Lost and Found (Growing Pains #1)(23)

That’s going a bit far.

Ready. She was ready.

When it was time, she grabbed her laptop, her lucky mug, and headed up to conference room C. The smallest one. Why Sean, the best salesman, was heading a sales pitch for a tiny, weak company, when everyone important—including the rest of Research—was working on Dell, Krista couldn’t even guess. It probably had something to do with the Cosmos laughing at her.

Regardless, it was experience and that’s what she needed.

Up at the conference room, with weak legs and a tingling, nearly churning stomach, she poked her head in the door. Sean was standing with two women and a man, reviewing pictures on a large billboard.

“Can I help you?”

Krista jumped and spilled the contents in her mug. Luckily, it was water. She had been worried about being too wired with coffee so she switched it up.

She turned as she stepped into the room. A smallish man wearing an off-the-rack suit, probably from the Men’s Warehouse, was addressing her. He had gelled hair, a wide, flat nose, a goatee, and a sparkling, giant gold watch. Krista wondered if he was a car salesman before this job.

“I’m Research. Krista, I mean. From Research. I’m supposed to be here.”

Lame.

“Krista…” It was Sean. She turned to him gratefully. The intensity of the car salesman’s gaze was disconcerting. “Just the person I was looking for. Would you mind walking me through what you plan to go over?”

“Uh…” She glanced back at the other salesman, wondering if she should say something. He quickly shifted his gaze from her butt to her face.

That question answered, Krista shuffled into the room quickly. Sean stepped behind her, cutting off the eye-line of the other yahoo. It was a bad start and certainly not the professionalism she expected.

Letting it drift away, she set up her computer at a far table, butt to the wall, before looking back up at Sean. She could tell her mouth was a thin line of disapproval, but she was angry and disgusted, so there wasn’t much to be done.

“Your slides?” Sean prompted, looking fixedly into her eyes.

Krista cleared her throat and tucked a flyaway strand of hair behind her ear. “I thought you approved the slides?”

“I did, yes. The slides were artfully done. I was just wondering about your delivery?”

Krista swallowed nervously, hesitating to make sure her voice would stay steady and unaffected. He took the pause for suspicion.

Smoothly, he said, “I just want to make sure we are all presenting as a team. I’ve already talked with everyone else, and I want to be the glue between your faction and the art people. It makes for a more cohesive presentation, don’t you think?”

God she was inexperienced, and she was doing a poor job of hiding it. She felt like she was about to throw up, but she nodded as if trying to say, Yes, of course, that sounds about right. “Oh, sure.”

She angled her laptop toward him and stepped to the right, allowing him to step closer and view the screen. She opened up the presentation and put it on slide show mode. Before she could begin, he said, “You changed some of the colors.”

He scooted in closer, hitting her with those vivid, sparkling eyes, so confident, a question in his look. Krista’s nervousness combined with butterflies at his proximity quickly derailed her already fragile concentration.

“Would you like to sit on my lap?” she blurted.

“Oh. Excuse me.” He took a half-step away with a devilishly handsome grin, swirling his unique scent around her head.

It was a smell you couldn’t buy. He smelled like the beach at sunset on a mild summer day. A proper beach. With beautiful people and cresting waves. A Hawaiian beach, maybe. Or Mexico. Somewhere warm and lovely. Get her a Mai Tai and a beach chair and she was home.

She distractedly waved her hand in front of her face to clear the air. She needed fresh air.

“Not much I can do about the stink,” Sean said casually.

She could feel a smile working its way up her face as she looked at him with wide eyes. “Well, we can’t all be perfect.” She couldn’t help but laugh.

He laughed with her and leaned a little more comfortably against the table.

“Okay.” She sighed. Then flinched.

“You okay?”

“Oh. Yeah. Mr. Montgomery has a ba—uh, habit of sighing all the time. For some reason I’ve picked it up, but my friend told me she’d give me a Thump Bird the next time she caught me doing it, so I’ve been trying to stop.”

“I noticed that about him. It drives John crazy. What’s a Thump Bird?”

Krista’s face went red. “Oh, it’s a…well…”

She looked around the room, making sure no one was watching. When she saw that they were all engrossed in poster boards or idle chit-chat, she touched her middle finger to her thumb like she was doing an “A-OK” sign gesture, but with her middle finger. The other fingers were out as straight as possible. She made like her hand was a bird, flying, her fingers wings, bobbing as if in the air. She lost her nerve before she made the traditional Thump Bird sound, and then collapsed in a fit of giggles.

“I can’t do it. If you ever meet Jasmine have her show you. Eventually you get flicked in the head. It doesn’t hurt per se, but she does it when you least expect it. You sit there wondering what that weird sound is… then bang--Thump Bird.”