Tiffany blinked and nodded like she was having trouble absorbing what he’d said. “Okay. Okay, I guess. Is money all you care about?”
Jericho grinned at her. “You’ll have to win the next skin to find out.” He wasn’t going to spill all his information after the first hole. He was at least going to make her work for it.
On the second hole, Tiffany hit a seven-iron to four inches away from the pin and tapped in for a birdie score of two.
Jericho took a bogie four.
While they were still standing on the green and Jericho replaced the flagstick in the hole, Tiffany turned to him. “I asked you if money was all you care about?”
“No, in general,” Jericho said, grumbling that last part as he wiggled the flag stick to make sure it was solidly in the metal insert in the bottom of the hole.
“You’re waffling,” she told him. “I know equivocating when I hear it. Is money all you care about?”
“As far as the club is concerned, it’s not necessarily money but value. There’s more behind this that I’m not at liberty to talk about.” According to the terms of the bet, anyway. “But I’m most interested in increasing the club’s net worth, not just its cash flow.”
“I know the difference between net worth and cash flow, Jericho, and I know how they correlate. And I know they’re all money.”
“Yes, it’s money, but it’s not only money. And that is your one answer to your one question.”
Tiffany gritted her teeth. “The third hole is a short par-four. Get ready to answer my next question in six minutes.”
She wasn’t wrong.
On the green of the third hole, after she’d holed her ball for a par and Jericho was standing over a bogie putt to lose yet another skin, Tiffany asked him, “What changes are you going to make to the club to increase its net worth?”
Jericho blew his breath out through his pursed lips to expel a little bit of stress as he tried to putt this ball five feet into the hole while Tiffany was watching him. “I don’t have an answer to that question yet. There are a lot of things that I might do, but I have not decided the actual tactics I’ll use.”
“Like what?”
He bonked the ball with the putter and watched it wobble toward the hole and stop three inches short. “Dammit. Never up, never in.”
“I’m glad you said it so I didn’t have to,” Tiffany said. “Why are you holding your putter with that weird grip?”
“It’s a reverse claw. It’s supposed to be more stable.”
Tiffany shook her head. “One of the girls on the TSU team did that because she was the worst putter on the squad, and she stayed the worst putter on the squad. Do you want a better grip?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” Jericho was not too proud to take instruction from a girl. Indeed, Jericho prided himself on taking advice from the best people he knew, and Tiffany was definitely in that category on the golf course. “Feel free.”
Tiffany batted his ball back to where he stood, dropped her putter back in her bag, and strutted over to him, and then she knelt in front of where Jericho was standing.
The top of her head was level with his belt as she gently pried his fingers loose from where he was suddenly choking his putter. “You don’t need to grip your clubs this hard, either. Is your grip always this tight?”
His left knee started shaking. “I might be a little wound up today.”
The cool wind chilled his skin, or maybe he popped a sweat.
The brim of her golf hat bonked the top of Jericho’s putter. In exasperation, she whipped off her hat and tossed it aside. “Let go of the putter, Jericho. I’m trying to help you here.”
He could hear the smile in her voice, and he loosened his grip on the golf club, stretching his fingers where they cramped.
“Here’s how you do it.” She stroked each one of his fingers and wrapped them carefully around the top of the club, curling each one around the leather grip on the steel shaft.
Speaking of steel shafts—
As he looked down at the top of her head, her hair was parted into perfect little squares and gathered into ponytail holders at the top of her braids. The two perky white beads on the top of each were just frickin’ cute, such a contrast to her extraordinarily competent and competitive nature.
And yet, with her kneeling in front of him and her fingertips like rose petals stroking his fingers just inches away from his crotch, he was entirely distracted from her cute hairstyle.
Tiffany Jones was a professional golf instructor, and she was his employee. Jericho needed to get those filthy thoughts out of his head.
Damn, he was in trouble.
She said, “You run your finger down the golf club like you’re pointing at the putter head. It’s much more stable than the reverse claw.”
As she leaned back and stood, Jericho examined how she placed his hands on his putter. It did feel more solid. He rocked his shoulders, penduluming his putter and knocking the ball toward the hole.
This time, it rolled straight down the line and leaped in.
He straightened. “Okay, you’re right. That’s a better grip.”
Tiffany laughed, and Jericho’s shoulders relaxed at the sound of her tinkly giggle. But then she said, “For the free lesson, you have to answer three more questions.”
Jericho shrugged. “You’re going to get everything out of me anyway. Go ahead.”
“What are some of the options for increasing the net value of the club?” she asked.
He nodded at the acumen of her question. “There are a lot of options. The first and most obvious one is to raise membership rates and increase the number of members.”
Tiffany lifted her hands and let them fall in exasperation. She snarked, “Now why didn’t we think of that? Newcastle Golf Club has had cash flow problems for the last ten years. Don’t you think we’ve tried to get new members? And every time we try to raise the rates, people start resigning. We end up with less money than before. That’s why we were running the initiation fee sale.”
Jericho picked up his bag and slipped his arms through the backpack straps to carry it. Tiffany did the same. He gestured to the fourth hole, and they started walking toward the tee box.
