Dead By Midnight by Beverly Barton Page A

“We can both get jobs. You can go to school at night until you get your degree and I can sign with an agent and get small parts in TV at first. And later on, when you’re a big-time LA detective and I’m a movie star, we’ll be the envy of every other couple in Hollywood. Just think how romantic that is—the detective and the actress.”
    Those had been her dreams, not his. She had wanted a glamorous life surrounded by the rich and famous. All he’d ever wanted was to finish college, work for local law enforcement, get married, and raise a family. He was a simple man with simple wants and needs. Lorie had been—and probably still was—a complicated woman with the kind of wants and needs he could never fulfill.
    It had been his choice to stay in Dunmore and not follow her to LA. At first, she had called him every day, then every week and then every month. He would never forget the last time she’d called and the things they had said to each other.
    â€œHoney, forget all that fame and fortune bullshit and come home where you belong.”
    â€œOh, Mike, why can’t you understand? I just got a speaking part on a Law and Order episode. I want you to be happy for me. I want you to fly out here and—”
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œYou mean you won’t.”
    â€œYeah, okay. I won’t. I don’t belong out there and neither do you.”
    â€œThat’s where you’re wrong. I’m not going to live and die in Dunmore, Alabama, and waste the talent the Good Lord gave me. I’ve got a good singing voice and I’m taking acting lessons and my teacher says I’m a natural. And I’m told I have the kind of looks that will help me go far in the business.”
    â€œYou do what you have to do,” he’d said. “And I’ll do what I have to do.”
    â€œWhat you have to do doesn’t include me anymore, does it? You’ve stopped loving me…if you ever really did.”
    â€œHow can you say that? I love you so damn much it hurts,” he had told her. “And I miss you something awful. It’s you who doesn’t love me. If you did, you’d come home and we’d get married the way we planned. In a few years, we could save up enough for a house and our first baby.”
    â€œI don’t want a baby! Not now. Not for years and years.”
    In the end, Mike had been forced to accept the fact that Lorie would never come back to him, that he had lost her forever.
    It had taken him years to get over her, to move on with his life, and he could thank Molly for that. She had been his salvation. All the dreams he’d once had that included Lorie, all the plans the two of them had made together, he had fulfilled with another woman, with Molly. Thinking about his children, he knew that was the way things were meant to be.
    He wasn’t the kind of man who wasted his time looking back and wondering what if? or wished for things that he couldn’t have.
    Yeah, sure, he could have Lorie, could have had her when she first came back to Dunmore, could have had her before and after Molly died. He could probably still have her. But the Lorie he had known and loved no longer existed. His Lorie was as dead to him as Molly was. The Lorie who had come to him a sixteen-year-old virgin, the girl who had been his and only his. The teenager who had planned her future around him and the family they would one day have.
    The Lorie Hammonds who had returned to Dunmore nine years ago was a bruised and battered, used and discarded whore. God only knew how many men she’d had sex with, not just in that sleazy porno movie she’d made, but during the years she had been trying to get her big break. Just about every man in Dunmore had seen her in that film. He had seen the movie once, and the sight of her and what she’d been doing had made him sick.
    Why she had ever thought when she returned to Dunmore, her reputation