He stopped because he saw the impact of that rejection in her face.
He had thought it's lines were more mature, but now he saw it age before his eyes. The soft curve of girlish cheek tightened and thinned. Her lips reshaped themselves, no longer full and expectant.
"Valued perhaps, but undesired," she said, her voice flat.
He wondered if he were capable of that lie, remembering the long sleepless nights during which he had desired her. Dreamed of her. Wanted her with a need so great that his body aches and trembled in the darkness.
"The fault is not in what you offer," he said softly.
"Your brother said you believe yourself unworthy of a woman's love."
"My brother says a great many things," he said, smiling at her again. "Sometimes he thinks he knows more about my affairs than I do. He had no right to speak to you about my feelings. I can only tell you how sorry I am that he has misled you about the reality of them."
"Elizabeth told me you are in love with someone else. If you will tell me that is true, then..." She paused, her eyes on his as she drew a breath. "Then I will never speak to you again about what I have told you tonight."
An open and gallant heart. All it would take would be another lie, and eventually she would forget what she believed she felt for him. She is so young, Ian thought, trying to justify what he knew he must do. Too young, surely, to have formed any lasting attachment.
You're afraid that what I feel for you is the result of my tender heart. Or my romanticism. She was wrong, of course, for what he really feared, more than he had ever feared anything else in his life, was that it was not.
One more lie, he thought again, his gaze on her face. At least do me the courtesy of dealing with me honestly.
"Elizabeth was wrong," he said, and could not bear the sudden flare of hope in her eyes. So he added the words that were designed to destroy it, as surely as he was destroying himself, "But so was my brother."
She said nothing for a long time, her eyes locked on his. And then, she nodded, the movement small and carefully contained.
She rose and, without looking at him again, left him alone with only the cold, black memory of what had been in her face in response to the lie he had chosen. He had understood before he had uttered it that it was by far the crueller of the two weapons she had placed within his hands. And he had chosen it because it would be, or so he prayed, the more effective.
*~*~*~*
"You sent for me?" the Earl of Dare asked. He had opened the door wider this time, surer, perhaps, of his reception.
"Come in," Ian instructed, and waited until Dare had closed the door behind him and advanced across the room.
He would not have wished to hold this particular interview in the horizontal, as Val called it, but the things he needed to say to his brother could not wait. There had already been too much damage done by his reticence to speak honestly. An open and gallant heart echoed somewhere within his heart.
"You told my ward that I am in love with her."
He could read the shock in his brother's eyes as easily as he had read the pain in Annie's.
"It seems Miss Darlington wastes no time in going after what she wants," Dare said, controlling the upward slant of his lips.
"She is very young. What she thinks she feels for me is rooted in an unfortunate and, given her age, perhaps natural tendency to romanticize our roles."
"And what you feel for her?"
"You had no right to speak to her."
Dare raised one dark brow, the arch of it enquiring. "I have a brother's right, I think."
"You bloody, arrogant bastard," Ian said bitterly. "
"Are you denying that you love her? It won't do any good, you know. I know you far too well."
"You don't know me at all. Not if you believe my reason for hiding what I feel is because I limp. Do you take me for a fool? So insufferably vain that I would reject Annie's love because I can no longer dance with her?"
The pupils of his brother's eyes widened minutely, expanding into the rim of sapphire blue.
"You have no idea what you have done with your meddling," Ian continued, emphasizing every word. "Where I choose to love or not is of no possible concern to you. Nor is what I do about those feelings. I am not Sebastian, who does not know his own emotions well enough to control them. I am the Sinclair who is neither impetuous nor reckless. How dare you question whatever decisions I make about my life? And how dare you confide my feelings, whatever you believe them to be, to a woman?"
There was an answering fury in Val's eyes. Ian imagined that no one had ever talked to the Earl of Dare like this, certainly not either of his brothers. To Dare's credit he did not respond, and despite his anger, Ian drew in a sharp breath to finish what he had begun.
"You may be the head of this family, but that position gives you no right to interfere in my life. Since I have returned to England, you have persisted in treating me as a child, as if I were incapable of deciding what I am fit or not fit to do. And because I love you, I have endured and even forgiven your unwanted attempts to coddle me. But I swear, Val, I shall never forgive you for this."