Heaven Sent (42 page)

Aubrey had never seen Callie cower
before. She wasn’t the cowering type. Yet she seemed to cower back
in the chair now. She also flinched. “It wasn’t like that, Aubrey.
Truly, it wasn’t. I—I don’t know why I read the letters. But they
were so—so beautiful.”

“
They were written to the
woman I loved,” he said in an even voice that chilled the air
around him. He couldn’t understand how his voice could sound so
cold, when inside, he’d never been so incensed.

“
Yes,” she said in a tiny
voice. “I know they were.”

“
You had no business reading
them. No right.”

She hung her head. “I
know.”

“
You read my innermost
thoughts. You learned exactly how to manipulate me, didn’t
you?”

Her head whipped up, and she stared at
him, so pale she appeared ghostlike. “No! No, it wasn’t like that!
It’s because—because—” The breath she took sounded like a sob.
“It’s because I’d never known a man could love a woman so much. The
letters—they were so beautiful.”

“
They were private.”
Aubrey’s fury was so potent, he shook with it. He didn’t know what
to do. He felt betrayed. He felt as if his whole world had been
smashed to smithereens—again. Only moments earlier he’d been happy
for the first time in two years, and now, with this box of letters
and Callie’s so-called “confession,” his happiness, short-lived,
had been shattered.

She lifted her head and watched him
warily. “I’m so sorry, Aubrey. I was very wrong. Entirely
wrong.”

“
Yes,” he said. “You
were.”

“
I’m so sorry.” Tears began
to fall from her eyes, and she wiped them away with an impatient
gesture. “I was so wrong.”

As he observed her, he felt as if he
were watching a play. Her tears were only part of the act, and he
resented them. He felt foolish, as if he’d been handled by an
expert puppeteer. A mistress of her art. He’d never have believed
Callie capable of such a . . . a wicked deception.

Yes. It was wicked, the deceit she’d
practiced on him. She was wicked. How strange. Even from the first
moment he’d met her, when he’d actively disliked her, he’d never
have believed her capable of so rank a deception. If nothing else,
he’d always believed her to be honest and possessed of a certain
integrity.

Not any longer. Fearing his calm would
crack and that he might become violent with her, Aubrey drew the
box of letters closer to him and carefully replaced the lid she’d
put on the desk. “We’ll discuss this later.”

“
But— Oh, please, Aubrey,
don’t hate me. Please!”

“
Hate you?” He gazed at her,
his insides in such a turmoil, he couldn’t distinguish one emotion
from the other. “I don’t know.” He gave her a grim smile. “I’d just
begun to believe I loved you, the more fool I.”

He could scarcely believe his eyes
when she grew even paler than she’d been before. “You—you love
me?”

In the very most icy voice he could
summon, he said flatly, “Not any longer.”

“
Oh!”

It was a cry of anguish, and Aubrey
didn’t care. He felt wrung out. Depleted. Crushed.
Deceived.

For the second time in his life, he’d
allowed himself to love a woman—and he’d lost her. This loss was as
bitter, albeit for a different reason, as the loss of
Anne.

This time he’d been a jackass, and the
knowledge was hard to swallow.

Callie rose from the chair. She looked
shaky. He didn’t care about that, either. She was a jade. A doxy. A
manipulative bitch, and he hated her.

“
Aubrey . . .” Her voice
faded.

He only looked at her.

With one last, “Oh!” she whirled
around and fled from his presence.

Aubrey rose from his chair, walked
stiffly to his office door, shut it, and turned the key in the
lock. He walked back to his chair, sat, and stared at the box of
letters for a good two or three minutes. Then, with an anguished,
“Oh, God!” he buried his face in his hands and commenced to suffer,
feeling the pain, his heart hurting as if it were being ripped in
half by sharp, poisonous talons.

*****

It had been even worse than she’d
feared it would be. Callie ran to her room, shut the door, locked
it, and stood leaning against it, her whole body shaking with
sobs.

“
Idiot!” she raged at
herself. “You
should
suffer. You were totally at fault.”

She’d eased Becky’s life and soul, she
reminded herself. But she’d used deceit with which to do it. She
should have—should have—

Callie didn’t know what she should
have done, but she knew good and well she should never, ever, ever
have read Aubrey’s private correspondence to his late wife. It was
a despicable thing to have done, and she hated herself for
it.

With a moan, she flung
herself face forward on her bed— no, not
her
bed, Aubrey’s bed. Everything in
this beautiful house was his. She had no part of it.

She might have been part of it. If
she’d had the gumption to hand over those fetters when Becky had
first told her about them. She oughtn’t to have read them, not even
for Becky’s sake. It would have been the perfect time to explain to
the little girl that some things were private. Surely Callie could
have eased over the situation and still have gained Becky’s love
and trust.

But she hadn’t. She’d sunk to wicked
depths of subterfuge, and continued to read those beautiful
letters.

“
Oh!” The memory of the
beauty contained in Aubrey’s letters to Anne stabbed at Callie
heart like tiny pitchforks. Which was no more than she deserved.
She hated herself.

She hated herself almost as much as
Aubrey now hated her.

And he’d said he’d come to love her.
The memory of his words made Callie cry harder.

“
Idiot,” she cried into her
bedclothes. “Fool! Wicked, deceiving fiend!” In fact, she didn’t
spare herself a single epithet as she continued to rage against
herself.

Callie had been acting as nursemaid to
Becky for a week now. She hadn’t slept much, and she’d suffered
agonies of worry for Becky’s sake, and her own. The guilt she’d
piled up during the last week, since she’d agreed to Aubrey’s
proposal of marriage, had interfered with her waking and sleeping
hours almost more than Becky’s illness.

