What Might Have Been Read online

  “The works,” he said.

  Later, after he’d devoured most of the potato and was putting a third chicken breast on his plate, Barbara grinned at him from across the table. “Too bad you weren’t hungry.”

  He ducked his head in a gesture that was at once familiar. “I’d forgotten how good home cooking is. We haven’t had much of it at our house since Mom moved out.”

  “You and Missy—?”

  “Never learned to cook.” He laughed nervously. “My mother was a bit...obsessive. She wouldn’t let anyone in the kitchen when she was working.”

  “So...do you eat pizza every night?” Barbara couldn’t imagine the scenario he described. One of her earliest memories was of playing “cook” with the leftover biscuit dough after her grandmother had cut biscuits.

  “I’ve mastered noodles that go with bottled sauce, and Missy’s gotten to the point where the hamburgers are done inside before they’re too crunchy outside. And we bought a microwave last month.”

  “You didn’t have a microwave?”

  “According to Missy, we were the last family in America to get one.” He grinned sheepishly. “Mother flatly refused to have one in the house. She was convinced they were radioactive.”

  “Where did your mother go?” Barbara asked. “If you don’t mind telling me.”

  “I don’t mind. My uncle had Alzheimer’s, and she went to help her sister out when he was in the final stages. He died early last summer, and Mother stayed on to be with my aunt.” He took a breath and released it. “They’re doing some traveling, spending six weeks in Europe.”

  “That’s great.”

  Richard hesitated thoughtfully before replying. “It’s probably best...for everybody.”

  “Especially for Missy?” Barbara asked incisively.

  Richard’s gaze locked with hers across the table. “My mother helped with Missy, even before Christine and I...but lately, since Missy began to...since she turned into a young woman—” He sighed. “It was almost a relief when she left.”

  “And you feel guilty for feeling relieved?” she asked gently.

  He frowned at her. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that it’s not nice to read peoples’ minds?”

  “No,” she replied, undaunted. “But I’m sure your mother would have been happy to.”

  Richard’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “There’s a point you’re trying to make.”

  She reached across the table to touch his arm. “No relationship is a panacea. You’re not discounting all the good things your mother did for Missy when you acknowledge that her particular form of nurturing may not be what Missy needs at this point in her development.”

  A frown hardened Richard’s mouth. “When Missy told me about...her problem...all I could think of was that I was glad Mother wasn’t here. I dread telling her. It’s going to be like history repeating itself.”

  History repeating itself. Suddenly, to Barbara, the history he referred to didn’t seem nearly remote enough. Visions of Richard walking into the stadium with Christine invaded her mind. Embarrassed, she dropped her gaze to the water goblet next to her plate and tried to be nonchalant as she pulled her hand away from his arm to pick up the glass.

  Richard felt her sudden withdrawal acutely. Not that he blamed her. Her face, deliberately turned away from his now, wasn’t so different from the face she’d turned to his in frozen disbelief seventeen years ago; if her eyes met his, the pain would be there now, just as it had been then.

  Guilt, caustic and relentless, gnawed at him. God, wasn’t there a statute of limitations on regret? How long did a man have to live with his mistakes, regretting them, before he was granted some measure of pardon? Or peace?

  He’d never apologized to her. Until he’d walked into her office yesterday, he hadn’t spoken to her since that horrid argument when he’d said such hurtful things. He’d almost called her from the dorm after he’d returned to school, but he’d decided to wait until he could see her in person to straighten things out.

  What if he hadn’t waited? He’d spent a lot of idle moments through the years wondering. Would things have been easier if he’d written a letter or made a call before Christine dropped the bombshell of her pregnancy? Or would it have been even harder? Would he have had the strength to marry Christine if he hadn’t believed that Barbara despised him for the way he’d treated her?

  “You don’t have to finish that,” Barbara said, wresting him from deep thought. He looked down and realized he’d been picking at his food.

  “I’m not passing up a single bite,” he said, although the guilt gnawing at his insides had effectively killed his appetite. He sliced the remaining piece of chicken on his plate into two bite-size pieces, forked one into his mouth, chewed by rote, then followed with the last. With a flourish, he placed his fork across his plate and his napkin beside it.

  What now? Barbara thought as their eyes met expectantly. She saw the heat seep slowly into his eyes as he studied her face, a slow, sensual burn that set off explosions of awareness and need inside her. She understood the sensations better now. But she was no more immune to them than she had been when she’d been a seventeen-year-old virgin.

  She smiled self-consciously, wondering why, when so many men had tried so many more elaborate ploys without success, Richard could make her feel this way so simply. A smile and a look, and she was burning inside.

  “So,” she said, standing and gathering dishes to take to the kitchen, “tell me what you’ve been up to in the past seventeen years.”

  Richard rose and gathered more of the paraphernalia from the meal. “I’ll fill you in while I do the dishes.”

  “You’re my guest. You don’t have to—”

  “It’s the least I can do. You cooked.”

  Barbara grinned. “When it comes to washing dishes, I’m easily persuaded.” She pointed out the disposal, the sink stopper and the dishwasher, then proceeded to wrap leftovers and put away the salad dressing and margarine.

