13. Pebble Beach

13

Pebble Beach

NICOLE LAMB

The simulator room was the size of an oversized two-car garage with dual wide bays hung with projection screens. A conversation grouping of a couch and chairs stood between the door and the first simulator.

“Nice set-up,” Kingston said, pivoting in the middle of the room as he scanned the space.

Nicole was too busy watching him. His white dress shirt accentuated the breadth of his muscular shoulders that tapered to his narrow waist and long, long legs in his navy-blue suit pants. He looked like a superhero in disguise standing there, fists braced on his hips, shockingly handsome even in the fluorescent ceiling lights lining his jaw and strong cheekbones with bright lines.

Nicole stood beside him and powered up the computer. ”Yeah, I think Joe Flanagan wanted to schmooze prospective investors in here, but instead, it became the technicians’ playroom.”

Kingston looked down at her. “No other investors were listed as owners, just Flanagan and the banks that loaned him operating capital. Are there other owners?”

“Nah, he didn’t actually do anything about schmoozing other investors. He built this area so he could, if he ever got around to it. That’s probably why Sidewinder was going bankrupt.”

“Indeed. What course should we play first, Pebble or Augusta?”

“Guest’s choice,” Nicole said, firing up the software.

“Pebble Beach.”

Projectors hanging over the bays glared electric blue light onto the screens. Nicole squinted as she clicked through the windows to load the golf courses.

The lush green golf course of Pebble Beach Golf Links flashed into view on the screens of the right-side simulator.

“Wow,” Kingston whispered and walked inside the glowing cube.

Most golf simulators are just a flat screen that the struck golf ball smacks into, and then a virtual simulation of the ball continues into the image as the real ball drops to the Astroturf mat.

Sidewinder’s simulators included the room’s sides, and above it, a bright blue sky scudded with clouds.

He turned back to look at where she was standing at the computer. “This is unreal. Actually, it’s very real. It’s like I’m standing on the first tee, except there’s a portal back to the office behind me.”

“Yeah, Joe wanted to put a rear screen with a door on it, too, but that seemed excessive,” she said. “And not conducive to schmoozing.”

He squinted up at the sky. “That’s, what, forty feet up there?”

“Thirty. Optical illusion.”

“It’s a good one.”

“There aren’t any real corners, either. It isn’t four separate films. It’s one huge wraparound video image, so you don’t have the problem with jiggling or discrepancies in the corners that make some people carsick.”

He turned his back to her again, looking down the course. “The first hole is three hundred eighty yards, par four, dogleg right. This is amazing. I can see every grain of sand in the fairway bunkers to the left of the bend and all those traps right around the green. It’s like standing on the tee box.” He swiveled and looked back at her. “Do you have loaner clubs? Mine are in my car, but you know.”

Yes, their cars were as out of reach as pizza delivery. “Flanagan stocked this room with sets of every high-end club known to golf: Titleist, TaylorMade, Krank, PXG Black Ops, Honma Five-Stars, Bentley Centenary?—”

“Wow. Bentley only released a hundred of those sets.”

“Yeah, so one percent of the world’s stock of them is sitting in this room, gathering dust. We also have prototypes of some of the newer clubs we’re working on.”

“I’d love to play with your prototypes.”

She laughed. “HR will totally get you for that one.”

“Come on,” he said and winked. “Let me play with your clubs.”

“That should be my line.” She’d led him over to the racks of golf clubs lining the wall and selected one. “The Mojave set I was talking about at the sales meeting this afternoon is over here. We can start with that.”

“The Mojave line, huh? No real prototypes? No Legendary clubs that you’re still working on?”

It was kind of gratifying that he was so interested in her work. Most guys didn’t care about the design’s elegance and how hard she worked on them. “Luckily, I just made a couple of sets in the usual men’s shaft variations of the Mojaves for the trade shows in May. Righty or lefty?”

“Righty,” he said.

“How tall are you?”

He towered beside her and looked straight down his chest, like standing under a tree as the crown bent at her in a high wind. “Six-five.”

“Oh, so you have a long shaft.”

Kingston snapped his head up and looked at the wall. “The HR violations just write themselves.”

