9. 601pm

9

6:01pm

KINGSTON MOORE

Nicole Lamb’s lush form swayed in front of him as she walked, leading the way to her lab.

His skin practically crackled with energy as they neared the lab. Here, he would find out if the succulent Nicole was as attracted to him as he definitely was to?—

No. He was going to look at Sidewinder’s future products, and that was all.

That was the reason he’d goaded Nicole Lamb into taking him upstairs.

That was the reason he was in California and Sidewinder Golf in the first place, to evaluate the company so he could win the damn bet.

Being distracted by a pretty face and an hourglass figure and a cute sense of humor and a shared passion for golf was the last thing Kingston Moore needed.

So he kept his eyes to himself as he trod behind her. He intently watched the elevator floor numbers flicker when they were in the confined space where in two steps he could have her up against the wall with his mouth on hers and his hands in her hair, and then he followed her down the corridor to her lab where she once again badged him in.

Again, they donned the crackling Tyvek suits, plus the masks, goggles, and gloves that protected them from flying metallic debris and the prototype clubs from the oils on their hands and other detritus from their bodies.

He’d thought that once Nicole was swathed in a papery burka, he’d be able to ignore his rising infatuation a little. Still, every time she flashed her dark eyes full of intelligence and humor at him, even from behind plastic safety glasses, he didn’t want to look away.

She looked at him when she straightened from bending over, sliding the blue gauze booties over her shoes, and his focus wrapped his mind around her gaze. “Okay, you asked for it. I’ve got to warn you, though. This is all just pie in the sky cogitating, not actual clubs for release,” she said.

“I understand,” Kingston said, arrested where he stood by her, looking at him and himself staring back at her. “I just want to see.”

No, he just wanted to touch.

But he must not.

“Okay!” she said, her voice as perky as a pixie. “You’re paying for it. Let’s go look at these golf clubs that don’t exist and probably never will.”

Kingston hadn’t meant to dawdle, but every club on every computer-driven lathe might have been the magic wand that boosted Sidewinder’s sales into the stratosphere.

At Last Chance, Jericho Parr had his spreadsheets where he divined a company’s worth from digits like tea leaves. Mitchell Saltonstall was a showman who could sell oil to Saudis.

But Kingston was good at finding sociological niches that needed a product.

He didn’t mean taking a square product and hammering it into a round population niche, but looking at a group of people, figuring out what they wanted, and then giving it to them.

Kingston loved golf. He loved the challenge and the mechanics of it.

He knew everything that golfers needed.

He was looking for what they would want.

Nicole stopped at every machine in her lab and prodded her introverted techs into talking to Kingston.

“This is—well—it’s not done yet,” the first guy said, a lanky fellow with graying hair.

“Yes, Arvind, I understand it’s not done,” Kingston said. “Tell me what you think about it, though.”

Those poor techs must never have anyone genuinely interested in their jobs. Once they understood that Kingston was serious in his inquiries, they snapped open like popcorn and told him everything in their heads.

It’s a good thing Kingston wasn’t an industrial spy for Titleist. The Big T would have scooped Sidewinder’s lines for the next five years with all the information, theories, and strategies these techs were vomiting out at the slightest provocation.

Nicole, meanwhile, hung back once she’d gotten them talking and watched, her dark eyes never missing a thing behind her bulbous safety glasses.

The way she’d crossed her arms over her chest, plumping up her breasts even under her paper jumpsuit, distracted Kingston.

The techs were talking, telling him exactly what he needed to know. He had to concentrate. “Yes, and if you had one club you would stake the company on, which one would it be?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Nicole slip her cell phone from her pocket and swipe, texting or writing something.

She kept it in her hand, obviously working hard, furrowing her dark eyebrows behind her goggles and tapping on the screen as she edited.

At four-thirty, while Kingston was deep in discussion with Caitlin, passing a prototype club back and forth and peering down the shaft in turn and commenting on its superior straightness that extended to the microscopic level when Nicole nodded at the phone in her hand and tapped it one last time.

An instant later, his own phone in his front trouser pocket chimed and buzzed under his Tyvek coveralls, the vibration a little too close to his dick’s half-mast bell-end for comfort.