She’d also been deprived of Monster’s
comforting presence, since he’d abandoned her room for Becky’s.
Callie believed it was no more than she deserved for being such an
evil, wicked person. She wouldn’t blame the whole world if it
despised her.

Eventually she sobbed herself into a
restless sleep. She woke slightly when Mrs. Granger knocked at her
door, but she didn’t stir. She didn’t want to talk to the kindly
housekeeper. She didn’t want to sully Mrs. Granger’s presence with
her evil essence.

After another light knock and another
pause, Callie heard Mrs. Granger mutter, presumably to Delilah,
“Poor lamb, she must be dead to the world. She’s worked so hard
lately.”

Callie couldn’t hear Delilah’s answer,
but from the tone of her voice she knew the maid was agreeing with
Mrs. Granger’s opinion of her. If they only knew.

If they only knew, they’d hate her,
too.

On that note, she shut her eyes and
slept some more.

When she awoke again, night had
fallen. Callie staggered to her feet and made her way to the
window, where she pulled the curtains aside and gazed outside.
There was no moon tonight, and fog, which occasionally crept over
the landscape, seemed to thicken as she watched it.

Callie knew what she had to do. The
knowledge had come to her as she slept.

“
I’ll write a note to Becky,
and one to Aubrey,” she decided.

The electric company had turned the
power off, so Callie presumed the night was far advanced. Lighting
the lamp on the mantel, she squinted at the clock.
“Three-thirty.”

So. Dawn was a little less than a
couple of hours away. She could write her notes, pack, and make her
escape before the household stirred. Good. Callie didn’t think she
could face Aubrey again. And she knew she couldn’t take leave of
Becky. Such a parting would be too painful for both of
them.

“
Notes. I’ll write
notes.”

She’d also leave Monster
with Becky. It was going to be hard enough on Becky to lose her
nanny. Callie wouldn’t deprive her of her cat, too. She might be
wicked, but she wasn’t
quite
that bad.

It took Callie an hour to write her
notes because she wanted to be sure to phrase everything just so.
That didn’t leave her much time to pack. She managed, imperfectly,
and with no regard for wrinkles. At a quarter to five, she crept
down the back stairs of the beautiful mansion she’d come to love.
She still had forty-five minutes to make her escape. Aubrey didn’t
get up until seven-thirty or eight, so, even if Mrs. Granger would
be up and about at six, nobody would know she was gone until Becky
awakened. She’d been sleeping late because of her
illness.

Callie knew she could get away
completely before she was missed.

It was a cold, miserable, foggy walk
down the long, long drive to the road to Santa Angelica. Callie had
no idea what she’d tell people when she turned up back at her
family home.

She’d think of something, but she knew
it wouldn’t work very well. Everyone would wonder. Rumors would
probably fly.

With a sigh, Callie decided that was
no more than she deserved for deceiving Aubrey for so
long.

Not that she’d really
deceived
him, she told
herself. At once, her conscience slapped her.

“
You did, too, deceive him,
and you know it, Callie Prophet. You had no business reading those
letters. And if you felt compelled to read them once, you ought to
have turned them over after that one time. For heaven’s sake, it’s
a felony to tamper with the U.S. Mail! You did worse than
tamper.”

Again, the less principled side of her
nature tried to give her an excuse by reminding her that Aubrey
hadn’t used the U.S. Postal Service for most of the letters, but
had left them for his wife. There were no postmarks on
them.

“
Stop caviling this minute,
Gallic Prophet!” Callie sniffed, disgusted with herself.

“
Merciful heavens, it’s
foggy,” she muttered, trying to keep her feet on the road and not
wander into the woods. The fog had become so thick it made the
trees look as if they’d been wrapped in cotton fluff, and it
muffled every sound. Callie could neither see nor hear anything
through the heavy cloak of thick, gray, dismal moisture.

No birds chirped. No squirrels
chattered. The enveloping silence, like the enveloping fog, added
an even greater degree of loss and solitude to her solitary trudge
to the village and away from the scene of her disgrace. And away
from her love.

It was no more than she deserved, to
have to walk this road alone and in the fog. She deserved worse
than that.

If you’d been honorable,
you might be marrying the man you love. But you weren’t, and now
you’ve not only lost Aubrey, but you’ve lost Becky as
well
.

The notion of losing the two people
she loved most in the world was such a miserable one that Callie
couldn’t contain her tears. She was surprised she had any
left.

Stopping and setting her suitcase on
the roadway, she fished in her pocket for a handkerchief with which
to dry her eyes and blow her nose. She was irked with herself. This
was all her fault, and if she was now suffering, it was no more
than she deserved.

She didn’t hear the milk wagon until
the horse loomed out of the fog directly in front of her. She
didn’t mean to scream any more, probably, than the horse did, but
scream they both did.

Horrified and frozen in place, Callie
saw the animal rear. She saw its iron-shod hooves, which looked to
her startled brain like huge clubs, coming down straight at her out
of the air.

After that, her world went
black.

Chapter Twenty

Aubrey lay in bed for hours after
Callie’s confession. At first his anger and sense of betrayal kept
him awake. After those two bitter emotions had burned themselves to
a slow simmer, he began to wonder about lots of things.

He still resented Callie’s having read
his private correspondence to Anne. Those letters had been written
out of love to the person Aubrey had cherished more than life
itself. Indeed, if he could have arranged things to suit himself,
he’d have gladly sacrificed himself for Anne. The good Lord knew,
Becky would probably have been better off with Anne than with him,
if fate had insisted she lose one parent.

On the other hand, after his fury
cooled, he sort of understood why Callie had read them.

“
Bah! She had no
right.”

True,
true
.