Shades of Gray (9 page)

How odd, she thought vaguely, that he should quote Robert Browning about love when she had earlier quoted to herself Elizabeth Barrett Browning about the “mastery” of love. And how strangely moving it was to hear this proud,
self-educated man turn often to the wise words of poets to express his own deep feelings.

She drew a deep breath. “Yes.”

His mouth twisted a little, and he didn’t look up at her. “Should a man not show the softer side of himself to the woman he loves?”

Her fingers tightened in his. “Andres, it isn’t what I see that frightens me. It’s what I don’t see, what you won’t
let
me see.”

“So.” He met her gaze finally. “You wish to see the face that took a country in bloodshed. The face that gave sanctuary to terrorists. The face that sent a dead boy home to his family branded a traitor for all to see.”

She didn’t flinch from his hard voice. “It’s your face. It’s you. Should either of us hide from that?”

“You wanted to,” he reminded her almost reluctantly, his tone unchanged. “You tried. You ran from it in fear. We both know that. Do you really believe I’ll allow the same thing to drive you away again?”

“Just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, Andres!”

“That part of me will never touch you.” His voice was still harsh. “It doesn’t exist between us.”

Sara knew that Andres understood what she was afraid of; she also knew that his method of dealing with it would never be a solution for her. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—defend his actions, perhaps because there
was
no defense, but he had seen her fear and had acted to banish it, taking care that the darkness she feared in him was hidden from her as much as possible. He could speak of it to her and would, but he would consciously try not to show it. Even now he was trying to shield her.

So she braced herself inwardly and said the only thing she could to show him how impossible his solution was. “You say you want my love, my trust; how can you expect that from me? How can I love what I don’t understand? Or are you willing for less? Do you
want
me to love only a part of you, Andres?”

She hadn’t flinched from his harsh voice, but he flinched from her quiet one.

Sara went on as steadily as she could. “I can’t,
you know that. Not and live with you.” She suddenly wanted to cry. “I’d always be afraid of that part of you, always wonder about—about the darkness in you.”

“Sara—”

“It’s
there
. We both know it! You said I had to see the best of you; I have to see the worst too. I thought it was the terrorists, but you said yourself I hadn’t known the worst of you. I have to.”

“No.”

“Yes.” She steadied her voice with an effort. “Andres, I said I wouldn’t run away again, and I meant that. But if you won’t let me understand you—completely—then I’ll never get over the uncertainty. I’d always wonder. And I’d have to say good-bye—this time—and
walk
away.”

He said nothing, just continued to gaze down at the hand he held.

Sara searched his face and was conscious of a growing desperation. He’d shut her out, blocking the chinks so that nothing escaped, and she couldn’t let him do that, not now. Not when it was so terribly important. “You said that I wanted the easy answers, the simple solutions,”
she said. “And you were right. I ran because there
weren’t
any easy answers. Now I know there can’t be, not between us. But there
has
to be understanding, Andres. And truth. You said that, too, that you’d have no lies between us.”

“I’ve dug my own grave, haven’t I?”

She felt a prickle of foreboding, an odd unease. His voice had been strange, almost lifeless, as if the metaphorical grave he spoke of yawned before him. But before she could speak, he was going on in the same tone.

“And if you can’t live with the worst?”

She didn’t say anything, because they both knew the answer.

After a moment Andres lifted her hand quickly to his lips and then released it, rising to his feet. His expression was hard-held, masklike, remote. “We’ll discuss this tomorrow,” he said. His voice was even now, controlled. “You should eat. Maria’s kept something hot for you; I’ll go and tell her you’re awake.”

Sara waited until he was at the door, then said, “Andres?” And when he half turned back to her, she said, “Tomorrow things won’t be different.”

His expression changed then, and for a flashing instant she thought of defeat, of something beaten. Then he was expressionless again. “I know.”

She looked at the door for a long time after he left.

A considerable distance away from the tensions of Kadeira, a massive and dangerous-looking man moved with inherent grace through the shadowed streets of a large East Coast American city. No casual stroller of those streets would have seen him, but the petite, red-haired woman standing patiently under a streetlight spoke to him even before he left the concealing shadows and joined her.