Nicole’s sharp eyes were right on him, examining how she’d sent an email to the Last Chance, Inc. email address, and he’d received one at precisely the same time.

Lying to her about who he was made his skin crawl.

As soon as Caitlin finished her dissertation on the perfect straightness of the golf club, she said her farewells and headed for the lab’s exit.

Yes, it was a quarter past five o’clock. These technicians should have left work a few minutes before.

Hourly and salaried employees leave when the work day was over.

Owners stayed longer, and Kingston was used to twelve-hour work days.

After making the rounds of all the techs, each one expounding on their golf club-related specialty, Kingston and Nicole ended up at the corridor leading to her office and the break room in the back of the lab.

“So, that’s all the new clubs we have in the works,” Nicole said, her voice muffled from her mask and Kingston’s Tyvek hood over his ears. “I guess we’re done.”

They were withholding information. Kingston could smell it. “Is that everything?”

“Everything to speak of.”

Oh, that was waffling. He’d used that one himself. Obviously, projects existed that were not to be spoken of. “Is it?”

“Sure.”

She was holding out on him.

Should he pull the I ’m-really-your-boss rabbit out of his hat yet? Pulling rank seemed like a douche move, as was the reveal of the hogwash he’d been peddling.

Instead, he went with, “Well, those are some amazing clubs. Really innovative. Truly game-changers.”

He put his heart into it, too, raising his eyebrows in enthusiasm and shoving all the sarcasm right down into his shoes.

Her sharp sideways glance from behind her safety goggles looked like she wanted to contradict him.

Good.

The new clubs she’s shown him weren’t innovative game-changers. They were, at best, incremental improvements on technology already incorporated into Sidewinder’s Rattler line or, at worst, cosmetic marketing gimmicks.

Golf clubs’ shafts don’t need to be straight down to the molecular level. They need greater consistency when they bend from the angular momentum of the swing.

Kingston looked directly back at Nicole, lifting his cheeks and crinkling his eyes so it looked like he was smiling behind his mask, a skill everyone learned during the Covid pandemic that came in handy when garbed in protective clothing.

And then he waited.

Nicole’s shoulder twitched first, and then she cocked her hooded head to the side, and then she broke eye contact and looked away. “Yeah.”

“Those clubs will change the face of the company.”

“Sure.”

Which was what Nicole said when she was fibbing. She did not disagree nor confirm.

Kingston sucked in a deep breath through the blue surgical mask over his face and said, “Those Mojave clubs you showed me are definitely enormous improvements. You should be s o proud of them, and they’ll be blockbuster additions to the Legendary line.”

“Oh, they’re not for the Legendary line,” she said quickly.

Of course not, because the Legendary line was her baby. “Oh?”

“These are definitely Rattler series clubs.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So, where are the clubs destined for your Legendary line?”

Nicole looked down at her feet. “Those aren’t even in pre- pre -production. It was a miracle that I managed to push through the Scimitar Edge.”

Kingston leaned down, watching Nicole’s eyes through the scratches on his plastic safety glasses. “Why is that?”

“Because Joe thought innovation like the Scimitar was too risky, and its manufacturing is different than any other club. Nothing in the head is cast. We don’t pour molten metal into a mold and glue it together with plastic like every other golf club on the market today. It was barely accepted by the PGA as a legal club?—”

“But the professional golfers can use it in PGA Tour events?” he asked, checking to make sure.

“Oh yeah, its coefficient of restitution is compliant, but it took an extra month for them to approve it. Three extra rounds of testing. Joe didn’t like the uncertainty.”

“Joe doesn’t own the company anymore.” And Kingston needed to stop talking right there.

“I don’t like the uncertainty,” she said.

“You don’t own the company, either.”

Sometimes, an owner has to roll the dice to make gains.

Arvind, the tall, lanky guy whose arms moved like flopping ropes under his white coverall passed them on his way out of the lab, striding for the anteroom to change out of his gear.

He nodded at them.

Kingston and Nicole nodded back.

Arvind left.

And Nicole still stood in the hallway with her arms folded in front of her like a locked computer while Kingston tried password after password, trying to get her to open up. He said, “Those clubs are truly the next step in golf technology.”

