Her fingers faltered on the computer keyboard and made a mess that she had to undo. “Who said I was there?” she asked uneasily.

“My sister, Brenda,” he replied.

“Oh.” She knew Brenda from church. She liked her. It wasn’t Brenda’s fault that she had Attila the Hun here for a brother.

“Well?” he persisted.

She looked up into curious black eyes. She averted her own. She couldn’t handle meeting that glittery gaze very often. It unsettled her. “I was thinking about the benefits,” she said absently.

“You have benefits here,” he said shortly. “Insurance, retirement, the whole bundle, besides which, you don’t have to carry a rifle and shoot people.”

She flushed. She wasn’t going to tell him that she’d never get in the Army, with her health problems. It had been a whim. When Morris got out, and he might very soon, she and Tad would be on the streets, because there was no way she’d agree to live under the same roof with her stepbrother. Besides being afraid of him, physically, she was afraid of what retribution he might want to exact from her and her little brother. Morris was vindictive. Clancey’s testimony had put him in jail for six years. He wasn’t going to forgive that, no matter how nice he’d sounded in that letter he wrote her after Ben died. Anyway, that had been years ago.

“I could learn to carry a rifle,” she muttered.

“And shoot people?”

She drew in a breath and shrugged. “They have clerks and stuff in the Army,” she said. “I could do that.”

“Maybe you could, but what a recruiter tells you and what you actually have to do are two different things.”

“Like you know,” she said irritably.

“I do know,” he replied. “I went into the Army at the age of eighteen. They promised me sunny California. I ended up in Afghanistan, learning to speak Farsi and shoot people.”

She flushed. “Oh. Sorry.”

He cocked his head and frowned. “If you don’t like it here, you can always go back to work for Hollister,” he pointed out. He even looked hopeful.

“I can’t walk that far.”

He blinked. “Are we having the same conversation?”

“I can’t walk all the way downtown and back every day,” she repeated. “I live two blocks from here, so I can walk to work.”

“You worked for Hollister for four years,” he pointed out, having read it on her employment application.

“Yes, when he was in an office the next street over, before he got promoted to captain,” she pointed out. “Now he works downtown.”

“You can get cabs to work, or the bus.”

“I can’t afford cabs and the bus doesn’t come near my house.”