47. A Simulation

47

A Simulation

NICOLE LAMB

The Excalibur driver didn’t sound right when it hit a golf ball.

At least, it didn’t make the correct sound when Nicole hit a golf ball with it.

The manufacturing prototypes from Dali had arrived via FedEx the night before, and the changes they’d had to make to the club for manufacturing might have messed it up.

Not that it mattered. By spring, just in time for next season, a thousand knock-offs of the club were going to litter the retail golf stores like every drug store’s generic Advil, and no one would buy the overpriced real thing.

Nicole lined up another shot with the chubby-headed club, her hands choked down on the grip so far she was nearly holding the club’s shaft.

A description she refused to giggle about.

This was golf. This was serious business.

Right up until you remembered it was a game that people wagered stupid amounts of money, betting who could hit a rock into a hole with a stick the fastest.

She tried smacking the ball again.

Tink.

Golf clubs should not go tink.

The golf ball smacked into the simulator’s screen and dropped to the Astroturf mat, while the virtual ball continued into the blindingly blue sky above the ocean churning on the rocks below.

And a proper golf club striking a ball should make a bright metal-on-ceramic click, not a sound like ice cubes dropped in a whiskey class.

At the Baccarat Hotel, when Kingston had poured himself a drink at the minibar in the suite, the diamond-clear ice cubes bouncing in the crystal glass had rung out a tink like that.

Her worry over the sound wasn’t aesthetic or even marketing. The metal itself had a resonance it shouldn’t have, which meant energy was being lost instead of being transferred to the ball, so the ball wouldn’t fly as far, and that was indicative of a design flaw.

And she was going to figure out what the heck was wrong with it.

Assuming that the problem wasn’t operator error, which it might be.

Nicole still wasn’t very good at golf.

Nicole was barely adequate at golf.

Most people who play golf as badly as Nicole did quit.

Which meant the problem might not be within the club but how she was hitting the club.

So, there might not be a problem with the Excalibur. In the hands of a good golfer, a person with enough strength and height to smash this men’s-length club the way it should be smashed, there might be no tink.

The club might produce a proper bright metallic click like a splatter of sparks, like it was supposed to.

Nicole kept hitting the club, trying to figure out whether it was the problem or she was, and so she didn’t look up when the door to the outside world clattered closed somewhere beyond the computer and couches.

She lined up a new ball.

Tink.

Darn it.

Footsteps had stopped behind her, and she didn’t even bother to look up because the languid saunter of expensive leather shoes and fresh wood on the thin carpeting had already told her who it was.

“Did you need something, Kingston?” she asked without looking up from the golf ball on the unnaturally green plastic grass in front of her bare toes.

His voice was even and steady, as if he were perfectly in control of his emotions. “I was going to hit a few balls with the Excalibur manufacturing prototype, but I see you beat me to it.”

“This is the regular men’s length. The long shaft is over in the racks.”

“Thank you.”

The footsteps walked away, and Nicole sucked long, slow breaths through her nose, trying to calm her fluttering heart.

Adrenaline was the worst thing for golf. Some pros took beta-blockers to regulate their heartbeats as performance-enhancing drugs.

Hitting the ball in that state wouldn’t give her any usable data.

Nicole backed up, letting the golf club fall to her side as she stepped away from the ball.

The next simulator’s projector whooshed as it initialized, and it cast light into the whole room.

Heck, Kingston had a fantastic swing. In the interest of science and for the good of the company, Nicole should just walk over there and see what sound his golf ball made.

Her feet seemed glued to the plastic-prickly fake grass mat under her soles.

Besides, she could listen from over here. It was pretty obvious that when he swung the club, it made a loud?—

Crack.

Even accounting for Kingston’s much higher swing speed, that didn’t sound quite right either, or was the simulator wall between them absorbing some of the sound waves?

Nicole fidgeted, tapping the golf ball back and forth with her too-heavy club.

Crack, and then Kingston made a descending, dissatisfied hum.

Nicole charged around the barrier between the two simulator bays. “You heard it, too. Didn’t you?”

Kingston glanced up at her, and fear wormed into Nicole’s heart that maybe he hated her.

The flatness in his blue eyes was so different from the warmth and humor that had been there when they were together that Nicole stopped walking.

Maybe his anger at her refusing to hand over the design for the clubs that may very well save Sidewinder from bankruptcy had turned to straight-up distaste.

Kingston looked away and stared at the head of his golf club on the ground next to a ball. “This driver doesn’t sound quite like it did that night you and I were locked in here.”

“I had to make some changes for manufacturing, and I don’t think Dali is producing the same quality as our in-house, hand-crafted prototypes were.”

His voice was that same emotionless monotone. “Why was the original design changed?”

“Because there’s no way we could make a thousand Excalibur golf club heads on site, which is the goal you set, by Thanksgiving with the old process. There’s just no way. Even if we had a hundred blacksmiths pounding on them night and day, it still wouldn’t have worked. It had to be mass producible.”

Kingston turned the club upside down and examined its fat head and striking surface. “So it’s not the same.”

“It couldn’t be and meet manufacturing deadlines. I’m trying to figure out how to bring the specs closer to the original design before six o’clock tomorrow night, which is when they start work in the morning in Dali. If we can email the new specs and they can cast another one right away and airmail it, I’ll have time to look at that one before we finalize the design for the PGA submission.”

Kingston nodded. “That’s excellent business sense.”

“Can I hear you hit it just a few more times? Arvind is analyzing the coefficient of restitution and other specs in the lab, but sometimes hearing its sound gives me more clues as to what is wrong.”

Kingston’s flash of a glance at her held a shred of humor. “Kind of like the sound of a really good sword in battle?”

“That luxurious swish as you murder your enemy,” she quipped back.

His low chuckle made her homesick for joking around as they lounged between cool sheets. “Again, remind me not to be alone with you in your office when you’re sharpening your katana.”

“The last time didn’t go so badly for you.”

His glance at her was wary, but as he inhaled and his shoulders rose, his whole body seemed to swell as he stepped toward her.

What the heckers was she doing?

But she didn’t step backward.

Instead, she stepped toward Kingston, her freezing body gravitating toward a fire.

In two more long-legged strides, he was reaching for her waist and the back of her head, and his mouth crashed down on hers.

Nicole grabbed his shoulder and cricked her arm around the back of his neck, and she didn’t so much melt against Kingston as whip her arms and one leg around him like a vine trying to climb a tree.

As his lips plundered her mouth, he ran his hand from the back of her knee up her thigh to her hip, and his thumb hooked around the string bikini band of her panties.

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.”