“Maybe. Sure.”

The little tech who’d talked to him about metallic alloys on the club faces bounced by on her toes, her papery coveralls whispering as she walked past them, said, “See you tomorrow!” to Nicole.

Kingston said, “Those were definitely some clubs.”

“They definitely were,” Nicole said.

This wasn’t working in the slightest. “Can I talk to you privately?”

Yet another white paper-swathed technician—how many techs did Sidewinder employ?—walked past them and left the lab.

Nicole watched them walk out the door to the garbing room, and two other people shoved their coveralls in the waste bin and left, heading toward the stairs. “I don’t know if this is a good time.”

Because everyone was leaving, and she would be alone with Kingston in her office.

Yeah, Nicole Lamb would probably pick the bear rather than sequester herself with him in an out-of-the-way office as other Sidewinder workers left the building for the night.

Logical, really. He was just some guy who, for all she knew, had passed a cursory employment background check that was probably skewed toward finding financial crimes, not violent ones.

Thus, he did the crinkly thing with his eyes again and joked, “I don’t know if I’m comfortable being alone with you in your office. You aren’t going to run me through with one of your swords, are you?”

She cocked her hip to the side and placed one blue-gloved fist on it. “Are you asking to see my big, thick, pointy swords?”

He winked at her, exaggerating it behind his safety glasses. “Now, if I would’ve said that, HR would’ve had to get involved.”

Nicole huffed one chuckle. “Okay, come on, but let’s make it quick.”

Oh, the entendres he could double on that one. “HR would definitely have something to say about that.”

Her low chuckle wafted back to him as she badged them into the back corridor, where she shoved her paper hood back off her mahogany hair, tugged her mask strings down to let it dangle, and unzipped her coveralls with a groan.

Her throaty sound caught Kingston off-guard as he loosened his protective gear. Yes, it was sound of pleasure and relief, and deep in the animal part of his brain, he wanted to make her make that sound again, and more, and deeper.

He needed to get a grip on something other than his dick because he needed information, not to get laid.

He needed that, too, but that wasn’t his goal that night.

Was it?

Nicole badged them into her office and shut the door behind them, closing them in the small room bristling with swords shining on the back wall. “Okay, what is it you wanted to know, really?”

How you taste, rose in Kingston’s mind, and he shoved that thought straight back down into the murky caveman depths from whence it had come.

Instead, he went direct, if slightly sideways from the actual truth, as he sat in one of the chairs before Nicole’s desk. “Look, I heard through the grapevine,” that grapevine being the due diligence discovery spreadsheets when he’d bought her company, “that Sidewinder Golf was a few weeks away from bankruptcy, and that’s why Joe sold it. If Last Chance hadn’t bought you, Sidewinder might not have been able to meet payroll on May first. A sign on the door that day would have told everyone that you weren’t getting paid and not to come back.”

Nicole was standing across the office from him, and she grabbed a filing cabinet as she leaned back, resting against it. “What?”

“Yeah. It’s that bad, and that’s why I’m really damn interested in whether there’s an undiscovered blockbuster in this place that we can leverage to profitability real soon.”

“I—I did not know it was that bad. Heck, I didn’t know it was bad at all. I mean, we’re selling clubs as fast as we can make them. We have a backlog that is longer than our year-to-date sales. People are screaming to get on the waiting list.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you looking at new clubs, then?” she asked, looking straight at him. “We need to expand manufacturing so we can deliver the clubs we’ve already taken deposits for.”

“Yes, and we—” Be careful, Kingston! Jeez! “Not we, surely. I mean they, the people at Last Chance, Inc., are already looking at additional manufacturing capacity to fulfill the backlog.”

“Where?” she asked, still staring straight at him.

God, that direct eye contact was so sexy that he could feel his body flinch, trying to rise from the chair, stalk over to where she stood, and pin her against the wall to kiss her senseless.

Butt in chair, asshole.

“China, of course,” he said.

“Most manufacturing capacity is located in China. Which site, though?”

“Dali Manufacturing, in the western part of China, near the Myanmar border.”

