Ultimate Courage (True Heroes #2)(8)

To her, what she’d found indicated someone here was IT savvy. But if one of them was, why hadn’t anyone made a client database and reduced the need for all this paper?

Gah. Forget waiting for Alex or Brandon to come back. How mad could they really get at her, anyway? The worst they could do was fire her, and this was just a trial run. If they did offer her a steady job and she did decide to take it, she’d want to get a better system in place. And if this job opportunity didn’t work out, she’d be saving somebody else in the future.

Good enough reasoning for her.

Opening up one of the applications on the desktop, she set up and formatted a simple spreadsheet. It could easily be imported into a more sophisticated database later, but this would be sufficient to at least start organizing the data on their clients. Turning to the pile of papers from today’s class, she dove in. Once she entered those, she’d go for the deep drawer.

It was nice to exercise her organizational skills. The few jobs she’d been able to pick up over the last six months had been under-the-table jobs at mom-and-pop shops, running a cash register or serving ice cream. Here and there, even last night, she’d considered a retail job or something with a chance at benefits, but once she’d woke up in the morning with a clear head, she’d decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Anything that required filling out a W-4 might be a bad idea, at least for the time being.

After a while, Elisa straightened in her chair and sighed. She rolled her shoulders to ease some of the tension caused by working at a laptop and stretched her arms over her head. Taking in a deep breath, she let it out slowly, then grimaced as her left wrist throbbed. She’d taken off the brace in the midst of her data entry because it hampered her typing speed. Probably should put it back on.

An ice pack landed on the desk next to her.

She jumped, reaching for her neat piles of paperwork, but the ice pack was well away from them. Then she looked up at the man on the other side of the desk.

The expression on Alex’s face might’ve been irritation. Difficult to tell because his mouth was perpetually set in a hard line, and it was hard to read expression in a person’s eyes when all you ever looked at was any place on the face but the eyes. Because direct eye contact was asking for trouble.

She shuddered.

Not with everyone. Maybe. But better safe than sorry. Better not to if she didn’t plan to get to know someone in any case. She’d rather have a polite, nice impression of everyone she came into contact with, and not see the potential monster lurking behind the public face.

“Hey.” Alex’s gruff word brought her out of her musings.

“I’m sorry.” The apology came immediately, followed by the guilt. She was always sorry, even if she didn’t know what she’d done yet.

The corners of his mouth turned downward into a frown. “You haven’t done anything wrong as far as I know.”

She swallowed. Oh, good. “I wasn’t sure if I could work on the laptop, but if I could show you—”

He held up a finger, and she shut up. Right away. Her chest constricted. He was going to be mad. She should have known better than to mess with their laptop. She’d overstepped her bounds. Miserable, she started to put her careful piles back in the drawer as quickly as she could.

“Hold up for a second.” There was exasperation in his voice, and she froze.

She should’ve waited to hear the rest of what he said. Damn, she should’ve…

“First, put the ice pack on your wrist.” His tone wasn’t angry, and there was no edge of censure to his words. “Second, when was the last time you had something to eat?”

“Huh?” Surprised, she looked up into his face and was caught by his dark gaze. Now that she was giving him direct eye contact, it was hard to look away. There was a magnetism about him, and a calm that drew her in, like she was being pulled into the eye of a storm.

It was…enticing.

He held her in his stare for a long moment and she didn’t want to look away, but then he seemed to shake himself free, too.

“We’re ordering hot subs for lunch. I wanted to be sure to include something for you in the order. Do you like Italian?” Gruff, but kind. Maybe awkward. He kept his sentences short, imparting the information he wanted to communicate with minimum verbiage.

She reached out for the ice pack without breaking their eye contact. Suddenly, she didn’t want to. Self-preservation or no. She couldn’t read him very well, but she did notice that he seemed to like it better if she did meet his gaze. The cool pack was an instant relief on her wrist, and she berated herself silently for having ignored it. It needed to heal.

“Italian is fine; great even.” She ventured hesitantly. “If you’re ordering hot subs, I could go for an eggplant parm or meatball parm if they have one or the other.”

He nodded.

“How much?” She started to go for her wallet in her back pocket.

He shook his head in a sharp negative. “Lunch is on us.”

The statement brooked no argument.

She subsided. Unsure. “Thank you.”

“Serena was hungry anyway.” He glanced out the window toward a house beyond the main yard.

Elisa drew her brows together. “Serena?”

“Boom.” He turned his attention back to her and the full impact hit her, making her breath catch in her throat. “Everyone at Revolution MMA and her school calls her Boom, but her real name is Serena. It’s just me and her. Her mother passed away a few years ago before we moved here. I guess because it’s mostly me and Forte and Cruz, her nickname became more of a habit than we intended. But Serena likes being called Boom. Says it makes her sound awesome.”