A Place to Rest My Heart by Galen Rose Page A

they’d start to consider me nuts. I had never held a job that gave me a place or reason to be proud. Dishwashers hardly warrant a business card; neither do janitors.
    Laney Murphy , the card said. I found an envelope and quickly addressed it to Officer Chen. I looked up the address in Los Angeles and hoped he might be pleased and in a small way I had hoped he’d be proud. It meant something to me for him to be proud of what I had finally accomplished.
    I had always felt I owed him for helping me. I found a stamp and placed it in the outgoing mailbox.
    When I got back to my desk Chase was waiting for me and for the next three weeks he barely gave me time to breathe. Three hours a day, Chase put me through the ringer in evaluating my previous training in self-defense. The man had moves I’d never seen before. If Mason was a panther, Chase was a snake. But he also had an incredible amount of patience, which he needed when he pushed me too hard and too far and I let my temper take over. The only person that usually got hurt — or at the very least slammed on the mat — was me. Time and time again he cautioned me about letting my anger take over.
    Then I had weapons evaluation. All Woo employees had to be trained to use a handgun. “You will be licensed to carry a concealed weapon but most of the time you won’t carry one. There have been times that one is necessary, though,” Chase told me.
    Then there was the technical end of it all. Although I wasn’t installing alarm systems I still had to know them inside and out. So when I could dredge up the energy, I was studying schematics on alarms and surveillance systems of every type, Woo-manufactured or otherwise. This meant I got to spend time with Dallas. I felt hesitant at first. The man had a voice like warm honey with that New Orleans accent of his, and he was smoother than silk. He exuded a strong sexual vibe and yet his exuberance for his job was almost kid-in-a-toy-store. He and Mindy worked together most of the time. I never would have guessed they were friends but they were thick as thieves. Mindy was punk, goth, and outrageous, Dallas was sultry and loved setting up pranks like a high school kid. When it came to surveillance he was bonkers for the stuff. He had microphones planted all over the place. At first I thought this was a bit extreme, but he mostly did it to test out any of his latest inventions. I was sitting at my desk one day when I found one of his mini cams, neatly nestled inside a rose. My mysterious rose deliverer still left me a rose once a week. It varied in time or day but it was always a pink one and always delivered when I was away from my desk. Dallas had offered to set up a camera to catch them but I told him no. I had no ideas as to who it was and since I was enjoying them I saw no reason to stop them. That is, until week number four when they stopped.
    Every Monday I had lunch with Mike. We got along very well and he always made me laugh. Other than that night at the movies he had tried nothing more than a peck on the cheek. I had thought he was interested, but I had either read him wrong or he had changed his mind. In the grand scheme of things it really didn’t matter. I needed his friendship, and anything else would have interfered with work.
    What did matter was Sean — and he was driving me nuts. I thought about him at the oddest times. In particular, I remembered the kiss that had bruised my mouth and made me want more. I dreamed about Sean every night. On top of being exhausted from training, studying, and helping Tommy out when it was busy, I was now losing sleep too. Sean hardly had more than five words to say to me on a daily basis and when I was in the same room with him he either left the room or started an argument with me. Mike and I had been running all over the city as I learned how to install the alarms I had been studying, and also bypass them. By the end of the fourth week my get up and go had left me