Helen Myers - What Should Have Been

Devan froze. It had been six years since she’d felt such a mix of emotions, and she was terrified of what he would ask next. Once, she’d made herself his for the taking. She’d risked everything to hear him speak to her and her alone…touch her as she’d never been touched…encourage her to be free, to be truly herself.

But just as he’d changed, she had, too.

She turned back to him. “What?”

“Did you know me? I mean really? Were we…friends?”

Friends? For a night, he’d been everything she could dream of wanting or needing….

www.millsandboon.co.uk

a collector of two-and four-legged strays, lives deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas. She cites cello music and bonsai gardening as favorite relaxation pastimes, and still edits in her sleep—an accident learned while writing her first book. The bestselling author of diverse themes and focus, she is a three-time RITA ®Award nominee, winning for Navarrone in 1993.

To my dear friend

Darese Cotton

This one’s for you because you asked most and loudest

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

“M ommy!”

Blakeley’s cry had Devan dropping the hot pan of garlic bread onto the kitchen counter. Ripping off her new sunflower pot-holder mittens, she threw them after it, sending one skittering off the edge of the granite top, but she let it go. All she cared about was the panic in her child’s voice.

By the time she yanked open the back door, Blakeley was scrambling across the stone patio. At the same time she flung herself into Devan’s arms, the little girl also locked all four limbs around her and clutched handfuls of her glittery autumn-motif sweatshirt.

“Sweetie, what on earth…? What’s wrong?”

“There’s a man out there! A stranger in my park!”

For once Devan didn’t correct or reprove her four-year-old daughter for her habit of calling everything she had a personal attachment to as “mine.” Instead she lifted her gaze to confirm that the back gate on the chain-link fence was open. That was enough to send her imagination into overdrive. She’d warned Blakeley repeatedly never to open the gate on her own, let alone venture beyond it without her—especially into Mount Vance, Texas’s woodsy Regan Park. The headstrong minx had inherited too many of her genes, all the wrong ones!

“Are you all right?” she demanded, hugging the child closer until she could feel her small heart through her light red jacket. She inhaled that unforgettable but fading baby scent to help calm her own pounding heart. “Did he touch you? Try to hurt you?”

“No.” Blakeley’s voice wobbled with emotion. “Because I ran. He scared me, Mommy. He just stood on the other side of the creek and stared.”

She’d gotten as far as the creek? Devan couldn’t believe she had let her out of her sight for that long without glancing outside. Her impulse was to dial 911, but she reminded herself that in the meantime, the creep could be getting away. She needed to find him, to see if she could identify him. The police would need an accurate description.

Just then the front door opened and her mother-in-law Connie poked her head inside. Devan had left the door unlocked expecting her at any minute to pick up a box of outgrown children’s clothing for a church fund-raiser this weekend.

Setting down Blakeley, Devan grabbed her jacket from the hanger behind the back door and called, “Connie, lock the door and call 911! Blakeley, tell Nana what you told me. Lock this door, too.”

“Where are you going?” Blakeley cried, her blue eyes huge.

“I promise I’ll be right back, sweetie. Now do as I say.”

Planting a kiss on top of Blakeley’s blond head, Devan grabbed Jay’s old baseball bat, which she always took on walks in the park against the threat of some stray, sick dog attacking them. Then she rushed from the house, ignoring Connie’s protest and her daughter’s whimpering; she ran across the yard, and alley, and entered the woods marking the east boundary of their neighborhood.

Regan Park framed Regan Creek, land donated by one of the most powerful families in the northeast Texas county. Barely an acre wide and eighteen long, parts of the outer perimeter were deceptively brushy, but the bike trails were well tended, as were the picnic areas. Often used by joggers and weekend cyclists, at odd hours it had been known to be the rendezvous site of occasional drug deals.

I should have put a lock on the gate.

I didn’t even ask her what the guy looked like.

As she berated herself, Devan charged through the thicket of holly and prickly vines, then between stately pines and bushy cedar. She willed the creep who’d scared her baby to still be out there. She could and would stop him—at least long enough to make sure the police were given an excellent description, and to give the man an earful. That scumbag would know what awaited him if he messed with any youngster in Mount Vance.

After another few yards she crossed the bike and jogging trail, but when she came in view of the creek, she stumbled to a halt. At first she thought the heavy shade cast by a sinking October sun was playing tricks on her. But no, that was a man standing monument-still on the opposite bank just as Blakeley described. More unnerving was who he reminded her of; there was something so familiar about him. With every shallow breath, her impulse to charge and swing receded like the most fleeting dream and left her feeling…what?

“Mead.” She’d seen the article in the Mount Vance Report, had heard the gossip flooding town like whitewater bursting from a broken dam. Most she’d managed to ignore in her struggle to repress the fear that her past could finally have caught up with her. However, there was no hiding from the reality that stood in front of her.

She shifted so what sunlight trickled in through the trees worked to her benefit and drew a steadying breath. She remembered those compelling eyes—dark as the promise of Poe’s raven whispering, “Nevermore.” Gone was the near-black mane of windswept hair of his youth, though she’d seen it almost this short on his last visit home. The bristles now appeared to be seasoned with a hint of gray, as was his beard. He had been home for more than two weeks, but he looked as though he was still existing on a diet of air and willpower, the latter no doubt force-fed him by his mother. Devan estimated him to be at least twenty pounds lighter than was normal for his strong-boned, six-foot-plus frame. The blue bandana not quite hiding the scar at his right temple suggested one of the reasons why.

Her next step forward was involuntary. “Mead…do you hear me?”

Hunkering deeper into the upturned collar of his denim jacket, he stared into the glistening water as though willing himself to merge with the few inches of cold liquid. But her question finally had him raising his eyes in slow motion.

As their gazes met, she almost believed she saw a slight flicker of something like a dawning, only to wait with a mixture of disappointment and relief when he failed to respond. “So it’s true…you don’t recognize any of us,” she finally said.

He made no reply.

She’d known when he left town six years ago that his first destination would be somewhere dangerous…and the next, and the next. Some sixteen months ago, his luck, and that of his crack commando team had finally run out. On a mission to the Middle East that had made national headlines despite the government’s attempts to keep information classified, something went catastrophically wrong, and everyone save Mead had been killed. After that, she’d shut her ears and mind to any more information, and thereafter tried not to think about the Mead Regan who was undergoing operation after operation, was no longer himself, and was reportedly lingering somewhere between “strange” and “scary.” Small wonder that Blakeley had been spooked, she thought, sighing inwardly.