The one who had started everything yesterday with his cries and his pleas for rescue. What the child's age could have to do with anything...
However, Ian had asked her this same question in the coach. Her mind occupied with worry for her guardian, she hadn't understood the relevance of it then. She didn't now.
"He asked me how old I would judge the boy to be. I didn't see why it mattered. I still don't, but I gave him my opinion."
"Give it to me," Dare suggested.
"Eight or so. It was hard to tell, given the deprivations in his background. He was small and thin, but still..." She hesitated, recreating the urchin's dirty face in her mind's eyes. After she had, she could see no reason to change her original estimate. "What difference can it possibly make how old he was?"
"I'm not sure," Dare said. "Ian seemed to think it was important enough for him to attempt to tell me about it, despite the fact that he was half-asleep with the doctor's dosing. I suppose laudanum alone could be responsible for whatever significance he was attached to the child's age."
"Except he asked me this question yesterday. When there was nothing interfere with his ability to reason."
Dare's lips quirked. "Very astute, missMissDarlington. Perhaps it is your intellect that has so attracted my brother. And all along I had believed it was your speaking eyes."
She examined the words, searching them for any other possible meaning. Any meaning other than the one that seemed to be obvious, if unbelievable.
"He hadn't told you? How clumsy of me then to reveal his secret. I'm afraid Ian clings to the rather strange idea that because he was injured so severely, he is no longer worthy of a woman's interest. No matter how strongly he is attracted to that woman. I wonder that your intellect has not allowed you to arrive at that conclusion."
No matter how strongly he is attracted to that woman... No matter how strongly...
"You don't mean me, my Lord?" Annie said.
"Then I wonder why I would bother to have had this conversation with you, Miss Darlington. I am not yet in my dotage, I assure you, despite the difference in our ages."
"But..."
Again she searched her memory for Elizabeth's exact words. As she did, the remembrance of what had been in Ian's eyes as he had looked into hers yesterday was in her mind as well. And in light of what the Earl had just said that took on a new and compelling significance, causing her to rethink everything she had believed she understood about their relationship. Although his gaze remained on her face, surprisingly the Earl refrained from comment as she reviewed all the things that had caused her to reach that understanding.
"He is in love with someone else," she said finally, realizing that one piece of information was at the heart of what she had been led to believe.
"And who told you that? My so-noble, pigheaded brother?"
"Your wife."
"Elizabeth?" Dare said, a crease forming between the wings of his brows. "I wonder why she should think that."
"Perhaps because your brother told her?" Annie said, feeling her pulse begin to increase at Dare's puzzlement.
"If so, I can assure you he did it with a purpose. That ridiculous noblity I was talking about."
"Because of his health?"
"Another quixotic notion. The two of you deserve one another," Dare said mockingly.
"You are mistaken," Annie said, trying desperately to quell the surging hope.
This had been a battle she believed she was winning. She had been forced to accept that, no matter how she felt about him, Ian Sinclair was in love with another woman. He had to turned his head away from her touch because of it.
Or was it possible there was another reason for his reluctance to have her touch him? A reason which she would find palatable, of course. Was it possible as his brother had just suggested, that her guardian believed he was unworthy of her love? Unworthy. The idea was so ludicrous that she would have rejected it out of hand except...
She's searched the Earl of Dare's eyes, which were no longer cold, she realized. And no longer mocking. They seemed slightly amused and school with patience as he watched her adjust her thinking to the idea he had just planted in her head.
Planted. He had deliberately told her this because he had known Ian never would. After all, there was no one who knew hwe guardian better than this his notorious brother. And if Dare believed this were true...
"Thank you," she said softly.
The finely shaped lips relaxed, that motion very reminiscent of another beautiful mouth moving from the sternness of battle fury into this same enigmatic half-smile.
"I am overdressed to play cupid. And I shall never do so again, believe me. What use you make of this information is up to you. I seldom interfere in my brother's life. However, I have never seen him in love before, at least nothing beyond the calf-love variety of our boyhoods."