She laughed at him. “Seriously, though. You’re right on the dividing line. Half-inch or a whole inch extra for the golf club’s length?”

“Regular-long shaft, not extra-long, even though I’m right on the cusp.” He waggled his arms like a scarecrow. “Long arms and legs, so my wrist-to-floor measurement is right under forty inches.”

“Ah, okay. And regular shafts or…stiff?”

“Stiff,” he muttered.

“I’ll bet, what with—” She glanced up at him, deciding just how far to go, and she chickened out. “—your long arms, you probably have a high swing speed.”

They both paused while Nicole waited for him to say something dirty, but Kingston just raised an eyebrow at her.

Finally, he said, “So, yes. My clubs are fitted with long, stiff shafts. Where are those Mojave clubs you mentioned?”

She cracked up and hauled a golf bag off the rack, checking one of the bands just below the club heads to make sure she’d grabbed the right ones. “Here you are. You’re the first to play with these.”

He tilted his head and asked, so innocently, “So, the clubs are a virgin set?”

She snorted and grabbed herself a women’s regular-regular set off the rack. “Yeah, the clubs are.”

He laughed behind her in the dim light as she turned and flounced back toward the simulator.

She asked over her shoulder. “Those clubs are the only virgin things in the room, right?”

“I went to boarding school for secondary. I assure you, the clubs are the only virgins in the room. Hey, let me carry those for you!” he called from behind her.

“It’s right here. I’m already?—”

The bag lightened in her hand and floated, and then the handle snaked from between her fingers. “Hey!”

“Wouldn’t want to appear unchivalrous to the woman with the swords,” he said, holding her bag in his hand and his back with the strap over his other shoulder. “You still might run me through. The night is young.”

She rolled her eyes and stalked over to the simulator.

Inside the brightly lit cube, they stood on the Astroturf floor, the tee box of the first hole of Pebble Beach all around them, even the bushes rustling in the wind from the ocean and waves roaring in the distance.

Kingston set their clubs over on the side. “I can almost smell the sea breeze.”

She went back to the computer. “Yeah. I wouldn’t put it past Joe Flanagan to have scented oil sachets just for the ocean courses. What tees do you play from?”

“The blues.”

“Yeah, of course, you would play from the back tees.” And now, she would discover whether he had earned the right to play from the tips or was just a hacker faking it. “I play from the women’s, so it’s the greens for me.”

“So, you do play,” Kingston said.

“Well, I hack around the course. Some days are better than others. But why wouldn’t I play?”

Seriously, why not?

He said, “You’re a mat-sci engineer. You don’t need to play the game to optimize the material science specs on a club. You can design a car for Lamborghini but drive a BMW or ride a bike.”

“No, I play.”

He smiled. “I see that now. Would you like the honors?”

“Sure, I’ll tee off first.”

Nicole clicked on the green tees on the computers and grabbed her driver, the longest club in her bag, settling a ball on the tubular range tee.

The heady mixture of chocolate, sugar, and sexual attraction sped through her veins.

With a quick check to make sure Kingston was standing back far enough that she wasn’t going to uppercut him with the driver and knock out all his teeth, she swung hard at the ball.

She ripped it, all right.

But it was a fat banana-slice to the right. “Oops.”

“Mulligan,” Kingston said. “Breakfast ball. Drop another one.”

She did, and she sliced it again. “Um, rats. You go ahead and hit while I think about this.”

He went back to the computer, changing the settings so that the fairway on the screen stretched a hundred more yards, and then he brought his driver into the simulator. “It’s like walking out a door into a summer day, but with air conditioning. And no marine layer. The last time I played Pebble, the fog was so thick, we had to use orange balls.”

“Right?” Nicole stood back and away from him, twisting her body and looking at her backswing for whatever the heck she was doing so very wrong. “It’s fun.”

Kingston teed up a ball and ripped it—nay, smashed it—dead-center down the middle of the fairway, and it landed just an easy chip from the green. He said, “Sure is.”

Okay, she needed to remember to keep her eyes on her own game, and that golf is a game you play against yourself, not against the other players, because evidently Kingston was going to beat her as badly in golf as he had in arm wrestling. “How many strokes are you going to give me?”

