8. The Rattler Line

8

The Rattler Line

NICOLE LAMB

The following day, Nicole had a meeting with the sales department at two o’clock to update them on new golf club models that would be commercialized in time for the summer golf show season a month hence, so she de-garbed and stopped at the first-floor employee lounge on her way to get a candy bar because the sales folks’ vendoland was much better than the slim pickings in the tech break room.

So she was shoving a Snickers in her pie hole as she juggled a tablet computer and a bunch of slippery paper with her notes, and her hair was sticking out like a pine needle compost heap where her goggles strap had snarled it and the humid Tyvek coveralls had made her whole body sweaty, when she walked into the conference room with the long table.

Kingston Moore was sitting at the foot of the table, looking sharp as lasers in a dark blue suit with an open collar.

Yeah, Nicole thought the new guy was kind of hot, sitting there with his bright blue eyes and dark hair, even though she had very little chance with him and no time for pursuit.

But why did the universe conspire to embarrass her, too?

Nevertheless, she had a meeting to run. “Hello, sales team. How is everything going, down here on the first floor with the good air conditioning?”

Laughter from the rest of the sales team, and Kingston wrote something on a pad of paper in front of him.

The sales team, other than the hottie lurking down at the other end of the table and staring straight at her, was a panel of people who looked like they’d been crafted by AI to sell exorbitantly priced items to straight white men.

Two nubile white twenty-something women with probably plastic surgeon-crafted boobs and definitely bleached-blond hair were at the top of the table near Nicole’s right hand. She might have mentally dismissed them except that Morgan and Meagan asked the best questions, took sharp notes, and could play the vapid airhead at golf shows right up until a customer wanted specs. Then they could both reel off the numbers and explain their importance, becoming the cool girls who liked sports.

They sold a lot of golf clubs.

The other five people at the table were Ben and Andy, who looked like junior country club pros into all the latest tech and gadgets, and Rich and Ron, who appeared to be grizzled country club pros with decades of sun damage and had seen golf fads come and go but would set you right with the perfect set of clubs for you.

And then there was Kingston Moore, sitting at the end of the table with his hands folded on his paper, leaning in and peering at Nicole like she was prey.

He didn’t fit any of the roles.

Maybe they’d hired him to act like the club champion who vouchsafed the secret for his sudden drop in handicap to you, which would be his new clubs, which you could buy for the low-low price of?—

Just kidding. Sidewinder didn’t have a value line. Cheap crappy clubs were antithetical to the company’s primary mission.

Still, Kingston Moore was— disconcerting.

Nicole didn’t understand the machinations in Human Resources, and that’s why she was in tech.

She announced, “Okay, let’s start with the specs on the Mojave short iron series that we just put on the train for production. We expect the commercial product to be ready for wholesale orders in a month, with delivery in three.” She tapped a button on the control panel on the table, and the lights dimmed as her slides projected on the screen behind her. “The Mojave is an extension of our flagship line of clubs, the Rattler line?—”

She expounded on the benefits and discussed the specs in detail. She’d worked on the data for hours.

The cool girls and the young pros took notes and asked questions. The grizzled pros cracked jokes about the colors it came in.

And Kingston? His steady gaze alternated between the slides and her eyes.

When he stared into Nicole’s eyes, even from across the room, she forgot what she was saying and why golf clubs were important because she was caught, stuck to the wall behind the screen by the weight of his gaze.

Nicole looked back to her notes full of chicken scratch and meaningless numbers and sucked in a deep breath before she looked at the slide, back to her notes, at the slide, her notes, and didn’t look up at Kingston’s mesmerizing gaze again.

Part of her brain laughed at herself for being so easily distracted even while she reeled off digits and explained graphs. If she was going to be this weird, she might as well crawl under the table and run the meeting from there, her hand occasionally snaking up to the surface to slap the button and advance the slides.

Another part of her brain warned her off.

Nicole had terrible taste in men. He was probably a cheater or a trash fire if she liked him.

Somehow, Nicole survived and answered questions from the sales team. They all asked questions except for Kingston, who seemed to watch how she answered more than listening to the data itself.

Finally, at three o’clock on the frickin’ dot, Ron stretched and announced, “Good meeting!” before standing and walking out, leaving the handouts Nicole had distributed on the table.

The others gathered up their handouts—the young pros having written down some numbers, the blondes with copious notes—and chatted for a few minutes before exiting the conference room, leaving Nicole alone with Kingston Moore.

