The Fix Up (First Impressions #1) (9 page)

“I’d love to meet her sometime.”

“She’s the one I consulted before we went shopping with you the other night. In a roundabout way, she’s responsible for dressing you.”

“Only fair, since you’re responsible for undressing me.” He grimaced. “I meant the zipper. Helping me fix the zipper—”

“It’s okay, I knew what you meant.” Holly felt the heat creeping into her cheeks, so she turned toward the lobby to continue the tour. “We offer a wide range of marketing services at First Impressions, but branding and rebranding is our specialty.”

“Are these all awards you’ve won?”

She nodded toward the plaques and certificates on the wall, feeling a swell of pride in her belly. “We have a very talented team here.”

“I can see that.”

Something about his interest in her career left her wondering whether Chase had ever shown this much curiosity about her job. At one point not long after their honeymoon, he’d stopped by her office to take her to lunch and spent an hour visiting with her employees. At first, Holly had been thrilled with the attention, delighted by his interest in her career and his effort to get to know the people who made up her circle of friends and professional acquaintances.

It wasn’t until later she’d realized he’d been snooping around for ammunition, eager to prove to Holly that she needed to cut back her hours.

“Marla in payroll said you’ve been very supportive of her choice to work part-time after having a baby,” Chase had said later, twining his fingers through her hair to loosen her chignon.

“Her name is Mara,” Holly had replied slowly, wondering why he’d taken an interest. “But yes, I helped her work out a job-share arrangement with another payroll specialist who also wanted to work part-time. It’s gone well so far.”

“Hmm,” Chase had murmured. “So hypothetically speaking, you’re in support of a woman putting her family first before her career.”

“Of course,” Holly said a little too quickly. “Or finding a way to balance the two—it’s up to the individual woman, of course.” She remembered the sinking feeling in her gut, the knowledge of what was coming next.

“So you’re saying family isn’t important to you
personally
?” Chase had challenged.

“Wow, are these ad concepts something you guys came up with?”

Ben’s deep voice jarred Holly from the unpleasant trip down memory lane. She blinked, then followed his gaze to the magnetic board covered with a colorful array of ad slicks. He pointed to one, and she nodded, pleased to see he’d zeroed in on the concept she’d personally developed.

“Yes, that’s for a new advertising campaign we’ve been working on for a kombucha brewer that’s suddenly getting national media attention. These were mock-ups for a print campaign we showed them this morning.”

“Did they like it?”

“Very much. The whole team invested a lot into the pitch, and the company owners could tell.”

“Which one’s yours?”

Holly shrugged. “Everything is a team effort around here. No one person gets credit for a concept or a pitch.”

Ben grinned and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Sure, but just between you and me, I’m betting one of these has a little more of you in it.”

She hesitated, then leaned past him to point at one of the ad slicks, conscious of the heat radiating from his body. “That one right there. The one with the dog and the grapes.”

“I thought so. Very clever. It looks like something you’d come up with.”

She smiled, pretty sure it was the first time someone she’d known less than a week had been able to pick her work out of a lineup. “Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “Shall we get started on the speech coaching?”

He turned to face her, his expression somewhere between resignation and amusement. “You mean you didn’t invite me here to ogle your—work?”

“You’re welcome to ogle my—
work
—all you want. But our time might be better spent if you do it while I’m offering you tips on public speaking.”

“All right then. Shall we do it right here?”

“Let’s move to the conference room.” She led the way, conscious of Ben falling into step behind her. She’d worn her hair up in a chignon, and the exposed nape of her neck tingled with the thought of his breath on her bare skin.

She rounded the corner and halted just inside the conference room, then turned to Ben and gestured for him to join her. “I imagine this might be a similar space to the one where you’ll be presenting?”

He stepped past her and nodded as he surveyed the room. “Langley Enterprises doesn’t have a cool purple conference room table, but yes—the setup is probably pretty similar. Whiteboard, giant presentation screen, a big, ominous table with way too many chairs for way too many people.”

“Haven’t you heard that old public speaking tip about picturing your audience in their underwear?”

“Since my dad will be there, I’d rather not.”

Holly laughed and moved to the front of the room. “After we get started, I’m going to have you do some visualization stuff where you imagine bodies in each of those chairs.”

“As in cadavers or Victoria’s swimsuit models?”

“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. God, they were huge.

“So where do we start?” he asked. “Guide me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“
Star Trek
again?”

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

“What?”

“
Star Wars.
Holly, Obi-Wan Kenobi 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 butt 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 illustration. “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 space 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 glasses 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 assessment.”

“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 titled 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 rehearsed 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 massive hand made the pen look like a toy. Whatever he was jotting, he seemed enthusiastic about it.

Why was that so sexy?

“Do you anticipate 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 competitors.”

“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 reassure herself there was nothing sexual 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 fukalite—”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Fukalite. It’s a calcium carbonate silicate hydrate mineral.”

“Fukalite.” 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 damned.”

“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?