First Impressions: The Fix Up Part 12

"Whatever rolls your socks up."

Ben sighed and pulled out a chair and slumped down into it, folding his hands on the table. Holly tried not to stare at them. G.o.d, they were huge.

"So where do we start?" he asked. "Guide me, Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi."

"Star Trek again?"

He widened his eyes, then pantomimed stabbing himself through the chest. "Are you kidding me?"

"What?"

"Star Wars. Holly, Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi is from Star Wars. How can you confuse the two?"

"For starters, I've never seen either one. I only got your Star Trek reference the other night because I had a roommate who was really into it."

Ben shook his head in mock dismay. "How is it possible we're from the same planet?"

"I've been wondering the same thing myself."

He grinned and leaned further back into the chair, stretching his legs out in front of him. "One of these days, we'll have to have a Star Wars marathon."

Holly bit her lip, not sure whether the idea thrilled her or just created more potential for temptation. She was saved from deciding when he swung the subject back to the task at hand.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to digress from the purpose of our meeting. Where were we?"

"You asked me for public speaking tips," Holly reminded him. "Here's one: get your b.u.t.t out of the chair."

He grinned and straightened up in his seat, but didn't stand. "You mean I can't deliver a sales presentation from a seated position?"

"You order drive-thru tacos from a seated position. You watch bad sci-fi from a seated position. You use the bathroom in a seated position."

"Hey, I'm a guy-"

"My point is that you need to establish a commanding presence right off the bat." She moved across the front of the room, keeping her posture straight in ill.u.s.tration. "You have your height, Ben. Use it to your advantage. Take charge of the room right from the start."

Looking bemused, he stood up. Holly stared up at him, startled by the sheer size of him again.

"Better?" he asked.

"Much." She took a step back, needing to put a little s.p.a.ce between them. "Okay, that's a starting point. So tell me about this sales presentation. What are you going to be discussing?"

"Substrate-level phosphorylation in the absence of a respiratory electron transport chain."

She stared at him. "Was that in English?"

Ben shoved his gla.s.ses up on his nose. "I might have to dial it back a little for the intended audience."

"Unless your intended audience is comprised of nuclear physicists, I'd say that's an accurate a.s.sessment."

"The audience is a team of executives from Kleinberger. Some of the same guys you met the other night."

"Aren't they a brewing company?"

"Yep. Second largest craft brewery in the nation, and we're trying to sell them some top-of-the-line fermentation equipment we've engineered and manufactured. It's going to revolutionize their whole process."

"So-beer? You'll be talking about beer?"

"In a roundabout way, I guess so."

"Well, there's a topic you know and love. Why don't you start there?"

"Maybe. But I also need to discuss the engineering aspect of things."

Ben shoved his hands in his pockets, but Holly shook her head. "Nope, no slouching, no sitting, no hands in pockets. You're in a boardroom, not a video arcade."

"That's unfortunate. I'd be a lot more excited about this if I got to play Frogger with the audience." His face brightened suddenly, and Holly thought for the hundredth time how attractive he was when he smiled for real. Then he pulled his hands out of his pockets and held up a jump drive. "I almost forgot, I have a PowerPoint presentation."

"Perfect! Let's take a look at it." She held out her hand, and he dropped the little device into her palm. It was warm from his body heat, and she had the ridiculous urge to press the little electronic gadget to her cheek just to feel something he'd kept snugged up against his thigh.

She ordered herself to stop thinking about Ben's crotch and start thinking about his presentation. "When did you put this PowerPoint together?"

"About an hour after my dad came into my office and asked me to do this. It's probably a little rough."

Holly dropped into a chair at the conference table and shoved the jump drive into the slot on the boardroom laptop. She waited as the computer brought up a list of files. There was only one to display. "Is this it? Kleinberger Sales Presentation."

"Yep, that's the one."

She clicked the file, then waited as the computer whirred and flashed. When the PowerPoint file popped up, Holly stared at it for a few beats. "Your presentation is t.i.tled Eukaryotes, Glucose, and You."

"Too long?"

"Too-well, a lot of things." She clicked through a few of the slides, dismayed to see they all looked a lot like the first one. There were no graphics. Just a whole lot of really big words.

"Look, I have a great graphic designer who does amazing PowerPoint work," she said. "Let me give this to her in the morning and see if she can spiff it up a little for you."

"I appreciate it." Ben shoved his hands in his pockets again, then grimaced and pulled them out. "Sorry. Okay, what's next?"

"Have you rehea.r.s.ed any of what you want to say?"

"I have a few ideas. I could use help organizing them. What's the best way to approach that?"

"A good strategy is to present your information in an inverted pyramid." Holly folded her hands on the table in front of her, feeling more in control of herself now that they were talking about a subject she knew well. "In other words, you want to give your audience the flashiest, most pertinent, most important information right up front."

Ben quirked an eyebrow at her. "I'm talking about the metabolic process of converting sugar into alcohol. What part of that is flashy?"

"The part where it becomes beer."

"Good point."

"Let's try this a different way," she said, minimizing his PowerPoint slides on the screen. "Is there any cost savings involved? Projected outcomes? Anything that might make an audience of business professionals sit up and pay attention?"

"Good, that's good." Ben pulled a piece of scratch paper out of the basket at the center of the table and plucked a pen from behind his ear. He dropped into a chair beside Holly and began scrawling notes. "I have a couple ideas about that."

