held the club gently as he walked back into the simulator and prepared to tee off at the tenth hole, a punishingly long, straight par-four to a green surrounded by sand and ocean.

Playing a new driver on the tenth hole of Pebble, especially one that was an entirely new design for a golf club, was sheer lunacy, but Kingston wouldn’t let that stop him.