“Well, did you meet your mysterious contact?”

“I met him.” Unexpectedly, Zach Steele’s deep voice was rather soft. “Anybody bother you, honey, or did that misbegotten hound pretend he was a guard dog?”

The “misbegotten hound,” who was an Irish wolfhound, and who, at a hundred and fifty
pounds, far outweighed his mistress, woofed softly in response to this aspersion on his character and thumped his tail lazily on the pavement. The redhead patted him consolingly and addressed her husband.

“Three men passed, and all of them scraped their elbows on that wall to walk around us. Wizard smiled at them. With all his teeth. Zach, did you get answers?”

He took her hand and they began moving down the quiet, shadowed sidewalk, Wizard pacing at their heels. “Interesting answers,” he affirmed, his deep voice still soft. Then, as if continuing an old argument, he said, “You should have stayed in New York, Teddy. This trip has been so rushed, you haven’t gotten any rest at all.”

“I’ll rest on the jet going back.” And then, apparently addressing Wizard, Teddy Steele said dolefully, “One of these days he’s going to find out that I was never meant to be wrapped in cotton or put under glass.” Wizard woofed in doubtful agreement.

“Dammit, Teddy.” Zach’s voice roughened a bit. “It’s only been a couple of months since …”

Teddy’s voice softened. “I’m fine, Zach. Really. Now, what did you find out?”

After a moment, and after a reassuring squeeze of her hand, Zach explained what he’d found out.

“It looks like Hagen’s goons snatched Sara about two jumps ahead of someone else. Two men, Latinos; they stuck out a bit in this neighborhood, so they were noticed.”

“Sereno’s men?” Teddy asked, then replied to that herself. “No, that doesn’t make sense, not if he’d asked Hagen to bring Sara to him; he wouldn’t have sent his own men after her as well. So who were they?”

“Hard to say for sure,” Zach told her broodingly. “But I’ll bet that if we backtracked, we’d find that Sara’s been running from two different … parties—all this time. Sereno’s men, certainly. And somebody else’s.”

Teddy, who was extremely intelligent and very quick at reading between the lines, exclaimed softly. “An enemy of Sereno’s, maybe? Practically the whole world knows how he feels about
her, knows she’s his … one weakness. Could it be someone who wanted to get his hands on Sara to—to use her against Sereno in some way?” She remembered when it had happened to them, when an evil madman had used her as bait in an attempt to destroy Zach.

Zach’s hand tightened around her as he, too, remembered. After a moment he said, “Could be. Kelsey said it didn’t fit otherwise that Sereno would move all of a sudden after nearly two years—and that makes sense. If he found out somehow that his enemy was closing in on Sara …”

They walked in silence for a little while, and then Teddy spoke soberly. “You’re worried Josh is going to go down there.”

“I know he will. Hell, we’re all suckers for love.” The words were flippant, even sardonic, but his tone wasn’t. “And those two should have a chance; it’ll be hard enough for them without some bastard trying to use Sara to break Sereno. They should have a chance. Josh’ll go down there—Derek, too, I’d bet. Josh owes Sereno,
and if this is all because he’s trying to protect Sara, then I’m sure Josh wants to help.”

Quietly Teddy said, “You can’t wrap him in cotton, either.”

“Yeah, I know.”

But knowing it wouldn’t stop him from trying, Teddy knew. She had known that from the first, had known that Zach would instantly and without thought or hesitation place his own large body between danger and anyone he loved. So she mentally began to gather her arguments, because Zach wasn’t going to Kadeira without her; he just
wasn’t
.

“Teddy …”

“The
Corsair
,” she said serenely, “is very comfortable, after all. And I love islands.”

“Dammit, honey …”

Sara was up and about the next day despite Andres’s objections, sporting a white bandage just above her left temple but feeling much better physically. Emotionally she was still a bit raw, accepting what she felt, but still confused, still
afraid that in the end she wouldn’t be able to understand and love what she thought was the ruthless core of Andres, the part that gave him much of his enormous strength.

