What Might Have Been Read online

  He shifted in the chair. “It was a strange feeling when I realized I didn’t have to answer to anybody if I decided to go out to dinner. I was thirty-seven years old, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to answer to anyone if I decided to go out to dinner with a woman.”

  “So you went to dinner.”

  He shrugged. “So I went to dinner. And afterward, she asked to see my atrium.”

  “Is that anything like wanting to see your art prints?” Barbara asked drolly.

  Richard scowled at her. “Don’t mock me, Barbara. This is hard enough without trying to be cute. We had talked about atria at dinner and I had told her about the tropical garden my mother had put in.”

  “Sorry,” Barbara said.

  Richard accepted the apology with a frown. “It doesn’t take Einstein to figure out what happened. I just wish to God I’d had the sense to take her into the bedroom instead of staying in the living room.” He ran his hand through his hair and exhaled a shuddering sigh. “Missy came home to get something she’d forgotten—”

  “Oh, Richard,” Barbara said, struggling for objectivity she didn’t feel. “How horrible for you.”

  “Horrible?” he asked with an ugly chortle. “My baby girl finds me with my pants down on the living room sofa with a casual acquaintance two weeks after I told her that I like to get to know a woman before I have sex with her? Yeah, I guess that qualifies as horrible.”

  Barbara forced herself to sit perfectly still during the silence that followed. Oh, Richard, why do I have to be your friend and listener? When I see you so bitter, hurting so badly and looking so alone, I just want to hold you.

  “How did Missy react?” she asked tenderly when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to continue without prompting.

  Richard stared at the far wall, unseeing. “She said one word. ‘Daddy.’ And then she ran out of the house.” He paused again. His eyes were bright—too bright and wet—and his voice was hoarse with emotion. “To the day I die, I’ll never forget that horrible night.”

  “What about since then, since you’ve both had a chance to recover from the initial shock?”

  “She’s never mentioned it.”

  “And you’ve never brought it up?” Barbara asked, appalled.

  Richard’s dismal sigh was almost a groan. “What good would it do? It would have been embarrassing for both of us, and it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Not change anything? Richard, it must have been just as traumatic for her as it was for you. She probably needs to talk about it as much as you do.”

  He gave her an incredulous stare. “Need to talk about it? My daughter—and quite possibly one or more of her friends—caught me buck naked with a woman on the living room sofa. The less said, the better. The last thing I want to do is talk about it.”

  “Well, Missy might be dying to talk about it, but too embarrassed to bring it up. You should find out. She could be confused, or she may be carrying around some heavy-duty unresolved anger.”

  “Two months later Missy came in and announced she was pregnant. I think that pretty much sums up what she thought of the whole thing.”

  “You think that Missy got pregnant because she interrupted you with a woman?”

  “She emulated me!” he said bitterly. “I became her casual sex role model! She thought I’d lied to her. She thought I told her one thing and did another.” He faced her evenly. “I swear to God, Barbara, I didn’t lie to her. It was an isolated incident. I just...got caught.”

  “I believe you,” Barbara said. After a long hesitation, she added softly, “Missy would believe you, too, if you explained what happened to her the way you’ve explained it to me.”

  “It’s a little late for explanations now,” Richard said. “But you see why I can’t take a chance on getting caught with my pants down again.”

  He’d dropped the last piece into a complicated puzzle, but Barbara couldn’t quite believe the picture that emerged.

  “I can’t afford another mistake, Barbara. Not with this situation with Missy.”

  “I see,” Barbara said, thinking she should have felt relief that his rejection of her had not been personal, instead of being so outraged about the poor timing that had brought Richard Blake back into her life just when he’d decided he didn’t want to risk an involvement. “You took one chance and had a bad experience and now you’ve taken a vow of celibacy?”

  “Do you blame me?”

  Barbara bristled. “I don’t have to. You’re too busy blaming yourself to need anyone else’s disapproval.”

  “I don’t exactly have a lot to be proud of lately.”

  “You’re beating yourself up over some very human mistakes. You’re a grown man. You took a woman to dinner and...got friendly. It’s not as though you were married and cheating on a wife, or as if you knew Missy might come home, and deliberately took a chance on her finding you.”

  Leaning forward, she rested her hand lightly on his forearm. “Lighten up on yourself, Richard. Please. For Missy’s sake, as well as your own. You’re using up all your energy regretting things you can’t do anything about, and you need that energy to help Missy.”

  Richard looked down at her hand, wishing the weight and warmth of it didn’t feel so natural there, so familiar and comforting. Then he lifted his gaze to her face, and the expression in her eyes turned what had been a simple touch of comfort into something much more complex. Torn, he searched inside himself for the strength to pull away from everything that touch offered, while everything in him yearned to cover her hand with his own and invite her closer to him in every way a woman could get close to a man.

  He found the strength—barely—and eased his arm just out of her reach, saying her name firmly.

  Barbara jerked her hand back as though she’d been shocked.

  After an interval of dreadful silence, she spoke, her voice soft but her words intense. “You’re not the only one living with mistakes, Richard.”

