15. Excalibur

15

Excalibur

KINGSTON MOORE

Kingston’s head was still spinning as he staggered to his feet, buttoning his shirt.

This woman was a handful, that was sure, and he should be wary. He wasn’t at Sidewinder Golf to find a one-night-stand.

Or a girlfriend.

Indeed, Nicole was the head engineer and an essential component of Sidewinder Golf, the company, the investment.

This interlude was a terrible idea.

And he could hardly wait to take her into bed the next night. He was going to absolutely ruin other men for her.

That plan’s stupidity was plain to him even while he finalized the details.

Supper first, definitely.

Wine.

Dessert.

His bed.

Maybe his ties. He’d packed four.

Even though he’d only booked the trip for three days.

But that was tomorrow.

Today, they were playing Pebble Beach on the golf simulator.

He laughed and balanced himself. “I think I still need to tee off.”

She huffed a chuckle. “Yeah, I think you got teed off all right.”

He laughed again out loud, a sound he didn’t hear often come out of his throat, and walked over to his bag to select the big, long driver.

Even his driver seemed lighter as he stood in position over the ball and striped it dead-center down the fairway.

Getting off seemed to be good for his golf game. He’d have to remember that.

When Nicole stood over the ball to take her next shot, she was still grinning, still relaxed, and she hit her shot much better than before, too.

Getting off was good for everybody’s game.

Convenient.

They played the spectacular vistas of Pebble Beach, marveling at the views of the ocean that stretched to the distant horizon and the sea birds calling and flying overhead.

After the first nine holes, at the turn, Kingston asked Nicole, “Got any other interesting new golf clubs over in the rack?”

“Nothing to speak of,” she said.

Ah, there it was again, her non-answer that was as suspicious as hell. “You don’t have an early mock-up of the Excalibur or the Vorpal Sword in that rack somewhere, perchance?”

She watched him again, her dark eyes gazing steadily into his, and he felt like he was being sized up.

“Come on,” he said, smirking and trying to be charming. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Nicole bit her lip, her brain-gears grinding, and then she walked over to the wall of clubs.

Yes. She was hiding something.

He watched her delicate form, a lithe, curved silhouette in the dark recesses of the room, as she fiddled with the golf clubs in the bags on the stepped racks.

Her dark braid swung down her back as she twisted, looking in different golf bags and examining tags on clubs with the flashlight of her cell phone.

Wrapping her long, silken braid around his fist, controlling her, had damn near pushed him past his boundaries. He could have tormented her into a yes. He could have held out until she’d begged him to take her despite her not being on the BC pill.

But Kingston had boundless depths of self-control. In the gym, he pushed himself to carve his body into exactly the form he wanted, to optimize his VO2 max, and he ate to produce a minimal body-fat percentage. Not the dehydrated striations of bodybuilders or Method actors, but a strong, robust physique that could handle anything and would never fail him.

He could lift a car off someone if he had to and run a marathon distance to get help afterward.

But when Nicole had had him on the floor, when she’d been stripping his clothes while he’d been on his back like a turtle, he’d felt his control slipping away.

And thus, he’d stood up and taken it back.

If she’d ended things there, that was the risk he’d had to take.

Had to.

“Are you bringing me a club?” he asked.

Her voice came to him through the dark room. “Just a minute. I’m—I’m thinking.”

She dawdled over at the racks for a while, half-pulling clubs from bags, regarding them, and then letting them slide back.

On the far end, she kept touching one, tapping it, but not taking it out.

Kingston stopped the game timer on the simulator and watched as she stewed about golf clubs.

Nicole walked back, her eyes sparkling, triumphantly holding up a golf club. “Okay, we’ll try this one. It’s special. Right-handed, regular-long, correct?”

A brittle shard near his heart melted a little. “Yes.”

Her eyes squinted on the ends, so coquettish, and she held the very long golf club as if she might snatch it back from him to play keep-away. “It’s the Excalibur.”