The wind had freshened, and the chill was beginning to prickle his arms as they walked.
He said, “Your club has good bones, but I don’t see much here to entice higher-value clients.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? How can you value one member over another?”
“By the amount of money they spend at the club, of course. Besides initiation fees and monthly dues, there are a lot of other sources of revenue that I think NGC has been leaving on the table.”
“We don’t milk our members for every dollar we can get out of them. We don’t try to nickel and dime our members to death. The boxes of ProV1s in the clubhouse are overpriced enough as it is.”
“Yes, the pro shop’s golf balls are shockingly overpriced, but that’s not what I meant. Increasing revenues does depend on the quality of the members, though.”
“Quality of the members,” she repeated, her voice lower and more dangerous.
“In a manner of speaking.”
The golf course in front of them darkened as a cloud passed between them and the sun.
Jericho glanced skyward. The gossamer lines of cirrus clouds were gone, and the accumulating clouds were tinged with gray.
Tiffany stalked up to the tee box in front of him because, having won the previous hole, she had the honor. She stabbed a tee into the ground and then unfurled a massive drive, cutting the corner of the dog leg and ending up in the center of the golf course before her ball rolled nearly to the front edge of the green.
Jericho had stopped trying to beat her on any single hole because it wasn’t going to happen. A shot with his three-wood smacked his ball onto the fairway but nowhere near as long as hers.
After his short iron, a chip, and a long lag putt plus a tap-in, Tiffany used a seven iron for a quick bump
and run that rolled up to the hole and dropped in.
She’d made an eagle, two strokes under par and three better than his score.
Yeah, Jericho needed to concentrate on his own game because he was not going to win a single skin.
Tiffany retrieved her ball from the hole and turned to face Jericho. “You can’t just raise the rates here. A lot of families won’t be able to afford it, and this golf club means a lot to the families of Newcastle.”
“That’s not a question,” Jericho noted.
“You’re gentrifying it, aren’t you?”
“I’m not trying to price anybody out of membership,” he told her. “Indeed, I want a thriving golf club with a deep bench of members supporting it. I’m looking to add value, not replace anybody.”
“Why did you even buy this golf club if you were just going to change everything?”
“That’s another question. Save it for the fifth green.”
The fifth hole was a long par five, and it took them each several strokes to get down the fairway. Jericho’s longer drive helped him get to the green in three. After two longer irons, he had a long putt that, thanks to the new putting grip Tiffany had taught him, he managed to sink for a par.
She took an additional stroke to get to the putting green, but she sank her par putt, too.
A wet dot chilled the skin on Jericho’s arm, and more raindrops touched his neck and cheek.
Walking down the long fairway while carrying clubs had taken them twelve minutes, and clouds had gathered and darkened until they blanketed the entire sky above in just that time.
Tiffany said to him, “Fine, we split that hole, but skins carry over. I’ll get two questions on the next one.”
“Tiffany, do you think it’s looking like—”
Raindrops splatted more thickly around them.
She glanced up, the bright sky reflecting in the dark of her irises. “Uh-oh.”
The air flashed white as a lightning bolt lanced through the clouds above. Thunder crashed, shaking the flesh on Jericho’s bones.
His ears rang, and Jericho realized he had his hands around his head.
A horn near the clubhouse began blasting triple honks.
Tiffany grabbed his arm. “They’re blowing the horn in the take-shelter pattern. We’re too far from the clubhouse to make it back. There’s a storm shelter behind the green. Come on!”
Shelter from the Storm
Tiffany
Tiffany and Jericho had gotten soaked while sprinting for the shelter, but at least they hadn’t been hit by lightning.
Flashes of it painted the windows yellow, and immediate thunder shook the shack.
She unwove her arms from the straps of her golf bag and slung it to the floor, grabbing a clean towel from her bag to dab the water out of her hair, trying to save the style. Luckily, she’d been wearing the wide-brimmed golf hat to keep the sun off of her skin, and it seemed to have protected her hair from the worst of the rain, too.
Her drenched shirt clung to her soggy exercise bra, and she plucked at the fabric, wishing she could strip and wring it out.
Wooden benches lined the walls of the shack that served as a storm shelter. The club had stored a few of the old deck chairs in there when they’d bought new ones five years ago.
Jericho had also been deluged by the sudden spring thunderstorm. His clothes—and Tiffany could tell by the brand that they were far more expensive than hers—were pasted on him. His shirt stuck to his rounded shoulders and arms, broad chest, and the stacked bricks of his abdominals like a blue second skin, and raindrops shimmered in his dark blond hair. His golf pants, which were supposed to wick sweat away, had sucked up rainwater like a sponge and shrink-wrapped the thick muscles of his thighs and calves. A long, thick bulge curved down into his right pants leg.
Sweet Baby Jesus, Jericho Parr was even sexier when wet. The man did not skip leg day at the gym, and he was definitely not smooth like a Ken doll down there.
Whoa.
Tiffany looked away, lest he catch her gawking at his fine form again.
Damn, why did he have to be her boss?
