One thing was abundantly clear. Ben Bolton wasn’t a normal CFO.
Below her, someone wolf-whistled. Before she could react—cringe, stick out her chin in defiance, anything—Bolton whipped his body to the railing and shouted, “That’s enough!” in a voice powerful enough that Josey swore she could feel the vibrations through the metal stairs.
The sounds of the workshop—the clanging of hammers hitting metal, the whine of air compressors, a stream of words she could only vaguely discern as cursing—instantly died down to a low hum as Bolton bristled. For a moment, Josey thought she saw the railing bend in his grasp.
Josey’s insides went a little gooey. This wasn’t a show of power, this was actual power, so potent that she could nearly taste it. Ben Bolton commanded absolute respect, and he got it. She was an outsider here—she couldn’t think of a time when she’d been more out of her league—but he still defended her without a second thought.
Bolton’s glare swung down to where she stood precariously perched on a step, as if he thought she’d challenge the authority that had silently reined in twelve men armed with power tools. And then he was moving away from her, taking each step slowly and methodically this time.
Josey’s pulse began to flutter at her wrists. She was used to men trying to impress her with their money, their things—all symbols of their power. This was a man who didn’t appear to give a darn about impressing her. Heck, given the way he now stood at the top of the stairs, arms crossed and boot tapping with obvious impatience at her careful pace—Josey was pretty sure he detested her. Somehow, that made him that much more impressive.
When she neared the top, Bolton flung open a steel door and waited for her to get her butt in the office with poorly disguised contempt on his face. The doom ricocheting around her belly grew harder to ignore. She’d missed her chance to bolt, though. She had no choice but to tough this out.
The moment the door shut, the sounds of the shop died away. Blissful silence filled her ears, but her eyes were now taking the brunt of things. Bolton’s office had so much metal in it that Josey was immediately thankful the sun wasn’t shining in through the floor-to-wall windows. A stainless-steel desk was underneath sprawling piles of papers. Filing cabinets that matched the desk perfectly made up a whole wall.
Everything in this gray office—down to the leather executive chair and the walls—said money. The leather-and-chrome seats downstairs had said money, too. But this was different. Downstairs screamed of someone dressing the place to impress. Up here? Mr. Bolton didn’t give a flying rat’s behind about impressing anyone. This was all about control. Or Ben Bolton was color-blind. Either way, the whole place looked depressingly industrial. In a wire mesh trash can, she saw the remains of what had to be the recently departed intercom. Had he ripped it out of the wall? Because of her?
No wonder Bolton was in a bad mood. If Josey had to work in this office, she’d probably curl up into a lump of iron ore and die.
Bolton motioned for her to sit in a shop chair—also metal. He sat down and fixed her with another one of those dangerous/desirous glares. He picked up a pen and began bouncing the tip on the metal desk, which filled the air with a perfectly timed pinging. “What do you want?”
Oh, yeah, he was mad. Being as she had no plan B, Josey decided to stick with plan A. It was still a plan, after all. “Mr. Bolton—”
“Ben.”
That was more like it. Familiarity bred success. “Ben,” she started over. “Where did you go to school?”
Robert had graduated from a suburban high school in a wealthy area of Rapid City about twenty miles from where they sat. Odds were decent Ben had gone there, too.
“What?” Confusion. Also not bad. An opponent off-balance was easier to push in the right direction.
“I’d be willing to bet that you graduated near the top of your class, maybe played on the football team? You look like a former quarterback.” Josey followed this up with one of her 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 al
most 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 numbers guy—he liked his facts hard and fast. But he was a biker, too—so he could appreciate things that were rougher, tougher and just a little bit dirty.
Her face—and other parts—flushed hot. So much for not blushing.
His eyes widened, the blue getting bluer as he noticed her unprofessional redness. The corner of his mouth crooked up again as he leaned a few inches toward her. A small movement, to be sure—but she felt the heat arc between them. Desire kicked the temperature up several notches.