He half-turned and looked back over his broad shoulder. His voice was low, sultry, as he asked, “How many strokes do you want?”

Nicole’s whole body flushed hot as if the bright sun on the screen above had turned to an August-summer sizzle. She’d meant it in a golf way, but now she couldn’t get the image of his hands on her bare skin out of her mind.

“Two per hole,” she choked out. “Eighteen per side.”

He laughed. “Fine. So what is really different about the Mojave clubs?”

She explained it to him, eventually clicking out of the golf sim software so she could sketch equations. “And that variable right there, that’s the whole reason you get five extra yards and yet they’re more accurate.”

He grinned at her. “That’s really amazing.”

She drew herself up a little. “Yeah, I suppose it is.”

“It’s astonishing that all that math is necessary to design a better golf club. It’s golf club design, not building a nuclear submarine.”

She felt slightly patronized-to, like he thought her job wasn’t important enough to use advanced math. “Yeah, the value of the golf industry is eleven-point-one times the size of the nuclear submarine industry, so I guess we get to use the math, too.”

“That’s an oddly specific number.”

She shrugged, switched the computer back to the golf sim software, and then proceeded to hack her way around the first hole. “I’m a materials science engineer. I had offers from Sidewinder Golf and Electric Boat when I graduated, among others. The nuclear submarine market is nine billion dollars. Golf is over a hundred billion. I went where the money is.”

“You didn’t want to work at EB?”

She threw him a sharp glance. Usually, only people who worked there used the acronym. “What do you know about EB?”

“I live in Connecticut. Electric Boat sails its new subs down the Thames River when they’re launched. It’s a big deal. Why Sidewinder instead of EB?”

She shrugged. “I like golf better than nuclear war.”

“Okay, valid. But Sidewinder? How much money can this place be making?”

“Oh, a lot.”

“And yet it very nearly went bankrupt. This isn’t really a money laundering operation for a cocaine cartel, is it?”

She chuckled. “As far as I can tell, as long as I’ve been working here, we make golf clubs and sell them for an exorbitant amount of money. Joe just kept buying ridiculous ‘investments’ like these golf simulators. Besides, if Sidewinder was a cocaine money laundering operation, it would have made more money, and the lab and simulators would never have actually been built.”

Kingston nodded thoughtfully, staring up at the ceiling. “Money laundering is generally thought to be a profitable business model. Okay, it’s probably not a mob business, then.”

They stepped onto the second tee box at Pebble Beach Golf Links, seven hundred miles north of Sidewinder Golf. The insanely long par-five had a waste area before the green that Kingston shot over just fine. After three hacks, Nicole finally overrode the software and electronically kicked her ball onto the green to putt out.

She hoped she didn’t die of embarrassment while they were locked in the building. Kingston might have a hard time explaining her corpse to the police the next day.

Her postmortem grimace of mortification might save him, though. Every golfer would recognize that pathetic hangdog expression after you shank every shot out of bounds.

Okay, every hit of the golf ball was a new game. She just had to stop sucking so much.

Yeah, she’d like to ? —

No, no. She was not going to think about Kingston in that way. They were locked in for the night, and hankering after something and some body she should not have was just a recipe for frustration.

Nicole stepped up to the tee, calmed herself down, breathed slowly, and smacked another ball directly off the side of the golf course.

Her game didn’t get better from there.

Kingston chatted about golf and club design while Nicole deeply considered breaking every darned club over her knee and throwing the bag off the digital cliff and into the electronic ocean beside the fourth tee box. Maybe the software would catch the bag and show the stupid thing falling onto the rocks far below.

After four agonizing holes in which Nicole shanked every single shot way off the course into the rocks and deep grass, and Kingston knocked each of his hits onto fairways and greens and then tapped a few short putts, scoring pars and one birdie, he asked her, “Would you like a tip or two?”

She wanted more than just the tip.

No. Nicole was not going to get involved with the new sales guy who, it had been confirmed, was not moving to California but staying in Connecticut.

Long-distance relationships were always doomed to heartbreak.

She didn’t need any more heartbreak.

Not that he was offering her anything, really. All golf terms just sounded dirty.

But when she turned around to look at him standing back by the computer, the mischievous glint in his blue eyes made her laugh.