Jericho sat in one of the low deck chairs and stretched his long legs, crossing them at the ankles. “Well, it looks like we’ve got time to talk now. You can ask your two questions from winning the fifth hole and your next thirteen questions that you’re going to win, if you want.”
Tiffany plopped her soggy butt in another low chair near him and stretched out her legs, grinning. “You don’t think you’re going to win even one skin?”
He chuckled and ripped open the Velcro on his left-handed golf glove. “I haven’t had my ass kicked this badly since I was fourteen years old and got suckered into a blackjack game at boarding school with a German prince who could count cards. I had to ask my father for money to cover my gambling debts. I’ve only wagered like that twice in my life. You’d think I might have learned not to gamble. Evidently, I suck at it.”
As he peeled off his glove inside-out like a freaking striptease, Tiffany idly noted that Jericho wasn’t wearing a ring of any sort on his left hand.
Just noticed.
Not that she was looking.
There was nothing wrong with noticing that.
She said, “You were fourteen. You shouldn’t have been playing blackjack with an adult.”
“Oh, he was sixteen. He was a junior in the upper school. I was a freshman.”
“I don’t even want to ask why you were hanging out with European royalty in high school,” she said, kicking off her shoes. Water oozed out the sides. So much for them being water-resistant.
Jericho laughed one rueful chuff and did the same with his shoes. Water spilling out of his shoes darkened the wooden floor. “My parents shipped me off to boarding school in Switzerland when I was six. The school, which is called the Le Rosey Institute, launched a big advertising campaign in the Northeast aimed at well-off parents who wanted to one-up the other old money parents who were sending their kids to Andover Academy or Phillips-Exeter. I think their marketing materials must have mentioned the fact that there was no way we could call them to come pick us up every weekend.”
“That’s sad.” She was careful to make it sound like she was sad for him, but seriously, what kind of parents would think of that as a selling point? “But it couldn’t have been that bad. How much money could you have lost in a high school card game?”
“Fifteen thousand dollars,” Jericho muttered.
Her jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me?”
“Not at all.”
“Wow, you are quite a gambler, Jericho Parr.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he muttered.
“My daddy would’ve paddled my butt if I’d have lost fifteen thousand dollars in a card game. No, he would’ve killed me and buried my dead body somewhere in the woods because it’d be cheaper that way. He’s got three other kids. I’m expendable.”
He chuckled. “From what I found out later, they’d been going easy on us because we were Americans. Most of the time, fifty or a hundred thousand dollars changed hands. One of the other guys in the card game, Pierre, is going to be the sovereign Prince of Monaco, like the casino in the James Bond movies. He’s going to rule a country.”
“Thought you said he was a German prince,” Tiffany said. Liars changed their stories.
“Different guy,” Jericho said, lazily drawing circles in the air with a finger to indicate the several royal princes sitting around the poker table all those years ago.
A table of teenage royals playing cards was so far outside of Tiffany’s experience that she couldn’t even picture it. “I didn’t go to high school with anybody like that. I thought it was pretty nifty that the mayor’s kids went to Newcastle Free Academy instead of a private school. Even when I was at Tennessee State, everybody I knew was fighting their way up for a place in the world, not already living at the top.”
Jericho was still smiling at her, his head tilted.
�
�Do you still keep in touch with guys like that? You just call them up and say, hey, Prince Bob, what’re you doing for dinner Friday? You want to get some Cheesecake Factory?”
Jericho was chuckling by the time she was done. “There were twelve Americans in my graduating class. Of course, we hung out together, but there were some groups even within that. I hung around with guys whose parents had also been taken in by the advertising. Le Rosey recruited half a dozen scholarship kids in my year, too.”
“I guess that’s nice.”
“I think it was for public relations. The scholarship kids seemed to think that, too. Le Rosey had gotten a reputation for being the most expensive and exclusive boarding school in the world and only enrolling the children of royalty and Russian mafia oligarchs. So they branched out the year I started. They began accepting a lot more kids from the ruling political party of China, Indian tech billionaires, and upper-upper-class families in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Mauritius. I might’ve had five million dollars in my trust fund, but those people were wealthy. I learned humility real quick.”
Rain continued to pound on the wooden roof of the storm shelter in runs and thrills, and thunder rumbled in the distance. “Wow, and I thought you were rich, dropping millions of dollars on a golf course in the middle of the night.”
He shrugged. “It was a good price.”
“NGC cost you more than five million dollars.”
Jericho nodded. “I may have been exaggerating when I said that Plan A hadn’t worked out for me. It turns out I’m pretty good at venture capital, and my three buddies are, too. The company that we started, Last Chance, Inc., has done well enough. We’re comfortable.”
“Comfortable?” One of her eyebrows started twitching because she’d wrenched it up so far.
“Comfortable,” he confirmed.
“That means you’re rich, doesn’t it?”
“It means we’re comfortable.”
“Right.” Tiffany began her attack. “But now you’re going to raise NGC’s dues and price out the families.”
Jericho shook his head. Water droplets shook out of his hair, showering his shoulders and spotting the floor. “I don’t want to do that, but I have to charge what the club will be worth. This isn’t a charity.”
Under Parr Page 8
