Page 54 of Skins Game

Nicole thought about cold things. Icebergs. Liquid nitrogen. The absolute zero kelvin of deep space.

Her face burned anyway. “Talked about golf, mostly.”

His eyebrow raised. “That’s a lot of time to just talk about golf.”

“We also ate everything out of the downstairs vending machines for supper.”

“Oh, that’s why the old guard sales guys were cursing this morning, because they eat the Pop Tarts for breakfast.”

“I also had him swing the Excalibur prototype in the golf simulator. Kingston has a really good swing. While we didn’thave anything else to do, I thought maybe we should see what it looked like in the hands of someone who knows how to play golf.”

Arvind chuckled. “What, you don’t think my hacking around a golf course counts as a proper trial?”

“Not in the slightest. Anyway, I videotaped him swinging it.”

They stood shoulder-to-shoulder and watched the vertical video on her phone.

Nicole tried not to sigh at Kingston’s athletic swing as he crushed the ball down the simulator.

“Wow, that is a good swing,” Arvind said. “What’s his handicap?”

Meaning the standardized rating for golf proficiency. “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“It’s low. I’ll bet it’s under ten. Maybe under five,” Arvind said. Lower is better in golf handicaps. “And he likes you.”

Her face started burning like Death Valley in August again. “No, he doesn’t. We just talked about golf.”

“Did you see the way he turned around and smiled at you? That is the smile of a guy who likes you.”

A smile was a smile was a smile. “Are you sure it isn’t the smile of a guy holding a really good golf club?”

Arvind frowned and went back to the video, scrolling it back and forth until he repeated a one-second clip about three times. “Look here. He was holding the club, but he turned around, then saw you over the top of your phone,and thenhe smiled. You were the one who actually took this video, right?

Nicole scowled at him. “Yeah. It’s my phone.”

“He was smiling atyou.”

Nicole scrolled the video back and forth, watching Kingston smile at her over and over. “Are you sure?”

Arvind waggled one shoulder at her. “Trust me, I know what it looks like when a guy smiles at you because he likes you.”

As the lab sucked down the free pizza over the noon hour, Nicole opened the table for information they’d gleaned from other departments about how the venture-capital takeover was being received.

Arvind started with, “Nobody likes these terse emails flung down from on high. It seems like they’re just mollifying us to lure us into thinking nothing will happen before they drop the hammer and half of us are gone.”

Caitlin nodded, her orange curls flipping as she nodded. “That last memo was ominous. Everybody thinks layoffs are coming. Nobody wants to be last into the job market. Early birds. Worms.”

“Has anybody found out anything more about this venture capital group?” Nicole asked.

Within minutes of the takeover, they’d found the obvious: that Last Chance LLC was incorporated in Vermont but had an office in Connecticut, that it had been in business five years, and some guy named Jericho Parr was somehow associated with it.

But the easy internet trail had stopped there.

Last Chance, Inc. was not a publicly held company, meaning they had issued no stock market shares that were trading around. Since no public documents were required, they’d managed to keep most of their dealings private.

“I looked into their recent acquisitions,” Arvind said. Arvind’s Google-fu was spectacular. He could dredge anything out of the internet, often by semi-shady means like calling people on the phone, not admitting he wasn’t the FBI, and asking questions. “They recently purchased a regional country club and a national tee times booking app, and then they bought us. The only thing in common with all their purchases has been golf.”

“That’s weird,” Nicole said. “Does anybody else think that’s weird?”