  Richard waited with a sense of impending doom for her to continue. He didn’t want to hear that her life had been anything less than wonderful. He would have preferred to hang on to the image of her as the wide-eyed teenager he’d known.

  “After we broke up—the way we broke up—I was bound and determined not to let anyone hurt me the way you’d hurt me,” she said.

  Guilt knotted Richard’s gut as he listened. Whatever mistake she was talking about, it bounced back to him. To the way he’d treated her. To his own stupid mistake. The last thing in the world he needed was more guilt piled on his shoulders. He’d known he’d hurt her, but that didn’t make coming face-to-face with the demons his actions had spawned any easier.

  “I wasn’t just careful,” Barbara continued, “I was...almost compulsive. I wouldn’t let anyone get close enough to hurt me, and I wouldn’t get close to anyone who threw me off balance. Guys came on to me, but if I felt the least bit out of control, I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t going to be vulnerable again. And then I met Dennis. Dennis was—”

  She paused to gather her thoughts. “Dennis was perfect. He was polite, respectful and mature. I didn’t have to worry about losing control with Dennis, because he had enough for the both of us. We didn’t make love until our wedding night. We agreed on that early on, and waiting was never a problem, the way it had been when I was dating you.”

  She allowed herself a bittersweet smile that made Richard want to lunge from his chair and devour her, every inch of her, slowly, appreciating every curve and texture and taste along the way. He wanted inside her as acutely as he had when he was a randy buck who’d never been inside anyone outside of his hormone-driven dreams.

  The smile that unintentionally taunted him grew into a gentle burst of self-mocking laughter. “I thought I had it all figured out. We weren’t thinking below the waist. Not Dennis and I. We had a mature relationship. What we had was more important than some fleeting chemical interaction. We shared mutual goals and we respected each other.” />
  She looked at him as she smiled this time, with the cunning expression of chums sharing a private joke. “It took me a long time to realize just how empty life can be without passion. I’d assumed that once we were alone and touching that it would be...that, well, nature would take over and it would be...the way it had been when you and I used to—”

  “I’m the last person in the world you should be saying this to,” he said, desperate to stop her. But she was strong, and he realized suddenly that she always had been.

  “No,” she said. “In some funny kind of way, you’re the only person I could ever say it to. I’ve never told anyone else how it was. I guess I was afraid they’d think the problem was in me, that I was incapable of passion. I’m not afraid of that with you—not since you kissed me again.”

  Her eyes met his. “Do you know what a relief it is to find out that I can be passionate beyond reason? That I didn’t imagine the magic? That I’m still capable of letting myself feel it?”

  She averted her gaze. “I used to lie awake at night wondering if I’d ever really felt it, or if I had just embellished it in my mind, the way children remember things as bigger and brighter and more wonderful than they really were.”

  “You weren’t just imagining,” Richard assured her.

  A deep sadness haunted her eyes as she smiled. “I knew that the moment you came into my office. And when you looked at me the way you used to look at me, and then you said you had to see me, I was hoping—” She vented her frustration in a sigh. “God, Richard, just once, I wanted to find out what it would be like.”

  Richard bolted from the chair. How much was a man expected to endure? He was trying to do what was right, what was decent. “You want to know what it would be like?” he said. “I’ll tell you. It would be everything we’ve missed, everything we lost when I gave in to stupidity. It would be there, a part of us, a part of our lives, a pivotal point that divides our lives into before and after. It would be like piecing all those shattered dreams back together. We wouldn’t just walk away from it. We...couldn’t just walk away unaffected.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Barbara said. “Do you think I didn’t know that when I went to the drugstore?”

  Richard felt as though he’d been poleaxed in the chest. “God, Barbara! You went to the drugstore? Why would you tell me something like that?”

  “I was willing to take the chance,” she said.

  She wasn’t referring to telling him about the drugstore, Richard knew. “Well, I’m not!” he said. “My casualty list is long enough.”

  She rose and collected the cocoa mugs, then turned to him as though he were an afterthought. “Goodbye, Richard.”

  “I can’t risk hurting you again.” The argument sounded as futile as a defense attorney’s closing statements after the presentation of condemning physical evidence.

  “You’ve told me what you came here to tell me,” she said. “Now leave.”

  Richard wanted to go, but his feet and legs wouldn’t cooperate. “I hurt you once. Look what it led to.”

  “No one’s arguing with you, Richard.” She brushed past him, carrying the mugs, the way she would have sidestepped a piece of furniture. “There’s nothing else to be said. Just...go.”

  She stopped, but didn’t turn around. Richard studied her—her hair hanging free, the drape of knit across her narrow shoulders, the fullness of female buttocks outlined by her pants, her bare feet. The desire he felt for her was as familiar as an old love song and as compelling as ageless lust. He saw her beauty and her trust, her strength and her vulnerability, and he wanted her with a yearning that cut through him with the sharpness of an executioner’s ax. The knowledge that she was his for the asking only fanned the flames of that desire.

  “It’s best,” he said.

  “Probably.” The word sounded choked.

  If he hadn’t been watching her so intently, he might have missed the way she winced, a subtle recoil of her entire body.

