48. A Risk He’s Willing to Take

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.”

Nicole looked down at the falchion beside her leg and shrugged. “I love my job.”

“I know you do,” Kingston said, his voice choking. “I know this company and making people happy with better clubs is important to you.”

“Sure beats making weapons to blow up the world.”

“I’m trying to save Sidewinder, too,” he said.

“I know, Kingston. I know you’re trying everything to save it.”

“Because it’s important to you,”

“And because it’s a company and there are people here who depend on it, your real business, Last Chance, has been pouring money into it and needs to make a profit.”

He looked up at her, a grim set to his mouth. “I miss you.”

The shift of the conversation from Sidewinder to them was an earthquake under her legs, and she grabbed the desk just in case it wasn’t a metaphor because that was California, but the trembling was in her heart.

“I am sorry I didn’t come clean about who I was earlier,” he said. “Because even though it gave me the information I needed about the company, I lost you over it. I would do anything to change the fact that I lost you.”

Words jumped out of her mouth before she could edit them. “I miss you, too. So much. I don’t want you to lose me.”

He was across the room before she’d finished saying that, and his lips swallowed her last word. His kiss was starving, almost violent, shoving her back across the desk until he grabbed her around her waist and dragged her against his chest.

The door was closed but not locked and they shouldn’t do anything while the office was full of people coming and going and any one of them might open her door and walk in to ask her a question and just start talking ? —

The frustration lingering in her body from a week before roared back, and she opened her mouth and tangled her tongue with his.

His hand was already under her skirt again, dragging her panties down her legs and dropping them to the floor before pressing a finger roughly inside her, pumping into her as he massaged her clit, and then she was squirming against his hand, trying to get more.

He growled against her throat, “You’re already wet for me. You were thinking about me fucking you on this desk the minute I walked in.”

Nicole was gasping as she rode his hand, her body already clenching because, no, she’d been thinking about him the whole time she’d been sharpening that sword, methodically and mindlessly running the whetstone up the hard length of it and hoping he’d walk into her office and leave with her panties as a pocket square.

Her mind was off-line. Her thoughts about everything were gone, and yet she needed to say, “Just so you know, I’m still on the Pill.”

“I don’t care. I’d have you anyway,” he growled, his head near her ear.

“No, you wouldn’t. You have too much self-control.”

Kingston stared right into her eyes as rivulets of pleasure ran through her, his fingers stroking her inside, and the ends of his blue eyes narrowed in what might have been anger. “I would take you every time I could, and if you got pregnant, I would buy a big house in Connecticut and fuck you until you’d had ten babies to fill it up.”

“Ten?” she laughed as she gasped, thinking he was joking. God, she wanted him to never stop.

The grit in his voice sounded like he was on the edge of rage. “Twelve.”

“That’s excessive.”

“I’m excessive,” he told her, the edge of his voice finally breaking as his words ground out between his teeth with her body impaled on his fingers. “I am absolutely the kind of man to take a pretty girl and hide her away from the world if she’ll let me. I would protect her and our children from everything. I would never let anything happen to them.”

“You’re joking.”

“Try me.”

Kingston unbuckled his belt and opened his fly, shoved her back to lay on the desk with her knees folded up to her shoulders, and then he rammed himself into her.

Nicole’s back arched off the desk at his possession of her body. She hated that she needed him so much, that her anger was secondary to her need for him to touch her.

Kingston reached past her head, grabbing the other side of the desk for leverage with both hands and railed her, his hips bucking as he stroked into her, his body grinding up against hers.

His body dragged inside her again, his hips grinding against her clit with each stroke, and words fled, and her body spun and twisted like a spring, torquing with pressure, until it broke and she broke and waves of pleasure reverberated through her, wiping out her memory and who she was and all the reasons she had to be angry.

Kingston rammed harder into her, his body jerking like he was out of control, and then he let go of the desk and grabbed her with both of his arms under her back and held her against him as he pulsed inside her, his cheek against hers, his ragged breath on her shoulder, the muscular hardness of his body heavy upon her.

Nicole’s eyes burned, and she wiped wet streaks away from her temples with her palms before he saw them.

As his breath smoothed, Kingston turned his head and kissed her neck, moving back to her mouth, and he kissed her slowly, tenderly, with his thumb on her cheekbone and his fingers woven into her hair that had fallen out of its ponytail.

His voice was a murmur against her lips. “I missed you.”

She rested her hand on his cheek. “I missed you, too.”

He held her, kissing her, until he slipped away and tucked himself back in his pants, buckling his belt.

Nicole struggled to sit up and smoothed her skirt down over her knees. “What if I didn’t want to be locked in a house in Connecticut with twelve babies?” she asked him.

“Fourteen. You’d have to fight me a little on it, just to make sure you really wanted it, which is too bad.” His voice dropped to that sexy lower register. “Because I would’ve loved keeping you like a little doll to take whenever I wanted.”

“I studied really hard in college because I want this to be my life,” she told him.

“College should open opportunities, not lock you onto one engineering track the rest of your life. It might be fun to be my little fuck toy for a year or so while you wait for the noncompete clause in your contract to expire, and then start your own company with all the ideas I know you have but never wrote down.”

Okay, if this guy could actually read her mind and see all the other golf designs in there, this was going to get creepy.

Because she had more ideas, a lot of them for golf clubs and a lot of other things that could make the world a better place.

Kingston laughed. “Don’t confirm or deny anything. The look on your face is answer enough.”

“Well, now I can’t say anything, can I?”

He grabbed her pink silk panties off the floor, folded them, and tucked them into the breast pocket of his suit coat.

Like a serial killer’s trophy. “I’m going to run out of panties if you keep doing that.”

“That is a problem. If you’re walking around this building in flirty little sundresses without any panties on, I won’t ever get any work done.”

“I’m serious!” But she couldn’t help but laugh, which totally destroyed the prim effect she was going for.

“Good point. Saturday morning, I’m taking you shopping for new lingerie. You can model it for me in the dressing room. Maybe I’ll fuck you with your hands against the mirror so you can watch me take you.”

As an engineer and self-professed workaholic, Nicole had never known what it was like to be “working for the weekend” until then because it seemed like Saturday morning could not arrive soon enough.