  “How about some coffee?” she suggested. “It’s early, but I have decaf if—”

  “I’ll take it straight,” he said.

  She quickly measured coffee into the coffeemaker and added water, then leaned against the counter and watched him load the dishwasher, much as he’d watched her cook earlier. “You’re supposed to be telling me the story of your life for the past seventeen years,” she said.

  “There’s really not that much to tell,” he said. “You’ve seen Missy. Officially, my marriage to Christine lasted three years, but it was over long before that. My mother helped with Missy until last year. That’s about it.”

  “Not quite,” Barbara said. “The last time I heard about you, you’d dropped out of college. Now you’re a successful real estate broker, with your own office.”

  Richard paused before replying. “I tried a lot of jobs to keep things going. The ones that paid well were dirty and hard. The ones I liked didn’t pay. And there were quite a few that I didn’t like and that were dirty and hard and didn’t pay worth a damn, to boot.”

  He stared down at his wet hands in sad reflection. “I was working at a hardware store and one of our customers took a shine to me. He asked if I’d ever thought of going into sales.”

  He grinned. “He seemed to think I was personable. I wasn’t even sure what it meant. But when he asked if I wanted to hang around his real estate office to see if I thought it might be something I might like to do, I took him up on the offer. Hell, it sounded better than selling nails and telling people how to change ball cocks in their toilets. And it was.”

  “And you were good at it.”

  “My timing was fortuitous,” he demurred. “We were in a boom situation. You didn’t have to be good to succeed, you just had to be adequate. And if you were better than adequate, you did very well.”

  “You shouldn’t be so reticent about taking credit where credit’s due,” Barbara said. “You must have been better than adequate to end up with your own business.”
/>
  Meeting her gaze, he smiled sadly. “You always did focus on the best in people.”

  “Maybe that’s why I became a guidance counselor.”

  “I don’t know why I was so surprised to see you in that office. When I think about it, it was the most logical place in the world for you to end up.”

  She gave him a skeptical look. “In a counselor’s office, maybe. In the school where your daughter is a student—it was a bit of a long shot. Especially when you consider that we’re hundreds of miles from where we grew up.”

  “I followed the booming real estate market. How did you end up here?”

  “New neighborhoods, new schools. Mrs. Stephon was my supervising teacher when I did my student teaching. When she was recruited to be principal here and started putting together her team, she called and asked if I’d like to apply. I loved the area when I came to interview, and I took the job when they offered it. So...voilà!”

  Richard, finished with the dishes, was drying his hands. He grinned suddenly.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I remember when you learned that word.”

  Barbara grinned back at him. “Oh, yes. First year French. I thought I was terribly sophisticated.” She waved her hand in the air and affected a Continental air. “Voici! Voilà!”

  His grin grew into a full-fledged smile. “The twittering of the birds.”

  She laughed softly. “Le gazouillement des oiseaux. You never did learn to say it in French.”

  “I never wanted to. I just liked hearing you say it. It sounded sexy.”

  Barbara shook her head. “What did we know about sexy? We were kids.”

  “Hormones,” he said humorlessly, thinking that perhaps he’d known more about what was sexy and what was good at eighteen than he had known at nineteen or anytime since. Seeing Barbara now and remembering what he’d felt for her was proof enough.

  The conversation had turned dangerous. The mechanical click of the coffeemaker automatically shutting off sounded loud in the silence that had descended over the small room. “The coffee’s ready,” Barbara said, relieved to have something to focus on.

  She filled the mugs she’d set out. “Why don’t we take it into the living room?”

  Richard sat down in one of the overstuffed armchairs flanking the sofa. Barbara handed him a mug, and placed the second mug on the coffee table in front of the sofa. She took a long route to the sofa, detouring in front of the stereo in the entertainment system. “I have a new tape of oldies from the seventies. Want to try it?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s humiliating when the music that was popular when you were a kid turns up on an oldies collection,” she said, peeling the cellophane wrapping from the tape. She slid the cassette into the player and adjusted the volume when a Bee Gees’ disco number blared through the speakers.

  “Tell me about it,” Richard said. “I heard a trivia question on the radio the other day, and the answer was Peter Frampton.”

  “Do you think that means we’re getting old?”

  Getting old? He’d just encountered the woman whose heart he’d broken when she was the age of his daughter—his pregnant daughter—and she wondered if he thought they were getting old?

  “It could be a symptom,” he said, watching her kick off her shoes and curl her legs under her before reaching for her coffee. She’d always done that, kicked off her shoes and curled up when she was ready to talk.

  Silence, laced by the softly playing stereo and memories of shared moments in simpler days, stretched between them as they sipped their coffee. Finally, Barbara set her mug aside. “I was thinking that Missy might come over after school one afternoon a week. We’ll just...visit and talk about girl stuff.”

  “In your home? That’s very generous of you, but—”

  “She’ll be more comfortable here than in my office.”

  Richard nodded uncomfortably. “I’m sure she would. But...it just seems like a lot to ask of you.”

  “Personal interaction with students is the most fulfilling aspect of my job.”

  “Inviting a student into your home goes a little beyond your job description.”

