Chapter 55：CHAPTER 55: THE GUARDIAN OF HER HEART

She was obviously trying to reconcile what he had just said with the events of yesterday. 

"Then why would he make that claim?" She asked. 

"To evoke your sympathy, perhaps."

She shook her head again, the movement almost unconscious, as if she were weighing that idea. 

"Then it worked, I suppose," she finally said. 

"It would have worked on anyone with such a tender heart."

She laughed, and the sound moved within him. She had been made for joy. He had known that from the moment her eyes, alight with humour and such an obvious zest for leaving, had challenged his in the hallway of Fenton school. 

"My greatest failing. At least according to Mrs Kemp."

"I thought she believed that to be a tendency to romance," Ian said, remembering Annie's confession. If course, it was not surprising that he remembered, since he had treasured every word she had ever said to him. 

The laughter faded, first from the mobile lips and then more slowly from her eyes. And still they rested on his face. 

"That's what you're afraid of," she said softly.

His heart stopped and then began to beat far too rapidly, a phenomenon he had experienced previously only on the eve of battle. And this fear was not so far from that. It, too, was the result of the recognition that he was in grave danger. 

Because he was not prepared for this. That she knew what he feared was an unexpected as the sudden confrontation in the street had been. 

He tried to think how to meet this attack, wishing that the control that had always governed his behavior had not been weakened by the effects of the drug. And, he admitted, by yesterday's unexpected contact between his hungry, aching body and the young, strong one of Annie Darlington. 

Young, strong, and beautiful. And deserving of far more than the shattered remnants of the man he had once been. 

Had there been any guarantee of how long the flawed vessel that held his heart would last, he might have been weak enough to offer her that tawdry gift. And given her nature she might well have accepted it, never even stopping to compare it to her worth. 

"I don't understand," he said. 

Even in his own ears, his voice was strained. Revealing? 

"You're afraid that what I feel for you is the result of my tender heart," she said. "Or of my romanticism."

"What you feel for me?" he repeated, injecting a note of disbelief into the repetition. 

She paused, holding his eyes as if she expected an answer to that assertion. He found he was incapable of giving one. 

He could hear the blood beating in his ears, almost loud enough to drown out the sound of her voice and the truth it spoke. Almost enough. 

"Then I shall be open with you first," she went on when he said nothing in response. "I am in love with you. I am not sure when it began. Or even when I was first aware that it had. I had always thought I should immediately know the man I would love. I believed that the identification would come to me like startling revelation as soon as I had laid eyes on him. And instead..." Her voice broke, and get eyes glazed with tears. She fought them, blinking the moisture away. 

"Instead," she went on, speaking so softly he had to strain to catch the words, "It grew so slowly that I was not aware of what was happening until it was far too late. And so I could not guard my heart against the cruel possibility that you would not love me in return."

Again she paused, swallowing to overcome the force of emotion. His eyes traced the movement along the slender column of her throat before they came back again to hers. 

"So I have no shield at all against what I feel," she said, "but I can tell you with all the honesty and courage I possess that what is in my heart for you has nothing to do with pity."

The silence lengthened as her words echoed again and again inside his head. And had his reason been the one she named, they might have been enough to defeat his determination. But it was not, of course. 

He was the guardian of her heart, which had been made for joy and not for sorrow. The decision he had made about her future had nothing to do with her father's will, and everything to do with the deadly legacy Darlington's cowardice has left inside his chest. It seemed as if he could feel it there. The weight of the metal as cold and heavy as the death he knew it would inevitably bring. 

"Believe me..." He began, hating himself for what he was about to do. And yet this self-hatred would be nothing to that he would feel if he were selfish enough to take what she offered him. "It is not that I do not value your affection."

He stopped because he saw the impact of that rejection in her face.