Jericho was lying in his bed in his hotel room at the Newcastle Inn and Spa, working with spreadsheets on his computer as he analyzed the flow of money in and out of Newcastle Golf Club—mostly out—and listening to the Golf Channel.
The mattress sank under his butt, and he was leaning over one leg as he scrolled through the matrix of numbers. Making NGC profitable was going to take an Act of God. Buying it in the middle of the night had been a foolish leap he shouldn’t have taken.
Surely, he hadn’t bought it just because a beautiful woman had shown him around. Surely, Jericho wasn’t that easily swayed.
From the first time he’d seen her swing a golf club, he’d wanted to see if she had firm muscle under that enticing, soft roundness he’d watched while she walked.
As far as Jericho was concerned, there was just nothing more fun than an athletic woman who could keep up with him.
And then she’d turned out to be fun to hang out with on the golf course. He was still chuckling over what she’d written on her golf ball.
And then in the storm shelter when she’d hooked her finger in his belt and offered—
Down, boy. I’ll get to you in a minute. I need a shower anyway.
And he’d taken the chance to ask her out to dinner because Jericho had had plenty of blow jobs in his life. At boarding school, adult supervision in the dorms essentially ended when the students started in the upper school at thirteen. His latest string of relationships had all ended in less than eight weeks, and he’d come to the startling hypothesis that maybe he shouldn’t screw around so much.
Perhaps, just perhaps, he should try something else.
It was going to be difficult for him to keep his hands off of Tiffany, though. Even after less than an hour alone with her and watching her lips move when she talked, and listening to her soft, dulcet voice had led to his tongue between her—
I said, down, boy.
As a matter of fact, being around Tiffany for less than an hour had influenced Jericho to buy a bankrupt golf course.
Yeah, it had.
On the other hand, if NGC rose to even a ten percent positive return on investment, that would be an enormous increase in its net value because at his time of purchase, it had been worth zilch.
Indeed, the club had been worth less than zilch because it hadn’t even been able to meet payroll for the month.
It was a bad investment.
NGC was a bottomless money pit that Jericho was going to shovel cash into, because otherwise, he stood to lose a hundred million bucks.
He wanted to go back in time and drown New-Year’s-Eve Jericho in the freezing Atlantic Ocean any time before he’d signed that damn wager. At least he wouldn’t have died in debt. If they all lost their bets to The Shark, seventy years might not be enough to recoup those losses.
Just as Jericho was beginning to curse the other Last Chance guys, his phone buzzed.
Might be Tiffany.
He scrambled across the bed to the phone, slipping on the dark blue duvet, but the name on the phone was Mitchell Saltonstall.
Damn.
He answered it. “Hey, Match. What’s up?”
“I heard you bought a golf course,” Match said.
“It’s a country club. Or a ‘golf club.’ I don’t know, Match. I don’t think it’s going to have the ROI to win the bet. You guys had better come up with something good if we’re going to have a chance to beat The Shark.”
“I haven’t found jack squat yet,” Match said. “It’s not easy to find a ‘golf-related establishment’ that you can increase its net value. Most of them aren’t run by idiots.”
“I found one that was. Or at least it was run by a board that was more interested in its own aggrandizement and control culture than it was in profitability. They were running a seventy-percent-off sale on initiation dues, and they still had no takers.”
“Yikes.”
“Because it’s a private club, there are some state rules about advertising, but they were doing nothing. The board was more interested in making sure they retained their feudal right to snap up prime tee times than the asking price.”
“Did you let them keep their tee time privileges?” Match asked.
“Hell, no.”
“Are the greens burnt to death or something?”
Jericho mused, “Nope. It’s in fair shape. They just didn’t know how to price it or negotiate.”
“Okay, so you might have a better chance at increasing its value and winning the bet than we thought.”
“So to speak.”
“Right,” Match said. “Well, we might not be able to consult officially, but how about you comp the three of us a round of golf on your new course tomorrow? Maybe we could take a look and see what’s going on with it.”
They showed up when the sun shone high above the course, shrinking the shadows down to tiny pools around their feet on the grass.
Jericho was working in his office on the second floor of the golf club when he glanced out the window overlooking the parking lot and saw three familiar sports cars parked around his Jaguar.
Just as he was getting ready to text something snarky to those guys, Morrissey Sand texted him, “Were we supposed to meet you on the driving range? Because we’ve only got half an hour until our tee time.”
Jericho strolled down the narrow path leading from the clubhouse to the driving range that Tiffany had introduced him to when he’d been scoping out the club. The weeds had grown a little higher in the days since, as weeds did.
At the range, he found Morrissey, Mitchell “Match” Saltonstall, and Kingston Moore pounding balls. The four of them had decent golf swings because their boarding school regarded sports as one of the few acceptable pastimes for the progeny of the uppermost class. All four of them were excellent golfers, skiers, sailors, and horsemen.
The training in golf and sailing had come in handy in making business deals.
As Jericho approached the other three, he raised his hand and called out, “Hey, imagine meeting you assholes here.”
Morrissey, who stood at the end of the driving range closest to Jericho, raised his head at the sound of Jericho’s voice. His dark hair was bound in a short ponytail at the back of his skull. “At least you’ve got a grass driving range instead of mats. That’s a good feature.”
Beyond the three guys hitting balls, a sharp crack detonated like a firecracker, and a golf ball bulleted down the range.
Jericho leaned and looked beyond his friends.
