

He grabbed her near a golf cart, quickly took her clothes off, and lifted her up against a wall. Another time, they didn’t even make it out of the garage. Not long after that her cell phone began bleating with texts: Tiger needed her. He showed up that morning for breakfast, however, with his buddies, and gave her a knowing look. Lawton was in and out of the house in 30 to 45 minutes, leaving before dawn “looking like a rag doll.” As she drove home to change before reporting back to work, she kept thinking, That was great, but it was a one-night stand. She took his penis in her hand and said, “Wow,” she tells me. They ended up naked in the kitchen, with its “fine porcelain tile and brushed-stainless-steel appliances,” she remembers. I like that.” He tugged her hair, spanked her butt, and whispered things such as Do you like that? Do you want it harder? It was over in minutes, a needy and uncontrollable release for a man who, Lawton imagined, “had a voracious appetite for sex and wasn’t getting it at home.” “We ended up doing it right there,” she says. Without turning on the lights, Tiger guided her to a couch in what she assumed was the den, where he immediately began kissing her-“unbuttoning as he was kissing.” It all happened far too fast for her to think clearly or even ask him to wear a condom, which, she tells me, he never did with her. The garage door opened, they got out of their cars, and she followed him inside. Motioning for her to follow him, he drove across the street and through the gates of Isleworth to his house. He was sitting in his black Escalade with its tinted windows, and she was driving her sister’s Mitsubishi. she rendezvoused with him as he’d instructed her, outside the CVS pharmacy next to the restaurant where she worked. “I was thinking, This can’t be real.” She went out on the dance floor to work off some of her anxiety, and when she returned Tiger said, “You look hot.

alcove, and he gestured for the guard to raise the velvet rope and let the two women inside. Woods was sitting with some buddies in the V.I.P. That night she took her sister Bobbi with her to the Blue Martini, the fancy, island-themed bar in Orlando’s most expensive shopping mall. Soon after that, however, the phone at her hostess counter rang. “I didn’t see any signs of affection.… I figured he was in a loveless relationship with his wife.” One morning, as Lawton was clearing tables, she says, “I could feel his eyes on me.” A fellow employee scoffed and said it was all in her head. “One of them would read the paper, just very cold,” says Lawton. For months, she explains, she had seated Tiger and Elin Nordegren, the gorgeous, blonde Swedish ice queen, who always ordered her husband’s breakfast for him but rarely spoke to him or made physical contact while they were eating. She’s still svelte and shapely, a sweet, ivory-skinned young woman with long black hair falling in ringlets over her shoulders. “I was a 34B then,” she says, indicating that she’s put on a few pounds since. His office is in a nearby building, and across the street from it is the Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, where he often had breakfast with his wife, before his double life made headlines, and where, in 2006, Lawton came into his orbit. His magnificent $2.4 million mansion is in the gated community of Isleworth. We are in the exclusive Orlando suburb of Windermere, Florida, Woods’s small, self-contained bubble of a world. Mindy Lawton, a 34-year-old restaurant hostess who had a 14-month affair with Tiger Woods, is taking me on a tour of the golfer’s indiscretions.