Kingston’s heart jumped. “The prototype?”

She nodded, the soft little tendrils of her hair around her face bobbing in her enthusiasm. “An early prototype. I’ve still got some refining to do, especially in the marketing aspects of the design. But this is—this is it. This is the concept. This is the idea that the final model will be made from.” She grinned up at him “I love my job.”

Nicole held it out to him on her open palms with both hands.

He half-expected her to bow like a maiden of the lake, presenting a sword to a knight before sending him off on a holy quest.

Kingston carefully took the club from her hands with both of his, because this was a rare gift and a measure of her trust.

Even in the dim light, watery holograms shimmered on the shaft and the top of the club head. “It’s beautiful.”

“I used Japanese steel-folding techniques to strengthen the metal at the top of the club head.”

“It’s like art.” It might be just a mock-up, not properly glued together. He didn’t want to take a full roundhouse swing and have the club head fly into the rafters and rattle around up there like a pinball. “Can I swing it?”

“It’s fully functional. You can hit balls with it if you want to.”

“Oh, I want to.” He smiled at her. He’d meant to leer a little, maybe a wolfish grin, but the breathlessness in his chest at standing with her in the dim room, receiving what she obviously considered precious, made him serious. “I don’t want to damage it.”

“Just handle it gently, but it’s tougher than it looks. It’s pretty close to the final design. If it can’t handle normal use, it wouldn’t be a very good golf club.”

“So if I hit a ball and it shatters?—”

“Then it’s back to the drawing board, literally. It has to be more than just pretty.”

“How much force can it take?”

“We haven’t performed those tests yet. We need to get closer to the composition of the final materials. Heck, I don’t even upload the specs to the main intranet until it’s closer to finalized.”

He swung it a little more. “Everything should be uploaded to the company’s intellectual property database as soon as it’s conceptualized in case we need to defend the patents in court.”

Nicole shrugged. “I can work on them better if I keep them private, without the lawyers poking around in everything and messing up my work. Everything is on my hard drive. Joe knew about it and said I could.”

Kingston held the club gently as he walked back into the simulator and prepared to tee off at the tenth hole, a punishingly long, straight par-four to a green surrounded by sand and ocean.

Playing a new driver on the tenth hole of Pebble, especially one that was an entirely new design for a golf club, was sheer lunacy, but Kingston wouldn’t let that stop him.

Well, it was just a simulator. Maybe he’d gotten wrapped up in it.

He set a golf ball on a tubular range tee and backed off to take a few long, slow practice swings.

The Excalibur club was so exquisitely balanced that it felt like a silk rope in his hand, whipping back and forth. “Is this a stiff flex?”

“Yeah.” When he glanced back at Nicole, she was watching him closely and called out, “Is it okay if I video you?”

“Sure,” he said.

“It hasn’t been swung by anyone with a good swing,” she said. “Just techs, and you know, they’re fine. But I want to see what it can really do.”

Excitement trickled through him. “You want me to put it through its paces?”

“Sure,” she said with a grin. “Knock it out of the park.”

He swung the club in long arcs, feeling the break point and how the club responded to him, then stepped up to the ball and shot it off the tee like a bullet. “Wow.”

When he looked back, Nicole was holding up her camera and grinning.

“That was an extra thirty yards and dead-center,” he told her.

“Yeah,” she said, lifting her eyebrows like she’d tricked him with magic.

“This thing can’t be legal.”

“It is. Well, it should be. It’s not ready for production, so we haven’t submitted it to the PGA yet.”

“This will sell a million units,” he said, admiring the rippling metal on the shaft in the simulated sunlight.

“A million units isn’t Sidewinder’s business model. We’ll sell a hundred units to the right people and make the other million die of envy.”

“Right,” Kingston said, watching the aqua and silver ripples on the club head.

This magic club could save Sidewinder and Last Chance, Inc., but he needed to sell more than a hundred golf clubs to do it.