  He was hurting her by leaving—who could say with absolute certainty that he would hurt her any worse by staying? In desperation, he searched his mind and his conscience for the reasons he felt compelled to walk away from her.

  He couldn’t remember a single one of them. “Like hell it’s best!” he snarled.

  6

  RICHARD’S SHOUTED OATH fed into a sudden silence. Barbara was standing, eerily still, at the entrance to the dining nook with her back to him. He waited for her to move, to speak, to indicate, somehow, that she had understood what he’d said, that she hadn’t changed her mind, that she still wanted him to stay with her. But she just stood there, shoulders tense and head rigid, motionless and elegant as a statue.

  He stepped behind her, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her soft woman’s flesh and hear the whispered rush of her breathing. He would have spoken, but the questions were too fragile to commit to words. At length, he gingerly positioned his hands on her shoulders and urged her around so he could see her face. And her eyes.

  Relief spread through him like an unguent. Soothing. Healing. The years fell away, and with them the guilt and deprivation. He was with Barbara, looking at Barbara’s face, peering into Barbara’s eyes; the sheer splendor of it filled him to overflowing.

  Barbara drew in a ragged breath as Richard caressed her cheek with his fingertips, then released it as his thumb teased across her lips, coaxing them apart. The sweetness of his smile seeped deep inside to soothe old hurts.

  “What now?” she rasped, surrendering the privilege of decision to him.

  He lowered his head and kissed her gently, almost reverently, but when he moved to slide his arms around her, the mugs she was holding wedged between them. With a half chuckle, he took them from her hands, put them on the counter and then turned back to her with deliberate purpose.

  Color rose in her cheeks as he devoured the sight of her. Richard still couldn’t quite believe the miracle of walking into an office at his daughter’s school and finding Barbara; couldn’t believe that after years of being haunted by memories of what it was like to hold her, she was there, solid in his arms, flushed, womanly soft. He couldn’t believe that he was capable of feeling again all the healthy and hopeful emotions she had awakened in him.

  Smiling seductively, she rested her palms on his chest before slowly sliding them over his shoulders and locking her hands behind his neck, urging his head down.

  Just having her hands on his nape was unbelievably erotic. The quickened pulse of his heart dizzied him even as he obligingly lowered his mouth to hers. The kiss burned through his senses like wildfire, volatile and consuming. It had always been that way with Barbara, even when they’d been too inexperienced to realize that kisses were more than just two sets of lips pressed together. She’d turned his world upside down the first time she’d smiled at him, and when he’d finally managed to wangle a kiss, she’d sent him soaring into an adolescent male’s heaven.

  Seventeen years hadn’t changed anything. A couple of kisses and she had him as hot and bothered as a little boy bunny in springtime. And if he didn’t do something to slow things down, they were going to wind up doing what little bunnies did in the springtime right there on the kitchen table.

  He ended the kiss, but continued holding her. When he opened his eyes and looked at her, she smiled and combed her fingers into his hair. He groaned as her thumbs grazed his ears. “No wonder I went nuts at nineteen.”

  “Do you still like it when I tickle you behind the ear?” she asked mischievously, performing magic with her forefingers.

  Richard cupped her bottom and hoisted her against him. “What do you think?”

  She gasped softly, and stared up at him in surprise. Richard watched her eyes grow dark with arousal. The cunning grin that slowly captured her features mesmerized him.

  “I think we’re wearing too many clothes,” she replied huskily.

  She slid her hands down to his chest and started unbuttoning his shirt. Her fingertips
teased their way through the hair on his chest as she parted the shirtfront. She leaned forward and kissed his sternum. The pressure of her lips, still moist from their kiss, set him afire.

  “In a hurry?” he asked, but the question came out more like a sigh than with the edge of droll irony he’d intended.

  “I’ve been waiting seventeen years.”

  His arms tightened around her and he cradled her head against his chest with one hand. He kissed the top of her head. “You sure know how to put pressure on a man.”

  Barbara closed her eyes and listened to his heart beneath her ear. “You’re not going to disappoint me.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Like an old, familiar love song, the rhythmic beat of his heart stirred emotions and sparked memories of other times she had stood with her head nestled against his chest.

  “Because it’s already wonderful.”

  Her sigh fanned over his flesh, ruffling hairs and heating skin. “Barbara?” he asked.

  “Mmm-hmm?”

  “Which way is the bedroom?”

  “In a hurry?” She teasingly threw his question back at him.

  “I’ve been waiting seventeen years.”

  “You sure know how to put pressure on a woman.”

  He brushed her hair away from her temple and kissed her there. “You’re not going to disappoint me.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  He kissed his way across her cheek, down to her mouth, and nibbled at her lips. “Because...it’s...already—”

  The kiss said it more eloquently than words. Words—passionate, fiery, tempestuous, intense, erotic, arousing—could only describe; the kiss was...all those things and more. By the time it ended in a duet of protesting groans, Richard’s shirt was untucked and his hands were inside Barbara’s sweater, roving over her smooth back. “You were right,” he said. “We’re wearing too many clothes.”