She watched his gaze move back and forth across the page as he scribbled furiously. The beautiful amber-flecked eyes flashed with excitement, and his ma.s.sive hand made the pen look like a toy. Whatever he was jotting, he seemed enthusiastic about it.

Why was that so s.e.xy?

"Do you antic.i.p.ate any really tough questions from the audience?" she prompted, crossing her legs to keep her mind off the thought of having Ben between them. "Any flaws in your plan that they might be inclined to zero in on?"

Ben glanced up and gave her a thoughtful look. "Well, I guess they might ask how Langley Enterprises' equipment differs from that of our closest compet.i.tors."

"And how does your equipment differ?"

"My equipment is huge. Much bigger than anyone else's equipment."

Holly gripped the edge of the table. "What?"

"The fermentation tanks," he said, giving her a funny smile. "They're quite large. I developed them myself, and they're capable of brewing up to five hundred barrels of beer in a twenty-four-hour period. That's pretty huge."

"It sounds like it," Holly said faintly. "What else?"

"Mine's also much harder."

"Oh. Well-"

"The metal Langley used, I mean. It's a 440C stainless steel I developed with a specific formulation of chromium and nickel designed for strength and corrosion resistance."

"Good," she said, nodding to rea.s.sure herself there was nothing s.e.xual about this conversation. Nothing at all. "And you say you developed it yourself?"

"Yes, I was the head engineer on the project." He beamed proudly, leaning forward and spreading his hands wide.

Don't look at his hands, don't look at his hands, don't look- "I made some very exciting developments with minerals," Ben said. "No one's ever utilized this exact formulation of materials to create equipment used in the brewing process before, so it's extremely revolutionary. I melded the stainless steel with a unique mineral blend of f.u.kalite-"

"I'm sorry, what?"

"f.u.kalite. It's a calcium carbonate silicate hydrate mineral."

"f.u.kalite." She stared at him. "Did you just make that up?"

He grinned. "Google it. F-U-K-A-L-I-T-E."

She looked at him for a few beats, then down at the laptop. Moving her fingers over the keyboard, she typed in the letters and waited. "I'll be d.a.m.ned."

"I told you."

Holly looked up to see him smirking, and she wondered if it was the thrill of being right, or the thrill of being able to say something so innocently filthy to her. Or filthily innocent. Was filthily even a word?

G.o.d, she was losing it.

But it was clear Ben was gaining confidence here. Whatever the cause of it, it was exactly the demeanor she hoped to refine in him. Holly drew her hands off the laptop and wiped her palms on her skirt. "This is good stuff, Ben. Important information to share with your audience. It's also clear you're pa.s.sionate about the subject, which is a key thing to get across in your presentation."

"Thanks. We reviewed a lot of this in the all-hands meeting last week."

"Excellent," she said, trying not to let her gaze drop to his hands. "Okay, what else? Tell me some more things you think your potential client will get excited about."

"Well, there's the elongation."

Holly swallowed hard. "Elongation?"

"Absolutely." Ben nodded to himself as he bent to scribble more notes, really getting into it now. "Greater elongation means the material is less p.r.o.ne to fracture. While that typically results in lower stiffness, that's not the case with the materials I've developed."

"Oh." Holly uncrossed and recrossed her legs. "So stiffness isn't a problem?"

Ben grinned again. "Not in this case."

"Good." She nodded, trying to keep her expression as professional as possible. "You want to address that right up front with your presentation. Let them know you've thought of it already, then show them the logic and evidence that proves-um-whatever you said about size and stiffness and hardness."

Ben grinned wider and stood up, his long legs carrying him to the whiteboard in two easy strides. There was a certain spring in his step that told her he was feeling pumped up about the subject. That he knew it well, and felt confident about his approach.

G.o.d, why was that so d.a.m.n s.e.xy?

"This is really helping, Holly," he said as he picked up a dry erase marker. "Thanks for getting my gears turning here."

"Don't mention it." She cleared her throat again, wondering who turned up the heater in the conference room. "Um, okay, so tell me more about the elongation. You think this is something your audience will be concerned with?"

"Definitely. As I was saying, greater elongation often goes hand in hand with lower stiffness." He turned to the whiteboard and began scrawling a complicated-looking formula while Holly fought once more not to stare at his hands.

"And your equipment has the right amount of elongation?"

"It's perfect. See, elongation is usually expressed as a percentage of the length change over the initial measured length."

"Right. I'll see if the designers can work some details about elongation, stiffness, and length into the PowerPoint presentation." She took a deep breath, willing herself to stay focused, but it was so hard.

So hard. So d.a.m.n hard.

"Okay, it's also important in any public presentation to have a very clear call-to-action," she said.

"Action?"

"Yes. What is it you're hoping your audience will do?"

Ben studied her for a moment, his amber-flecked gaze holding hers for a few beats longer than Holly expected. "Give it to me," he said. "Their business, I mean. I want them to give me their business."

She licked her lips. He had to know what he was doing, right? She honestly couldn't tell. Maybe it was all in her head, or under her skirt, to be more precise.

Then again, maybe he knew d.a.m.n well he was turning her on. Did it matter, as long as he was embracing his inner alpha male?

Holly took a shaky breath. "Then tell them to give it to you. Clearly. And make sure you show them why that's a smart business decision."