Page 82 of Skins Game

When he went to leave, the doorknob wouldn’t turn in his hand.

Odd.

He jiggled it.

Nothing.

He rattled it longer and pounded on the door.“Hey!”

Finally, Gia Terranova, his erstwhile manager who watched him too closely and asked pointed questions about his employment history that had nearly tripped him up on more than one occasion, shoved the door open from the other side. “What are you doing in the copy room?”

Ben, the young sales associate who had narrowly survived the first wave of layoffs, not that he knew that, stood behind her to better observe Kingston’s plight.

He swiped some of the copies off the tray. “Getting the handouts.”

“The handouts are already in the conference room,” Gia said. “What have you got there?”

He looked down at the paper in his hand.

Not copies of handouts, but spreadsheets that someone had remotely printed.

Tables and tables of numbers.

Dammit.

“Why must one badge oneselfoutof the copier room?” Kingston demanded.

“When Hammerhead installed the internal security badge network, they put the lock on the wrong side of the door because that’s what Joe wrote down.”

‘That’sridiculous.”

“Yeah,” Gia said, holding her hand at her shoulder like a waiter with a serving tray.

Ben fished around in his wallet and slapped a twenty into her hand.

“You were wagering on it?” he asked them.

Ben cocked his head at Gia. “We paid off HR to not give you a badge because you were ‘non-local,’ to bet on how long it would take for you to get stuck somewhere.”

“And my getting stuck in the building after hours wasn’t the endpoint of the bet?” he asked them, just to cause trouble.

Ben’s sharp glance at his manager told Kingston everything. “Hey! Yeah, it should have been!”

Gia’s face scrunched like she’d stubbed her pinkie toe.

Kingston strolled back to the sales meeting, enjoying the thought of Nicole somewhere in the building, maybe in her office, sitting in her office chair, flustered because she wasn’t wearing panties.

Absolutely titillating.

Back at the pre-planning meeting for the NYC golf show at the Javits Center, Kingston sat at the back of the table.

Nicole walked into the conference room with her white skirt fluttering around her bare bottom.

The moment she saw her pink lace panties in his breast pocket like some depraved sociopath’s trophy, her eyes grew on her face, and a blush bloomed over her throat and cheeks.

Kingston kept a demure smile on his face while Nicole blushed furiously during her presentation.

Meghan, Morgan, Ben, and Gia didn’t notice a thing, probably.