Closer by Morning Read Online Free PDF

him being cast as the love interest in a teen TV show. Like modeling, the role hadn’t required him to do much except stand around and look decorative, but it had been a foot in the door to the career he really wanted. He’d always been a passionate performer in the school drama group and had kept up acting classes during his poster boy years with a view to someday moving on.
    From the TV series, he had progressed to his first film role—Chuck, the all-American football hero boyfriend of the second lead in a schmaltzy teen romance. The movie had been awful but a decent success at the summer box office. It had been his next role that really changed things.
    An Axe in the Dark had been a bandwagon-chasing addition to the torture porn genre, which was currently in vogue. Dale had a sizeable role, the obligatory hunky boyfriend of the leading lady, but it was the elaborately staged murder of his character that had become the film’s major talking point. In just a pair of tattered shorts, he had been hanged ingloriously on a meat hook while the ax-wielding killer had hacked him in half. The unsettling, but timeless juxtaposition of beauty and violence, combined with some of the most realistic gore effects ever seen in a movie, meant the film and that scene had been a huge hit—two weeks at number one in the American box office.
    Dale had gone from support player to top billing in his next run of movies. The films themselves had been interchangeable, a roster of romantic comedies and gory horror films, but the parts improved. In the years that had followed, he had become a familiar face in TV shows and direct to video movies. Sadly, his biggest film, an earthquake movie with an enormous budget and an all-star cast, had been a huge flop. He had been far from the worst thing in it, but the movie’s failure had put an early end to his hopes of being an A-list leading man.
    But he was still working steadily. That’s all any decent actor could hope for.
    â€œGot another horror picture for you,” his agent had announced.
    â€œAnother one?” An Axe in the Dark might have given him a career but it had sure as hell typecast him too.
    â€œIt’s a good one this time. Two months in Europe. Expenses. Top billing. Decent money. They want you. They’re not looking at anyone else.”
    With no jobs pending, Dale had boarded a plane for Prague with little idea how this low budget indie film was about to change his life forever. It’s in the House was identical to any of the other found footage ghost stories cluttering up the multiplexes. He hadn’t even looked at the script until he was on the plane.
    He had been glad to get out of town. He’d been secretly involved with a married businessman for almost a year when the guy’s wife had found out. She never had discovered the identity of her husband’s lover but came pretty damn close. He’d hoped to land the lead in an NBC pilot later that year. A whiff of scandal now would ruin that opportunity for good.
    The hokey thrills of It’s in the House came at just the right time.
    Laura Kinnear had been originally from London. Working as a makeup artist in New York and Los Angeles, she eventually had found herself on the set of a low-budget horror film in Europe with Dale Zachary. She had been just a year younger, with a tomboyish attitude and filthy sense of humor. Dale had never met a woman quite like her. Always cheerful, and even in the makeup chair at seven in the morning, she could make him laugh harder than any comedian he’d seen.
    Most mornings he hadn’t been able to wait to get on the set to see her. Finally, a woman he really clicked with. A woman who had been able to banish all those foolish notions he’d had about other guys. By the end of the second week they had started sleeping together and when the movie had wrapped, Laura had returned to Los Angeles with Dale.
    He had scored the lead in the NBC