Page 42 of The Fix Up

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 howdoesyour 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?”

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