Straddling the Line - By Sarah M. Anderson Page 0,58

reaches over a hundred million potential home viewers!” Bobby grinned like an idiot.

Ben was having a little trouble understanding this so-called deal. “You—what? You sold our family?”

“Not exactly.” He flashed Ben his salesman smile. Ben hated that smile. “We’ll be paying a local production company to shoot and edit the webisodes.” He actually seemed pleased with this.

Ben turned to Billy. “Did you know about this? Did you agree to being filmed?”

“Hell, no.” Billy took a big breath and stood up to his full six-six height. “I won’t do it.”

“Ditto.” Ben stood with his brother.

What would Josey say—what would she think? They’d hit a nice rhythm. She slept at his place a few nights each week. They ate dinner, played pool, watched movies and had the kind of sex that men fought wars over. Her mom liked him. Her whole tribe liked him—well, that might be a little strong, but at the very least, they didn’t go out of their way to make his life more difficult, unlike his actual family. If he were a reality star? That would all change. It might even go away.

And then he’d be alone. With his family. Again.

“This is going to make us a lot of money,” Dad said. “We need to bring in a little more capital, and this is the way to do it.”

“Selling our family for a reality show? Are you serious? You’d rather have cameras follow us around for months rather than let me invest?”

Whatever control Ben had was starting to slip. He knew his father didn’t respect him. He could live with that—he had lived with it all this time. But to have the old man go so far out of his way to publically illustrate how little he valued Ben’s skills?

He couldn’t imagine that being hit with an angle grinder hurt any worse.

“I trust Bobby.” His father pulled himself up to his full height and slapped his youngest son on the back. “Your mother would have been proud of you, son.”

But Dad didn’t trust Ben.

How pointless it had all been, Ben saw now, to spend years trying to earn his father’s approval, his respect. To be someone his father could be proud of in a bar on a Friday night. Ben might as well have tried to make the sky yellow and the grass orange. He would have had more luck.

Everyone turned to look at him in a moment of calm before the hurricane-force storm. His whole life, he’d been the peacemaker who kept the wheels from falling off. He always kept his damned promises. That was who he was.

Wasn’t it?

Maybe not. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life being the sucker with a spare tire chained to him, fixing a family that was always going to be broken. He wanted something different. Something more.

When he didn’t rush in to talk everyone down and smooth ruffled feathers, Bobby did what he always did—he opened his big, fat mouth. “Then it’s settled. We’re going to need to conserve our resources to make sure we can pay the production company, so I canceled that big equipment order you guys put in.”

Ben shot to his feet as he and Billy hollered, “You did what?”

Old habits died hard, and he found himself halfheartedly holding Billy back.

So this was what it came down to. In trying to keep one promise, he’d managed to break a whole bunch of his promises. The fact of the matter was that he’d never be able to keep his promise to his mother. He could keep trying until he was blue in the face, but there was no fixing his family. And his mother was dead.

He’d promised Josey, too. So much more than equipment. He’d promised that she would come first. Not just in bed, he realized, but in his life. Maybe he hadn’t said the words out loud, but he’d promised her with his actions. And that was a promise he planned to keep.

“That’s my equipment.” Billy all but growled the response, momentarily lifting Ben’s hopes. He wasn’t alone in this. It was him and Billy against Dad and Bobby. He’d take those odds.

Dad snorted in unmasked scorn as he looked at Ben and said, “I didn’t approve any of that new junk.”

He didn’t entirely trust himself not to tell the old man where he could stick his money, so he kept his mouth shut.

“Besides, we don’t need any fancy new computer equipment,” Dad snarled, turning his attention to Billy. “The old stuff works just