He stood, paced.
Kingston splashed thirty-year-old Macallen into a cut-crystal highball glass, sharp against his fingers and palm, from one of the standing wet bars and sat in the living room on one of the velvet couches, warm in his robe.
The smoky scotch burned his tongue and throat like his soul was on fire.
Kingston had every right to do this. HeownedSidewinder Golf and every scrap of its intellectual property. Nicole’s standardized contract specifically said that all golf-associated products, prototypes, ideas, schematics, or knowledge were treated as work-for-hire. Thus Sidewinder Golf ownedeverythingshe came up with.
He settled her laptop on his legs and his fingertips on the keys.
His teeth grated in his jaws, molars clenched against molars, straining.
Her filing system was organized and straightforward, an engineering schema, not a businessman’s schemes.
The folder labeledExperimental Designswas obvious, and the subfoldersExcalibur Driver, Vorpal Irons,andKhanda Putterheld specs, CAD drawings, spreadsheets, and metallurgy data.
He uploaded all of them to his owner’s private vault in Sidewinder’s cloud storage service and texted Morrissey.
No more delays. Get the Dali Manufacturing plant on the line. I reserved space with them in April. We’re cranking out a whole new line in time for the Vegas PGA Show in December with deliveries before Christmas.
We’ll call it the Legendary line.
And we’re expanding. The Rattler line will go into retail big box stores. Dali should be able to start making them this week. And fuck the slow boats. We need them for October when people start buying Christmas presents. Put them on planes.
We’re going to destroy Titleist and TaylorMade’s market share.
Even though it was after two in the morning, Morrissey’s text came back immediately.
Atta boy.
The first part of winning the bet was in motion.
Kingston just needed to draft a memo for Sidewinder to go out next Monday on his own company laptop, which he had also brought on the week-long trip to New York.
Nicole’s whispered voice behind him asked, “Kingston, what are you doing with my computer?”
42
Betrayal
NICOLE LAMB
Nicole had been standing in the doorway from the bedroom for over a minute, wrapped in the Baccarat Hotel’s over-floofed robe, watching Kingston stare at the screen of her laptop.
It was definitelyherlaptop.
The desktop image behind the open folders was a pink and lavender high fantasy illustration of swooping dragons and maidens with swords.
When she’d eased the bedroom door open, a green uploading progress bar had just finished and then disappeared.
When she spoke, Kingston’s shoulders slumped before he twisted on the couch and looked back at her, his blue eyes wary.
With one step closer, she could see that her Experimental Designs folder was open, and the subfolders with all her plans, specs, and ideas had new green checkmarks beside them, showing that they had been backed up in cloud storage instead ofonlyresiding on her hard drive.
He’d stolen them.
He’d stolen everything.
She couldn’t even talk, couldn’t accuse him of what they both knew that he had obviously just done.