He was leaning back in his chair but still watching her.

“Did you have any questions?” she asked him.

He paused, and the still air in the conference room gathered around Nicole, squeezing her, until he said, “So, you said the Mojave is the latest in the Rattler line.”

Words flopped off her tongue. “Yes, right, uh-huh.”

His gaze flicked to her, pinning her like a dead butterfly against the projection screen. “So what line is the Scimitar Edge in?”

“That’s, um, the marketing people haven’t named the line yet, in case it’s a one-off.”

“Is it a one-off?”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“And so, what should the line be named?” he asked.

“That’s not my job.”

‘That’s not what I asked.”

She paused that time, watching him as he lounged in his chair at the far end of the conference table, utterly at ease with waiting. “The Legendary Line.”

“Interesting. And what do you call the line in the lab?”

“Stabby McStabberson,” she admitted.

He looked down and chuckled. “Yes, marketing might not go for that. Why ‘Legendary?’”

“Because it’s a great name.”

“It is. I’ve heard several people say the Scimitar is like ‘magic.’ What’s the next one in the line?”

“R&D has not released any prototypes of further designs.”

“Again, that’s not what I asked.”

“There’s no use even discussing concept models until we get to early prototypes.” She swiveled and flopped into a chair. “Probably eighty percent of models that we mock up on CAD don’t even get to the late prototype stage, so flapping our gums about them is a waste of air.”

“So there are models. More than one?” he asked.

“Yeah. We’ve got three in early dev and one more in the middle stages. The problem is that if the club’s engineering fails, it won’t matter. We don’t want to produce a club head that shatters after a month of playing. It would ruin Sidewinder’s reputation.”

Kingston stood and picked up the handouts. “Let’s go look at them.”

“There is zero percent chance that any of them will be available for sale this summer,” she told him. “That’s your job, sales, right?”

“Oh yes, but I’m interested in understanding where new golf clubs come from.”

The sarcasm rose strong. “Well, when a mommy golf club and a daddy golf club love each other very much?—”

He rolled his eyes, his really blue eyes that seemed to draw her attention even in the dim room. “Oh no, you aren’t going to send me pictures of your knobby-headed drivers, are you?”

Nicole clutched her chest as if he’d stabbed her in the heart. “My designs are never knobby. Sidewinder clubs are sleek and aerodynamic. Never knobby.”

He laughed out loud at her faux outrage, and the superiority of being the funny one stirred in her. Nicole wasn’t usually the funny one, as her jokes ran toward golf puns.

“Right, and just for fun, let me see these future designs. Even though I understand that they will not be ready for commercialization by summer, the Vegas PGA Show isn’t until early December.” He inclined toward where she stood. “What could be ready for Vegas?”

“Again, I don’t know that because I don’t know how the design and metals are going to work together until we do it,” she said slowly.

Kingston prowled toward her, a looming silhouette in the still-darkened conference room. “Show me what you’ve got.”

This conversation was getting weirdly double-entendre-y. “Dude, I don’t know what you want to see.”

“I know what I can sell, but I want to see what’s coming,” he said. “It’s imperative to sales morale to know that innovation is always coming down the pipeline.”

Okay, that wasn’t a double entendre. That sounded like a sales dude trying to sell a golf club. “None of the other sales staff care about what’s in design until we have a release date.”

He was standing near her, looming over her, menacing in the darkened room. “I’m not your average salesperson.”

“Right, I got that,” she grumbled and shuffled backward. “This is so irregular.”

Kingston leaned back and blinked, then spun out a chair and sat. “How about you give me an in-depth tour of your possible future directions? I promise to keep in mind that these are early concepts in the developmental process. In return, I will take you out to dinner to discuss anything other than golf clubs or sponsor lunch for your lab. Pizza. Subs. Whatever you want.”

Nicole had been in college recently enough that turning down free food for her lab felt like a betrayal. “Okay, but you must understand that none of these concept clubs might make it to production. Or maybe some kludged-together Franken-club version of several of them might be produced. We came up with probably two hundred concepts last year, and one went to commercialization. Capisce?”

“I understand,” he said, smiling. “Lead the way.”

“What, like right now?”

“No time like the present.”

“It’s already past three o’clock.”

“Come on. I’ll buy you supper and do a lab lunch.”

Two meals? With her student loans sucking her finances away every day, Nicole couldn’t pass that up. “Okay, but we have less than three hours, and there are a lot of concept clubs.”

“Let’s go.”