An Irresistible Bachelor (An Unforgettable Lady #2)(95)

She shook her head.

“Jack, I made an awful mistake last night. I’m so sorry. I should have known you’d keep your word. You always have. I jumped to the wrong conclusion about that announcement.”

He sat in his chair and stared down the long table at her. If she thought that was what bothered him most, he wasn’t going to correct her. He’d had it with trying to reach out. Now he was more concerned with getting over her.

“Thanks for saying something.” He looked at his watch.

“I just wasn’t thinking straight. I’ve been so torn.”

He nodded, but stayed quiet, not having much to say.

There was a period of silence.

“If there isn’t anything else,” he got to his feet, aware of a feeling of disappointment.

Christ, he still had hope? What an idiot he was.

“Jack, I didn’t come here to say I love you and expect you to forgive me.”

“Good.”

“Because saying I love you wouldn’t be enough.”

He narrowed his eyes on her face. He could see she was having trouble choosing her words.

She cleared her throat. “Right before my mother died, my father came to the apartment. He brought a dozen roses with him. The moment I looked into his face, I knew he had come to say good-bye. She was getting worse. . . . He knew it was time.”

Jack slowly sat down in the chair. He had a feeling she was going to tell him everything.

“I was at her bedside, and I knew they wanted to be alone. I went into the living room but the apartment was very small, so voices carried. Even the very quiet ones.” She looked at him. “I heard my father say that he would have married her. He would have left his wife and m-married her. If it hadn’t been for me.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath.

“He, ah, he told her that it was impossible with me around. He couldn’t very well marry a woman who already had a twenty-some-year-old daughter who looked like him. His indiscretion would have been so obvious. I—” She tapped her chest. “It was me who he blamed for keeping them apart. Me.”

Jack got to his feet and came around the table, unable to stand the way her voice sounded. He wanted to take her into his arms, but she started to pace.

“After he left, I went to my mother’s bedside. She looked up and I knew he wasn’t the only one who regretted having me. I mean, God, it was her whole dream. To be his wife. I tell you, I hated them both that day. I hated them and what they had done to each other. And what they did to me.”

She stopped and faced him. “There were a lot of reasons that I didn’t want to tell you what had happened. One of them was noble because I wanted to protect my half sister. But the real reason was—” She straightened her shoulders, breaking his heart with how strong she was trying to be. “But the real reason was me.”

She pushed a piece of hair out of her eye. Or maybe it was a tear. “I didn’t want to relive any of it and I had convinced myself that with both of them dead I would never have to. Telling you the story was hard enough. Telling you who he was, though, would bring it all back. I could barely get through the events when they actually happened. I couldn’t see how I could—”

Her voice cracked.

“Callie.” He walked over and he was relieved when she let him wrap his arms around her. He wanted to do something more to ease her pain, and he felt helpless.

Whatever he had expected, the truth was harder than he had imagined.

He heard a sniffle and then she stepped back sharply, lifted her head, and looked him straight in the eye. Her voice was completely unwavering.

“So I didn’t come here to tell you that I loved you. I came here to tell you that my father’s name is”—she took a deep breath—“Cornelius Woodward Hall.”

Jack felt his chest contract, convinced for a moment that he couldn’t possibly have heard her right.

She cleared her throat again and repeated, “My father was Cornelius Woodward Hall.”

As if she was getting used to saying the words out loud.

“Oh, my God.” Jack scanned her face and her red hair. He hadn’t noticed the resemblance before, but having known the man rather well, he could see it now.

“Grace is my half sister. As far as I’m aware, she and I are the only ones who know the truth. Well, and her fiancé knows, too.” She let out a long breath. “She’s all the family I have left, really. I was afraid . . . I don’t know. I assumed she’d be upset if I told you, even though you were a friend of hers. It has always been a secret, Jack. My father never wanted anything to be said about me. I only approached Grace after he was gone out of desperation. Loneliness.”

Jack’s mind started spinning. He’d known Hall, had respected the man, but all that went out the window as he imagined everything Callie had been through.

“How the hell could he do such a thing?”

“I’ve decided to stop asking that question.”

He reached for her again, drawing her against his body, thinking that he was never, ever going to let her go.

He pictured Hall, swanning around the Congress Club in New York, all smiles with his wife and his daughter. The man had always spoken of his family in such glowing terms, with such conviction. And it had been lies. All of it.

That bastard.