Wow. One slightly unprofessional thought, and she was on the verge of melting in the middle of a pitch. This wasn’t like her. She prided herself on keeping business and pleasure separate. Some people thought they could buy her with the right donations, but Josey never even allowed that kind of quid pro quo to enter the conversation.
With everything she had, Josey pushed on. She had a job to do. Pleasure came later—if it came at all. She needed to get the school ready more than she needed what would no doubt be a short-lived fling. She didn’t have time for flings, especially with a white man.
She handed Ben the three-color brochure she’d designed herself. “The Pine Ridge Charter School is designed to give our Lakota children a solid foundation, not only for their education, but for their lives. Studies have shown that graduating from high school raises a person’s total lifetime earnings over a million dollars more than a dropout. All it takes is a fraction of that cost up-front.”
He flipped her brochure over. She could see him processing the photos she’d taken of the happy kids crowded around her mother for a story at a family gathering, and the architectural drawings for the six-room schoolhouse that was only half built out on the flat grassland of the rez. “Your children?” His eyes cut down to her bare left hand.
“I am a registered member of the Pine Ridge tribe of the Lakota Sioux.” She hated having to add the “registered” part, but there it was. The red in her hair made people look at her like she was just a wannabe. She had her grandfather to thank for her hair, but that was the only part of him that showed up. “My mother will be the principal and chief educator at the new school. She has a doctorate in education and has spent a lifetime teaching our children how important a good education is to them—and to the tribe.”
“Which explains why you sound like you graduated from high school.”
Now it was her turn to glare. “My MBA is from Columbia. Yours?”
“Berkley.” He flipped the brochure onto his desk. “How much?”
“We aren’t begging for money.” Mostly because she knew she wouldn’t get it, but it was also a point of pride. The Lakota didn’t beg. They asked nicely. “We’re offering a unique sponsorship opportunity for businesses around the state. In return for supplies, we will provide free publicity in several forms. Our website will have a detailed list of contributors on our site, as well as links and feedback to your own internet presence.” She leaned forward and tapped her finger on the web address at the bottom of the brochure. When she looked up at Ben again, his eyes were fastened on her face—not her cleavage. But the intensity of his gaze made her feel like he was looking down her dress.
Slowly, she sat back in her seat. His eyes never budged, but the inherent danger that had lurked in them since word one was almost gone. Nothing but desire was left. “Everything donated to the school will be labeled with the sponsors’ information, helping your business build brand-loyal customers while equipping them with the tools they need to be able to afford your products—”
“You’re going to put ads in the school?”
No, Ben Bolton was nobody’s idiot. “I prefer not to think of them as ads—sponsorship. More along the lines of a pizza parlor sponsoring a T-ball team.”
His shoulders moved, a small motion that might have been a sign of laughter. “So, ads.”
“For your business,” she added, undeterred. “Crazy Horse Choppers has been around for forty years, and given how you built this state-of-the-art production facility a few years ago, I have every reason to believe you’ll be around for another forty.”
He tilted his head in her direction, a sign of respect from a man who commanded it. So she wasn’t completely unprepared—a comforting thought. His appreciation was short-lived. “I’m only going to ask this one more time. What do you want?”
“The Pine Ridge Charter School is designed to provide children with not only a world-class education—” he began to ping the pen on the desktop again “—but job training. To that end, we are asking for the equipment necessary to launch an in-depth vocational technology program.”
A smile—a real one, the kind of smile that made a woman melt in her business dress—graced his face. Whoa. All kinds of hot. “Finally. The point. You want me to give you shop tools for free.”
The way he said it hit her funny. A note of panic started growing again in her belly. “In so many words, yes.”
He picked up the brochure again. He looked like he was really weighing her proposal, but then he said, “No.” He set the brochure carefully to one side and put both hands on the desk, palms-down. For all the world, he looked like he was about to vault the darn thing. “Look. You’re obviously intelligent and obviously beautiful. But this business operates on razor-thin margins. I’m not about to give away a bunch of tools for nothing.”
