Dead by Midnight - Beverly Barton [28]
“You need to make it perfectly clear to your wife that Lorie Hammonds is your past and that she and the kids are your present and future,” his mother had told him.
He’d been dumbfounded that Molly had felt Lorie could pose a threat to their marriage.
“I’ll tell her that she has nothing to worry about,” Mike had assured his mother. “The only feelings I have for Lorie now are loathing and disgust.”
“I’d keep that to myself. Those are powerfully strong feelings. It’s best if Molly doesn’t see how much Lorie still affects you.”
“She doesn’t—”
“You forget who you’re talking to, boy. I was around when Lorie left you high and dry. You loved that girl with everything in you. Those kinds of feelings don’t die. You just bury them deep and hope and pray you can keep them buried.”
He had denied that beneath his seething animosity for Lorie the love he had once felt for her still existed. And he’d kept on denying it all these years.
I don’t love her. She means nothing to me. Less than nothing.
Then stop thinking about her, you dope.
He walked into the office, flipped on a light, and pulled out his swivel chair. After plopping down in the Office Depot special—on sale for $99.99—he glanced at the shelves above his computer desk. A row of photos spread across one shelf, school pictures of Hannah and M.J., various photos of him and his kids. And one photo of his family, taken two years before Molly died.
I loved you, Molly. You were the best thing that ever happened to me.
His gaze traveled over the books and magazines stored on the shelves and settled on his old yearbooks. He hadn’t looked through them in years. In fact, right after Lorie dumped him, he had tossed all four yearbooks in the trash. His mother had retrieved them and kept them for him.
Half standing, he reached up and yanked his senior yearbook off the shelf. As he settled back into his chair, he opened the book and flipped through it. Dust particles flicked off the pages and danced in the air, their images appearing in the iridescent light from the overhead fixture. He smelled a hint of mustiness.
And then he stopped flipping through the pages and opened the book at the sophomore photographs. A sixteen-year-old Lorie Hammonds smiled up at him, her dark eyes sultry even then. His body tightened with desire. It had been that way since the first time he’d noticed her. That much between them hadn’t changed. As desperately as he wanted to deny it, he had to admit that he still wanted Lorie.
They had been in lust long before they fell in love. From the get-go, sex between them had been explosive. She’d been a virgin. He hadn’t. Being a good-looking jock, he’d had his pick of easy lays from the time he was fifteen. But Lorie had been different. She had been his, only his, the girl he wanted to marry and make the mother of his children.
Mike slammed the yearbook closed and tossed it on the floor.
“Damn you, Lorie! Damn you to hell.”
Chapter 6
Derek parked his Vette in the driveway, got out, locked it, and stretched his long arms over his head. He had driven in from Memphis this morning, a good three-and-a-half-hour drive, and hadn’t made any stops as he’d crossed the entire state of Mississippi. The farther east he had traveled, the hillier the landscape, going from flatland through the Magnolia State to the tentacles of the Appalachian Mountains that spread into the northern and eastern sections of Alabama. After retrieving his suitcase from the trunk, he glanced around, taking in the beauty of the renovated Victorian house and the peaceful street lined with large, mature trees beginning to come to life in the early days of spring. Dunmore was an old town, seeped in Southern traditions that grounded it in the past. And yet when he had spent quite a bit of time here last year, he had seen glimpses of change, of people looking to the future.
When the Powell Agency had sent him there last