As for him, he avoided the “discussion” he’d said would take place that day. Obviously he was still tired and drawn, and his eyes, when they rested on her, were watchful, wary, and yet somehow anguished as well, hurting. Sara was disturbed and worried, but she didn’t press him, knowing that they needed time. There was so much between them, so much tension, so many feelings, so much pain. They were, she thought, afraid of that pain, both of them. Afraid of hurting each other even more. They were careful.

They were still being careful when Andres came looking for her sometime after dinner that night, finding her in the library, where she was trying to find a kind of peace among the poets. He sat down across from her in a chair and, asking her permission with a lifted brow, lit one of his thin cigars. She wondered only then where he had acquired his curiously old-fashioned manners, but she didn’t ask.

She didn’t ask because she was suddenly and rather bewilderedly coping with a stinging surge of feelings and sensations. The physical awareness between them had always been powerful, but since she’d returned, the strong emotions had partially masked—or even overwhelmed—desire. But it seemed now that the aborted kidnapping, or its disturbing aftermath, had changed that.

In the eternal instant during which he concentrated absently on lighting the cigar, she found herself looking at him as if she’d never seen him before. He was graceful even in his stillness, handsome in his weariness. The physical strength of him was a tangible thing, a vital force cloaked in fleeting quiet.

And in his eyes, those dark, intense eyes, were emotions that compelled, intrigued. Behind the shutters, underneath the wariness and the caution, the pain and the love, was the stillness of a man who had lived too long with danger. He looked at her then, and in the unguarded moment when their gazes locked, she thought she glimpsed his soul. It shook her to her own.

Love, instant and intense. Pride. Pain. And there was something else. Held in an iron grip, with the kind of desperation only a wounded soul could know, were the last tatters of illusion, the final, fragile tendrils of a cherished dream.

She tore her gaze away with an inner gasp, staring blindly down at her book. Too late, too late! It was always too late.… Embedded in her heart, as close as her own soul. If she hadn’t come back, she still would have loved him all the days of her life, angry and afraid. But she was here, and the anger was gone, the fear turned to confused uncertainty.

“I wanted to talk to you about something, Sara,” he said rather abruptly. “About Joshua Long and his friends.”

She was a little surprised and welcomed the distraction. Laying her book aside, she said, “There isn’t much I can tell you about them.” Her voice was steady.

“You’ve met?”

“Face-to-face only once,” she answered readily. “It was a little over a year ago, months after
I left Kadeira.…” She hesitated then, frowning a little.

Dryly Andres said, “I’ll make it easier for you. You were contacted by an American agent—either by a man named Hagen or by Sarah Cavell herself. Sarah was to take part in a very covert assignment here; she was part of a team sent to rescue another American agent I was holding as a political prisoner. It was believed that her similarity to you would make it easier for her and Rafferty Lewis to get in and out of Kadeira safely. And successfully.”

Sara was staring at him, a little puzzled, a little tense. “You—Did you know that … then?”

Andres hesitated, then nodded. “I knew. As soon as I saw her, I knew what Hagen had intended.”

“You turned your back and let them escape, even though you could have stopped them,” Sara said very slowly, remembering what Sarah Cavell had told her, gently, over the phone a few days after that escape.

He hesitated again. “Her resemblance to you made it easy for me,” he said finally, tension
evident in his voice. “No one was surprised that I couldn’t allow her to be harmed.”

Sara was trying to make sense of it. “But if you knew Hagen, knew why they were coming here—and Vincente said something about you having called in a favor from an American agent in order to get me here—then Hagen was returning the favor you did him, wasn’t he? The favor of helping him to get his agent out of here safely. You
planned
that.” She shook her head, adding softly, “Sarah said you did, that you were helping them, even though it wasn’t supposed to look that way.”

“It was for my benefit as well,” Andres said, apparently unsurprised by that other Sarah’s perception. His voice was suddenly flat. “Kadeira’s benefit.”

He’s showing me
, Sara realized, something inside her tightening.
Showing me a little of the darkness
. She found that her eyes were fixed almost painfully on his face, her ears straining to catch the shading of every word. And there was something else, something she sensed in him. This was important, so important.