He mouthed down the side of her throat, sucking and nipping to her shoulder left bare by her sundress. He’d wrapped her ponytail around the fist with his other hand, pulling her head to the side so her skin was stretched taut under his teeth.
He murmured against her skin, “What the hell are you doing to me?”
In reply, Nicole tightened her arms and legs around him, pushing herself against the thick ridge in his pants.
Her body was famished for him, and like an unfed vampire, she wanted to wrap her lips around any part of him she could.
But Kingston slowed down, kissed the side of her neck with one last slow suck, and then peeled her off of him.
He set her back, holding her shoulder tightly, and glared down at her. “This is a mistake.”
Kingston walked out of the golf simulator room, leaving Nicole panting and staring at the messed-up Excalibur driver lying on the fake grass under the projected image of a sky.
In the simulator, too, waves crashed on the black rocks below the cliff.
Kingston had also chosen Pebble Beach.
Nicole braced her hands on her knees and waited forever until her heart rate slowed, wanting to scream and cry as she stood alone on the fifth hole of Pebble Beach golf course.
After a while, she made her way back over to the lab where Arvind was glaring at a scientific instrument, his eyes squinting so hard that wrinkles folded his skin.
“I figured it out,” Nicole said. “The metal is resonating like a crystal wine glass when it sings. It’s setting up a standing harmonic wave when the club head hits the ball. That’s what we need to fix.”
48
A Risk He’s Willing to Take
NICOLE LAMB
A week later, Nicole was sitting on her desk and sharpening a pretty little falchion, a short, single-handed, single-edged sword she’d bought from a master blacksmith in Nevada, when Kingston stalked into her office, a piece of paper crumpled in his grip.
He slapped her door closed behind himself. “They rejected it.”
Only one thing could upset him this much, and she set the falchion aside on her desk near her thigh, almost resting the blade on the bright yellow fabric of her sundress spilling across her desk blotter. “The PGA? Was it the Excalibur or the Vorpal irons?”
“The Excalibur. The Vorpals passed, but it was right on the number, just like you said. The Excalibur didn’t.”
They could still sell the Excalibur, of course. Any company could sell any golf club it wanted to any golfer who would buy it, but professional golfers could not use it in PGA Tour events. Even most nonofficial tournaments, like country club championships, wouldn’t allow it to be used in play.
Good golfers wouldn’t buy it.
“Let me see the letter,” she said.
He handed the paper to her and began pacing back and forth in her office, one hand running through his dark hair.
Nicole read what the Professional Golfers’ Association of America had written in their letter, which Kingston had evidently printed from an email.
The paper rattled in her grip. “They said we could resubmit. If we get the prototypes there within two weeks, they’ll rerun the tests and might change the rating.”
“But can you? Is there anything we can do to change the design so that it will pass and yet still be as good as it is now?”
“We can try. At the very least, I can promise that we will try. We’ll work night and day until the deadline if we have to.”
Kingston stopped pacing, but he was still looking at the ground, and his hand was still clutching his hair. “I want you to know that I appreciate how hard you have worked for Sidewinder Golf. You could have just phoned it in these last few months and ensured we would fail.”
“If I wanted Sidewinder to fail, I wouldn’t have formed a union. I would’ve quit, and everybody else would’ve eventually seen the writing on the wall and followed me out the door.”
“Nevertheless, I appreciate your loyalty.”