As he’d suspected, Tiffany Jones stood a few tee boxes behind them and was smacking golf balls down the fairway like they’d offended her. Her swing was a graceful twist of her waspish waist like she might pirouette and unleash that coiled power like a whip.
After she uncurled from her swing, Tiffany glanced up and caught Jericho’s eye. She smiled and bent to place another golf ball on the tee in front of her.
He must’ve grinned at her or something because Morrissey, who’d had his head up, turned and looked behind himself. “What? Is something going on?”
Tiffany’s head popped up again, her ribbon-like braids swinging from the sudden movement. She glanced at Morrissey and then shook her head at Jericho.
Jericho said to Morrissey, “Nope, nothing. Just glad to see you guys. I mean, I haven’t seen you in what, a week and a half?”
Behind Morrissey, Kingston Moore laughed. Though Skins was musclebound, he still managed to turn his shoulders for his backswing, but his golf club ended up at an odd angle instead of parallel to the ground above his head. “We knew you couldn’t get along without us.”
“Yeah, that must be it,” Jericho said, smiling like his three asshole best friends weren’t standing a few feet away from Tiffany Jones.
Morrissey looked back over his shoulder again, took a thorough look at Tiffany, and then turned back to Jericho. “Is that Miss May I see behind me?”
“No,” Jericho said. “Ms. Jones is the assistant pro here.”
“So, you’re not fishing off the company pier anymore?” Kingston asked. “You must be hard up after Miss April threw you over the side after only two weeks.”
Running out onto the driving range and hoping to be instantly killed by a speeding golf ball to the head seemed like an attractive option. “Can we just not—”
They laughed at him.
Mitchell Saltonstall was in the third position, swinging three clubs at once to stretch his shoulders. “Yep, nice range, but our tee times are in fifteen minutes. We should start walking over there so we’ll have enough time to tell you how to tear this country club apart and put it back together so that it’s profitable.”
Behind Match, Tiffany straightened with her arm extended and her hand resting on her golf club as if it were a walking stick. Her bright eyes had turned sharp as she looked first at his three friends and then at Jericho.
He turned back to the three guys. “My clubs are waiting for us at the first tee. I’m eager to hear your advice about directions for Newcastle Golf Club.” Maybe that would reassure her.
The guys inserted their clubs into their bags and hoisted them for the trek over to the first tee.
Just as they were walking away from the driving range, Kingston trumpeted, “This place has some potential, Jericho, but if you want to maximize profit and net value, you’re going to have to knock it all down and start over.”
Jericho kept himself from visibly cringing, but when he looked behind them at Tiffany, she was still standing in her tee box and watching them walk away with an icy glare.
They were due to have supper the next day, so he could explain who these guys were then.
On the first tee box, Jericho let the guys tee off first and then knocked a golf ball nearly three hundred yards down the fairway and into the right-side rough.
Kingston chuckled as they walked down the short grass in the middle of the fairway. “Long and wrong, Jericho. Long and wrong.”
Yeah, he’d heard that before.
While they played the round of golf, the three guys from Last Chance, Inc. grilled him on membership numbers, initiations and dues, average net profit per member, and the overall business of Newcastle Golf Club.
Jericho had been studying the numbers for the past couple of days, and he had all those digits at his fingertips. While one guy was swinging, the other three guys had their phones out and ran calculations and scenarios on their calculators or spreadsheet apps.
Morrissey Sand was Last Chance’s math whiz, and for every number Jericho threw at him, Morrissey swatted back three. “The overall financial structure of the club should have been sound because the demographics around here are golden. If you look at the town of Newcastle’s average income, it’s not enough to support a good country club. The new wealth is concentrated in that McMansion housing development. Incomes in that neighborhood should be in the upper quintile, which means most of those people should have the disposable income to belong to a social club of some sort. That McMansion zone is only ten minutes away using the bypass that routes traffic around the one-way, cow-path streets of downtown Newcastle.”
Kingston Moore, however, was a sociologist as much as he was a businessman. “That McMansion housing development is going to be key. That’s where you need to concentrate your advertising. A lot of the houses within the city limits look a hundred years old, and not in a good way. They look like somebody needs to start enforcing fire and building codes. I saw a bunch of hole-in-the-wall restaurants that probably have amazing food, but I didn’t see any nice restaurants where people from the McMansions can go for Saturday date night or take their law clients to. Also, the nearest marina is seventy-five miles away, so the people who settled here aren’t yacht people. This community needs an upscale, exclusive country club that every successful person needs to belong to if they’re going to do business in this town, and you can charge them an appropriate fee to get in.”
Mitchell Saltonstall was Last Chance’s blood-and-guts businessman, a guy who looked affable enough but who made sure all their businesses turned in respectable numbers every month. “Your biggest problem is your profit-per-member number. Your restaurant isn’t turning a profit at all, and the bar profit is the most anemic I have ever seen. How did these inept managers lose money selling alcohol? I didn’t think that was possible.”
At the end of the round, Jericho had five pages of notes and twelve emergency action items that he had dictated into his phone as his friends ripped apart the Newcastle Golf Club’s operation and finances.
They were right, though.
Newcastle Golf Club was not a charity, and it was Jericho’s only chance to win that stupid New Year’s Eve bet with Gabriel Fish.
Jericho couldn’t allow sentimental nostalgia to guide his business decisions. If he screwed up Newcastle Golf Club, it could bankrupt himself, his businesses, Last Chance, Inc., and his friends.