A small, girly part of her went all gooey. He thought she was beautiful. Obviously beautiful. “Not even for the free advertising?” Her voice came out pinched. She couldn’t manage to keep the defeat out of it.
His shoulders flexed. “Not even for the free advertising.”
He was staring at her again, waiting to see if she’d challenge him. She swallowed and bit her lower lip. The barest glimmer of desire crossed his face.
“Isn’t there…anything I can do to change your mind?” The moment the words left her mouth, she wished she could take them back. She didn’t make offers like that, ever. So why the heck had she just said that?
Not that it worked. She thought she saw his pupils dilate, but it was hard to be sure because his eyes narrowed to angry slits. “Does that work?”
No, she wanted to tell him, because she’d never made the offer before. Yes, he was hot. He was also arrogant, domineering and quite possibly heartless—a real Scrooge in leather. All reasons her mouth should have stayed firmly closed. It didn’t matter whether or not Ben Bolton was good in bed. Or on his desk. Or even on one of his choppers, for that matter. It didn’t matter if she wanted to find out—or it shouldn’t matter. But with one mistaken sentence, suddenly it did.
And he wouldn’t even say yes to that.
The rejection stung her pride, and she wanted to tell him to go to hell, but she never got the chance. At that moment, a huge crash reverberated up through the floor of his office, loud enough that every piece of metal in the joint shook with enough force that she had to grab on to her chair to keep from falling off it.
Ben slumped forward, weariness on his face. He held up one hand and did a silent countdown—three, two, one—before his phone buzzed.
“What?” He didn’t sound surprised.
The voice on the other end was loud enough that even Josey winced. Ben had to hold the receiver a half a foot away from his head.
“I’m busy” was all he said, slamming the phone down. “Miss White Plume…” He paused, as if he was waiting for her to reciprocate his “Ben” with her “Josey.” When she didn’t, he went on with an apologetic shrug. “I’d recommend coming over here,” he said, motioning to his side of the desk. Another huge crash shook the floor. “Right now.”
Closer to him—mere seconds after that rejection? The next crash seemed closer—like a herd of buffalo were stam
peding up the stairs. Josey was in no mood to be trampled. She gathered her things and scurried over to Ben’s side of the desk. He took a protective step in front of her just as the door was thrown open with enough force that she was sure she saw the hinges come loose.
A man—no, more like a monster—burst into the room. He was huge—easily six-five, with a long handlebar mustache that was jet-black. His muscles were barely contained by a straining blue T-shirt, which matched the do-rag he had tied over his head. His eyes were hidden by wraparound shades, making it impossible to know how old he was. “Goddamn it,” he roared, the noise echoing off all the metal, “you tell that bastard you call a brother that I told him to—”
Josey’s presence registered, and the man bit off his curse at the same time an even bigger man, covered with enough facial hair to render him indistinguishable from a black bear, shoved into the room. “I told you, there’s no way you can pull off that asinine idea, and—”
The man with the handlebar mustache punched the bear in the shoulder and jerked a thumb toward Josey. She couldn’t help it. Even though she was mad as all get-out at Ben for turning her down—both times—she found herself cowering behind him. Compared to the wall of bikers hollering on the other side of the desk, Ben was the safest thing in the room. He leaned in front of her a little more and put one hand behind him, keeping her contained. She was furious with him, more furious with herself—but that simple act of protection left her feeling grateful.
“Aw, hell,” the bear muttered.
“What you got there, son?”
Ah. So the man with the handlebar mustache was Bruce Bolton, chief executive officer of Crazy Horse Choppers—and father of the Bolton men. Which meant that the bear behind him was probably Billy, the creative force behind Crazy Horse. Looked like that test drive they’d been on hadn’t gone well.
Straddling the Line Page 2