Straddling the Line - By Sarah M. Anderson Page 0,4
award-winning smiles—warm, full, with just a hint of flirting while she checked out those shoulders again. Wow. If Ben Bolton wasn’t so intimidating, he’d be all kinds of hot. What did he look like without all the gray? Boy, she’d love to see what he looked like on a bike. He had to ride. He ran a motorcycle company.
Flattery usually got her everywhere—but not with this man. Ben’s glare moved further away from desire and a heck of a lot closer to dangerous. “Valedictorian. And running back, All-State. So what?”
Josey managed to swallow without breaking her smile. The “All-State” was a good sign—bragging, if only just. But the pinging of the pen on metal got louder—and faster. Besides, she shouldn’t be entertaining any sexual thoughts about another white man, not after the last debacle. She needed to stick to her goals here. Getting the school ready would earn her a place within the tribe—permanently.
“Your school had computers in every classroom, didn’t it?” Before he could demand “So what?” again, she kept going. “New textbooks every few years, top-of-the-line football helmets and teachers who actually understood what they taught, right?”
With a final, resounding clang, the pen stopped bouncing. Ben didn’t stop glaring, though. Josey sat through the silence. She would not let this man know he intimidated her. So, chin up and shoulders back, she met his gaze and waited.
His hair was a deep brown, she realized. She could see the warm tones underneath—much browner than her own chestnut hair. A few streaks of salty white were trying to get a foothold at his temple, but his hair was cropped close in a no-nonsense buzz cut. The scowl he wore looked permanent.
Does he have any fun?
The question popped into her mind out of the blue, but it had nothing to do with game-planning her strategy. She found herself hoping he had some kind of fun, but she doubted it occurred within the walls of this steel box.
Finally, he broke the silence. “What do you want.”
It wasn’t a question—oh, no. A question would be getting off easy. This was an order, plain and simple.
That meant the answer to all of her previous questions was yes. She couldn’t afford to waste any more time on setting up the pitch. If she didn’t get on with it, he might take it upon himself to throw her out personally.
“Are you aware that the state of South Dakota has recently been forced to cut all funding to schools across the board?”
A look of disbelief stole over his face. “What?”
Right. He hadn’t known she was coming; obviously, his brother hadn’t told him about her. She pressed on. “As I told your brother Robert—”
“You mean Bobby.”
She forced a smile at the interruption. Hot and intimidating sounded like a good combo, but the hotness just made the intimidating more intense. She prayed she wasn’t about to start blushing. “Of course. As I told him, I’m seeking donations for the Pine Ridge Charter School.” The look of disbelief got closer to incredulous, but Josey didn’t give him a chance to interrupt her again. “Fewer than twenty percent of Lakota Sioux students graduate from high school—less than thirty percent go past the eighth grade.” No, he didn’t believe that, either, but then, few people did. The numbers were too unbelievable.
“Currently,” she went on like a warrior out to count coup, “there is no school located within a two-hour drive from some parts of the reservation. Many students must be bussed two hours each way. If they’re lucky, they get one of the good schools. If they’re not, though, they get textbooks that are twenty years old, no computers, teachers who don’t give a darn if their students live or die.” The near-curse word got her something that might have been a quarter of a grin.
Maybe Ben liked things a little gritty. Well, Josey could do gritty. “Between the butt-numbing trip on buses that break down all the time, the crappy education and the unrelenting bullying for being American Indians, most choose to drop out. People expect them to fail. Unemployment on the reservation is also near eighty percent. Any idiot can see that figure mirrors the dropout rate almost precisely.” She batted her eyes again. “You don’t look like an idiot to me.”
The pinging started back up. The only thing he was missing was a cymbal. “What do you want?” His words were more cautious this time.
He was listening. Suddenly, Josey had a good feeling about this. Ben Bolton was a