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 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
