What Should Have Been

His gaze roamed slowly over her face and his eyes warmed. He’d done that before, once relentlessly, and she couldn’t help remembering what had followed.

“Can I ask you another question?”

Suddenly she felt like a minnow on a hook. “I guess.”

“That baseball bat you had yesterday…do you play?”

She laughed, thinking self-deprecatingly, That’ll teach you.

“No, it was Jay’s. My husband’s. He coached Little League when he wasn’t busy taking over his parents’ three dry-cleaning stores.”

“He died.”

Devan wondered how he knew? Had he asked Pamela? Of course, he must have; hadn’t she told him to? “Yes. It was one of those freak things, an aneurysm.

“I’m sorry I can’t say more, but I don’t remember him.”

“You didn’t know him.”

“Would I have liked him? I mean, could we have been friends?”

Although the five o’clock shadow that had made him appear more threatening yesterday was gone, Devan couldn’t imagine two more different people. Jay had dressed in a tailored shirt and slacks no matter where he was except for the ballpark, and had shaved twice a day whether he needed to or not. He’d never missed church or Sunday dinner with his parents.

In contrast, Mead ignored social dictums and charmed his way out of faux pas. He had apologized to her once and smiled so beautifully, she suspected he wasn’t being quite truthful. By his own admission, it had been years since he’d been to church, and while he was cited as a good soldier, she knew he had never been a diplomat. Add to that knowledge of what he wanted from a woman—and it wasn’t compassion—she couldn’t see them as having more than three words to say to each other except by accident.

“No, I doubt you would have been,” she replied.

A flickering up the street caught her attention and she realized it was a flashlight. Of course, it was the usual time for Beverly Greenbrier to walk Jacque Blacque, her obnoxious standard poodle who had a rude fixation on the azalea bushes circling her mailbox and framing one side of the driveway. The second dose of emotional abuse was that Bev was a career gossip ranking right up there with Pamela Regan.

“Oh, God. Let’s go inside,” she said to Mead.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, glancing around.

“A neighbor down the street is heading this way. She’s too nosy not to stop and ply us both with questions, and she’ll spend half of tomorrow on the phone sharing every word she gets out of us.” Not waiting for him to reply, she led the way inside. Once in her living room, Devan gestured toward the kitchen. “Do you want a cup of coffee? I can make you a cup of coffee.” Inwardly she groaned over her inane redundancy.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mead replied, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll just let myself out the back.”

“You might want to wait a minute. She’ll go around the corner and up the alley. I’m not kidding—she’s as relentless as she is annoying.”

“Maybe we should get away from all windows?”

He was teasing her, but she didn’t mind that. She thought it was silly herself; however, he didn’t understand the South and Southern women anymore.

“Huh. This is more like it.”

She noticed he was looking around. “Pardon?”

“I like your house. I’m having trouble adjusting to my mother’s.”

“You said that before about the mansion…to her.”

“Did I?”

“She was devastated.”

“Somehow I doubt it.”

Already cited as a monument to taste and quality, Pamela’s house was a testament to the fortune she had spent after Mead Sr.’s death, trying to make it Texas’s answer to the Biltmore Mansion. Glancing around, Devan was pleased that he approved of her far more modest home. No more than an eighth the size of the Regan mansion, the brick ranch was furnished with plush, inviting couches and chairs in sage and ivory. Across the room, a huge armoire encased the TV and stereo system. The cedar coffee table was large enough for someone to rest his feet on and still have room for assorted magazines, as well as Blakeley’s coloring books and crayons. In the center a crystal bowl held the potpourri that filled the air with a fine pumpkin-cinnamon spice. It was only as she turned back to him that she realized Mead was studying the family photo of her, Jay and Blakeley on a side table.

“Your daughter favors you.”

Devan thought so, too; they shared the same surprisingly abundant blond hair, same blue eyes and fair skin that somehow managed to tan easily in the summer. She was grateful, however, that her daughter had inherited her father’s voice. Jay had been a soloist in the church choir. “Her name is Blakeley.”

“How is she coping—and you, for that matter? I mean, without having her dad around.”

“It’s sad but no longer painful. And as strange as it might sound, I’m somewhat relieved for Blakeley because she was almost too young to remember him. We live close to Jay’s parents, though, and that gives her a grandfather and a connection to the paternal side of her family.”

“What about your parents?”

“My mother died the year I got engaged. My father hadn’t been in our lives for a long time.” He hadn’t been the stick-to-it kind and had walked away from them before Devan turned thirteen. She was forgetting what he looked like, too, but there were times she felt his itch for adventure, for passion.

That’s the last thing you need to think about.

She gestured to a chair. “Would you like to sit down?”

“I’d better not,” he replied. “I may get too comfortable and forget that my mother is due home soon.”

Devan couldn’t help touching her fingers to her lips. “You couldn’t sound less like yourself, Mead. It’s…strange.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I guess it’s ten times harder on you.”

“No, I mean tell me about me. Us. What were we, Devan, really? I sense something.”

What could she say? Confess that he’d been the man to jump-start her heart, that he had been the one—not her fiancé—to release that passion she’d been keeping locked tightly inside her? No, in this case, his lost memory was a blessing.

“It was a long time ago,” she replied.

“Not that long. You’re quite young and, at the risk of frightening you again, dare I say lovely. And despite what I see in the mirror, I’m not a total relic. How long could it have been?”

“I’d rather hear about you. What was recuperation like?”

“Six weeks in intensive care. Two—no, three operations. Another few months in the hospital. More in some clinic where people taught me what arms and legs were supposed to do, followed by even more time with a barrage of head doctors.” Mead took a step closer to her. “What do you see when you look at me? Frankenstein’s monster?”

Mesmerized by his voice as she was by his dark brown eyes, she admitted, “Hardly. But you look terribly sad…and you were never that. No Regrets Regan is how you referred to yourself.”

“We were lovers.”