Lock Your Dreams At Night

About the Book

When beautiful Lauren Kendall´s husband dies, she views her life as over. There is no comfort in finding herself at fifty-eight, a very wealthy widow.

Still reeling from Ben´s death, Lauren is diagnosed with breast cancer. Having become hopelessly fatalistic, she refuses treatment. With Ben gone, the only things she cares about are her two German shepherd dogs, and makes provisions for them in her will.

Lauren´s primary physician, Leo Duffy, MD, who is also an old friend of the family, is unable to get Lauren to seek medical treatment for her breast cancer. Leo, divorced for many years, has always been secretly in love with Lauren, but lost her to his best friend, Benjamin Kendall, all those years ago. He now wonders if he will lose her to cancer, without her ever knowing how he feels.

Lauren has always been vivacious, life-loving and stunning. She is one of those rare women whose beauty is ageless. But now, emotionally shattered, she has let herself go. Keen intelligence of the mind, along with her emotional intelligence, have been seriously compromised since the death of her husband, and she falls prey to a handsome, charismatic twenty-eight-year-old con artist, Caesar Sulla. Caesar wins her over by pretending to have great love for her dogs. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Tired of eking out a living as a massage therapist, he will do anything to get Lauren´s money.

Caesar uses women, and true to form, with behind-the-scenes help from Trudy Marshall (Dr. Leo Duffy´s office nurse) he kidnaps Lauren´s two dogs for the ransom. He then decides that he wants it all. To that end, he supports and encourages Lauren´s decision not to seek treatment for her breast cancer. Lauren wants only to live long enough to find her beloved dogs.

Lauren hires a savvy and well-known private detective, Pee Wee

Pinnell, who is determined to find her dogs. In the meantime, Caesar takes advantage of Lauren´s vulnerabilities and becomes her live-in lover, enjoying a life of luxury and privilege.

Caesar manages to manipulate Lauren into putting her considerable financial resources into joint accounts, making them available to him. Blindly, she does this against the legal advice of her trusted long-time attorney.

Caesar thoroughly enjoys his life on Easy Street. He has turned the spigots on a seemingly endless torrent of money, but it is never enough. While on paper he is now joint owner of Lauren´s assets, it is in fact her hands who control the purse strings.

By conning a homely, sex-starved female bank employee, Elnora Rogers, into helping him, Caesar cleans out Lauren´s safe deposit box.

Realizing that Lauren´s happiness hinges on her finding her dogs, Leo Duffy does the unthinkable: he gives up his medical practice, hoping to help her find Fritz and Freida. But he must first overcome an horrific obstacle which he has hidden all his adult life: He has "cynophobia" — a morbid fear of dogs.

The private detective, Pee Wee Pinnell, has tracked down the dogs where Caesar is hiding them in cruel circumstances. Being very meticulous, the detective wants to check on a few things before disclosing their location to Lauren.

Aware that the cancer clock is ticking, Lauren decides, at Caesar´s urging, to live her final chapter by living it up. Caesar thinks of it as "introducing the high-brow to the low-life."

Dr. Leo Duffy, with his flaws and all-too-human-heart, has always been there for Lauren, trying to help, trying to make her see that Caesar is a fortune hunter. He knows that before he can save her from cancer, he must save her from herself.

Pinnell meets an untimely end when Caesar, who fears the detective is on to him, tries to scare him off. Caesar means to run Pinnell off the road with his car, as a warning, but the escapade goes terribly awry and Pinnell is killed.

Only when it appears that she has lost it all: her husband, her d

About the Author

"Billie" is the nickname of the former Willie Belle Daniels of Eastman, Georgia. She is an RN who retired from nursing management in order to write full time. This is her first novel. A widow, Billie lives in Augusta, Georgia with her two German shepherd dogs.