“Dude, Dali? It’s awful! First of all, goods have to travel eleventy billion miles to the coast for shipping, and secondly, it has a dirty reputation for stealing patented secrets. If we send our specs there, you can plan on a million knockoffs of Sidewinder’s clubs hitting the online shopping sites for a tenth of the price by next year.”

“But, by then—” Kingston didn’t finish his sentence. He’d almost said, By next year, Last Chance can win the bet, dump this turkey, and get out of the position.

“We can’t let them infringe on our patents like that,” she said. “Really, the intellectual property of what’s in Sidewinder’s clubs and how we make them is the company. We can’t lob it out there willy-nilly, especially if we have anything truly innovative and revolutionary up our proverbial sleeves.”

“And what do we have?” Kingston asked, honing in on what she obviously wanted to tell him.

“What do we have what?”

“Anything innovative and revolutionary?”

She shrugged, finally breaking eye contact with him, which he felt like someone snapped off the spotlight dazzling his eyes, and she studied the corner of the ceiling. She said, “All companies have concepts they haven’t acted on yet.”

“What’s yours?”

She fell silent, staring at the upper corner of the room.

Kingston followed her gaze.

The sword in the uppermost part of the room near that corner was a long, thick weapon, its steel burnished, hanging by its pommel with the blade pointing down as if to fall and stab the Earth.

He asked, “Is it that one up there?”

“Is what which one?”

He pointed to the oversized knife on the wall. “Is that the sword your next magical concept club is based on?”

Nicole looked down and away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your design for the club that other people call ‘magic,’ the Scimitar Edge, just happens to be named after your favorite sword. Now when we’re talking about your next design, you can’t stop looking at that sword up there. What kind of sword is it?”

“A broadsword.”

“Sounds massive.”

“Oh, it is. Broadswords are huge. I barely wrestled that one up onto the wall. Those hooks have six screws each into the studs.”

“Are you going to name the club after it?”

She snorted a laugh. “We were joking that we should design it for women, for the LPGA, because—get it? A broad sword?”

“Oh, no-no- no. You are not roping me into an HR complaint with that opening.” But he was grinning, and so was she. “What are you really going to call it?”

She sucked one side of her lower lip between her teeth as she smiled at him, obviously debating.

Kingston raised his eyebrows and leaned back in the chair, smiling harder at her.

Keeping up the grin wasn’t tough. She looked like a mischievous little kitten over there, practically wiggling its butt, convinced that you didn’t see it ready to pounce.

Nicole said, “Excalibur.”

Marketing strategies lit up Kingston’s mind. “That’s fantastic, and that’s why you want to call it the Legendary line.”

“Yeah.”

“Are there any other magical sword names that aren’t under copyright?”

“The Vorpal Sword from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky.’ The copyright on Alice in Wonderland expired.”

“Oh, that’s a good name.”

“Angrvaeall from Norse mythology, which has letters that shine brightly in battle but dim in times of peace.”

Kingston’s grin grew until his cheeks ached. “Hologram lettering that reflects in the sunlight. Brilliant.”

“Khanda, a sword that represents wisdom cutting through ignorance in Hindu mythology.”

His heart fluttered. “The marketing just writes itself. What else?”

“It really doesn’t matter what else because we don’t have the manufacturing capacity to make them,” she said. “Sending the specs to Dali Manufacturing is like flushing them down the toilet. There are a lot of other manufacturers in China, you know. Dali isn’t even one of the bigger ones.”

“Yes, but they have room,” he told her. “I heard that Joe Flanagan tried to have club heads produced by the same manufacturer as Titleist, but they didn’t have the capacity.”

“How about the original equipment manufacturer Taylormade uses in Vietnam? Taylormade’s specs are never leaked.”

“They don’t have room for another client, either. If we want additional inventory this year, it’s Dali or nothing.”

She frowned like a frustrated bunny. “Surely, some OEM has to have room for?—”

From somewhere outside Nicole’s office, a buzz sounded, and then a thump.

“Oh, no,” she gasped.

Kingston looked around again. No fire alarms. No more thumping or buzzing. “What?”

Nicole covered her mouth with one hand while she looked at the clock on the wall, which read six-oh-one. “No!”