  Barbara shrugged. “It’s not without precedent for a teacher to take a special interest in a student. She needs a friend, Richard.”

  Richard exhaled a weary sigh, then looked directly at Barbara. “I know Missy needs a friend. And I know I’m putting her in good hands. I just hate imposing on your generosity.”

  “She’s my student,” Barbara said, meeting his troubled gaze levelly. Their eyes remained locked during a long silence before she added softly, “She’s your daughter, Richard. Do you think I could refuse to help her if it’s within my power to do so?”

  Another very long silence ensued before Richard replied, “No, Barbara. I don’t think you could ever refuse to help anyone in need. What I can’t figure is how you can look at me without wanting to scratch my eyes out for the way I treated you.”

  Barbara swallowed. “I won’t deny that you hurt me. You ripped my heart out and tore it into tiny pieces. But when I remember you, I can’t remember one fight and ignore the happy times we shared.”

  Richard closed his eyes as a look of pure anguish contorted his handsome features. Softly, but with almost explosive intensity, he muttered an expletive.

  Opening his eyes, he released a sigh that sounded like a tire going flat. “For the record, I’m sorry I hurt you. That wasn’t what I was trying to do. I just... I was trying—”

  Barbara’s smile was bittersweet. “You were trying to grow up.”

  “I was stupid.”

  “You made a stupid mistake. Everyone makes stupid mistakes growing up.”

  “Not the kind I made.” The kind you have to live with for the rest of your life.

  “Not that particular mistake.” But we all have the private demons of our past mistakes.

  Richard picked up his coffee mug and looked inside as though he half expected it to have miraculously refilled itself, then, finding it empty, put it down again.

  “There’s plenty in the pot yet,” Barbara said, dropping her feet to the floor, ready to get it for him.

  Richard abandoned the mug and stood. “No. I have to go.”

  “I wrapped up some brownies for you to take with you. I’ll get them,” Barbara said.

  He watched her scurry to the kitchen. From the back, she appeared as young as her students in her jeans and sweater and with her hair loose around her shoulders. She returned with a paper lunch sack, which she gave to him.

  “How do I explain these to Missy?” he asked.

  “She didn’t know you were coming here?”

  He shook his head. “I just said I was going out for a while. She probably assumed I had a house to show. It’s not unusual for me to do evening showings.”

  Barbara winked and grinned conspiratorially. “Maybe you could just sneak them to your office and have them with your morning coffee.”

  Richard fought to keep his breathing normal. He had a dizzying sense of the years since he’d last seen her falling away. He found it difficult to concentrate on what she was saying when the sight of her face was so distracting.

  “Did you tell her that we knew each other?” she asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Missy. Did you tell her that we were friends?”

  “No. I was so stunned myself. I couldn’t see any reason to go into it.”

  “We have to tell her something,” Barbara said. “We don’t have to tell her how close we were, only that we knew each other in school. One of those ha-ha, small-world coincidences. Then if one of us should inadvertently mention knowing each other, she won’t feel that we deceived her.”

  Richard nodded absently, distracted by her eyes and the movement of her lips as she spoke.

  “I’ll send for her tomorrow so we can work out a time for her visits,” Barbara continued.

  And then, suddenly, a new song started on the stereo. A familiar song.
A song they’d hummed along with as it had played on the radio in Richard’s Mustang. A song they’d danced to. A song they’d—

  “I didn’t plan this,” Barbara said. “I didn’t even know this song was—”

  Planned or not, it was too late to stop. Too late to stop the song, too late to stop the memories, too late to stop his arms from sliding around her, his lips from covering hers. Too late to stop herself from feeling the same thrilling magic that only total sensual affinity between two people could generate.

  The moment his lips touched hers, she knew that what he’d made her feel before hadn’t been a function of youth or innocence; it was the same now, just as urgent and just as thrilling, but richer for their maturity and lack of innocence. Before it had been passion and wonder, and now it was both of those and more that flamed between them.

  They were old enough now to understand it. They were old enough to act on it. They would never, Barbara thought with one last shred of logic before she yielded completely to his sensual onslaught, be able to deny it.

  And why would they? Why would she be crazy enough to turn away from it twice?

  She slid her arms around his waist and pulled him closer. Her hands spread over his back, absorbing the male strength of his body. Her mouth opened under his, accepting him, inviting intimacy.

  He filled her senses, all of them. His warmth, his strength, the scent of him, the taste of him, the animal sound of passion he made as he plundered her mouth combined to take her breath and mind away. She didn’t care; she didn’t want to breathe, didn’t want to think. She wanted Richard to make love to her.

  When he pulled away from her, it was a physical wrenching. He actually had to pry her arms from around him. “Barbara. We can’t do this, Barbara.”

  Not do it? It was incomprehensible. She hadn’t felt this way in seventeen years—and she’d been waiting every moment since then to feel this way again. How could he push her away after they’d found each other again? How could he think of not finishing what had been left unfinished for almost two decades?

  The betrayal pierced her sharply. She searched his face for answers, finding only a reflection of her own agony, then smoothed her sweater with shaking fingers, as though putting the knit straight would make everything all right. “Are you...involved with someone else?” she asked hoarsely.