Shades of Gray (5 page)

In the end it had been a matter of his own conscience.

He had not sold them arms or offered aid, merely a base where they could live unmolested. He had helped make their continued existence possible, when he just as easily could have ordered his army to capture them. He could have had them executed or had them thrown into his prison for the duration of their natural lives, actions that most of the world no doubt would have applauded privately, if not publicly.

Instead he had offered them sanctuary here on Kadeira—in the eyes of the world. In Sara’s eyes. And there had been no connection made by the world or by her when the Final Legion had been quietly and effeciently captured one week after leaving Kadeira, and before they could kill again.

Only Adrian, the leader of that group, had managed to escape, and he hadn’t been heard of since. The Final Legion had been more or less forgotten in the year since their capture, replaced in the news by other groups. Forgotten by all except those like Sara, who had lost loved ones.

And by Andres Sereno. He would go to his grave with the blood of their crimes on his soul. But Andres could bear that. He didn’t know if Sara could.

He left the gazebo, walking slowly back through the garden, his hands in his pockets. He wondered grimly if he would be able to sit across from her at dinner without disgracing himself; his hands always seemed to shake when he was near her.

She was so lovely … and so vitally important to him. And though he had learned to cope
easily with foreign governments, with powerful men and enemies, coping with his love for Sara was still the most difficult task of his life. He could be nothing except what he was, and what he was unsettled and frightened her. He knew that. He had seen that even two years ago, even before the Final Legion had driven her away from him.

And because of all that he had never pressed her unfairly, had never taken advantage of the explosive passion between them. Because he had known that if they’d become lovers while some part of her feared him, it could have destroyed them both.

It might still destroy them.

High above the noise of New York City, in a large and luxurious penthouse office, only one voice disturbed the tranquillity of a Wednesday afternoon.

“Hagen,” Raven Long said with a rare note of anger in her musical voice, “has lived too long. I always knew that one day he’d do something
unforgivable. Well, he’s done it. The guys should never have stopped you from killing him, Josh.” She was pacing restlessly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” her husband responded in an absent tone as he bent over a large map on his huge desk. “If they’d let me kill him back then, we probably wouldn’t have Sarah, Teddy, or Kyle. Kelsey might have had to look for a new job, which means he probably wouldn’t have met Elizabeth. I imagine Derek would have gotten Shannon without Hagen’s—or our—help, but you never really know about these things.”

On the other side of the desk, Raven bent down to rest on her elbows, but she was looking at Josh rather than the map, and she was smiling. “Guess you’re right. Have I told you lately what an excellent husband you turned out to be?”

He looked up from his work, his normally rather hard blue eyes softening when they rested on her face. With a faint grin he asked, “What brought that on?”

Solemnly she said, “Well, you’re being very patient with me. You’ve let me rant and rave and
get it all out of my system. That’s a rare quality in a husband—and much appreciated.”

Josh chuckled but said in a grave tone, “You don’t rant and rave very often, darling. And never without reason.”

Raven, her reason brought back to mind, sighed. “Seriously, we are going to have to do something about Hagen, and soon. He’s been let run wild too long.” She shook off wistful thoughts. “First things first, though.”

“Meaning Sara Marsh.” Josh nodded. “I think you alerted the
Corsair
in time; they were sailing just off Trinidad, so their radar took in Kadeira.”

“That’s some boat you’ve got, friend,” a new voice interjected.

“Kelsey, did you find Derek?” Raven asked, frowning down at the map.

“I’ve been out of touch, you know,” Raven’s ex-partner said in a wounded tone as he approached them.

She looked up at him, one eyebrow rising sardonically.

Kelsey grinned. “As a matter of fact, I did find him. He has a hideout up near Canada, though
he
calls it a hunting lodge. He swore at me for ten minutes once I managed to raise him by radio. Said he’d retired and was about to dust off that boardroom chair just as soon as he got used to being a married man. I said he’d never get used to it, and wasn’t it nice? Anyway, I told him we were mobilizing the commando crew again and asked him if he wanted to play.”

“Well, does he?” Josh asked.

“He’s on his way. Shannon too. Do we have a plan, or will we charge blindly?”

“Charging Kadeira blindly,” Josh pointed out, “would probably
not
be the best way to do it.”

“Agreed.” Kelsey joined them in contemplating the map, which had a course marked out from Key West to Kadeira. “So Hagen transported her by sea, huh?”

Raven indicated the marked course. “This is the only thing to approach Kadeira in the last forty-eight hours—just a boat. Anybody want to bet Sara isn’t already there?”

After a moment Kelsey said soberly, “Are we sure she’s there against her will? Absolutely positive? Granted, Hagen’s ruthless enough to
kidnap her, but would Sereno have done it this way?”

Josh looked at him intently. “You tell us.”

Kelsey glanced from Josh to Raven, then sighed.

“He’s a cagey one, Sereno. Awfully hard to get a firm handle on. Where his country is concerned, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get in his way.”

“But,” Raven said, “you spent more time around him than any of the rest of us.”

Slowly Kelsey replied, “Where Sereno is concerned, Sara Marsh is the wild card in his deck. I just don’t know.”

“From instinct,” Raven urged. “What do you
think
?”

“Well, I think that in the past he’s gone to the extreme of making certain she was never forced in any way. Now … Dammit, it just doesn’t feel right! This sudden move after two years. It’s out of character. Unless …”

“Unless what?” Josh asked.

Behind mild eyes, Kelsey’s mind was working swiftly. “Unless,” he said softly, “she was in
danger here. If Sereno believed she might be in danger, he’d move heaven and earth to get her under his wing where she’d be safe.”

They looked at one another in silence.

Sara requested a dinner tray in her suite rather than face Andres again that evening, and though Maria was clearly unhappy with the request, she nonetheless brought the tray upstairs without comment.

It was hardly something Sara could continue for the duration; four weeks was a long time to hide out in a few rooms. In any case, her own personality would not have allowed such an action. But tonight … tonight she couldn’t face him again. She felt raw. For two years she had managed to convince herself that leaving him was the best thing she had ever done, and now she wasn’t sure of anything at all.

She didn’t allow herself to think about it at first. She ate dinner, then set the tray outside her door. She listened to some of her tapes while absently pacing the room. She caught herself
listening for a knock at the door and was so unsettled by this realization that she turned the music up louder and swore beneath her breath.

The evening dragged on. She took a leisurely bath, filling the suite with the scent of jasmine, and felt like crying when she discovered jasmine sachets in the drawer where her sleepwear had been kept. With a peculiar sense of defiance she put on a long silk nightgown and sheer negligee in emerald green, ignoring the fact that it was Andres’s favorite color on her.

Or had been.

She couldn’t avoid thinking any longer about the Andres she remembered so well: a handsome, charismatic man with a low laugh and a glow in his dark eyes that she’d never seen in the eyes of any other man. A man who had requested that she wear green often because she looked “so damned beautiful” in the color. A man who had ordered dozens of rosebushes because she loved them, and never mind the difficulties of growing roses in a tropical climate; the roses had been kept alive and well for two years. A man who, when caught by the international press nakedly
wearing his supposedly cynical and ruthless heart on his sleeve, had reacted with rueful amusement.

He had told her he loved her less than an hour after their first meeting. He had proposed marriage an hour after that. And yet it had been nearly a week before he kissed her, a week filled with media attention that had unsettled her. Andres had been unfailingly courteous to the reporters, but blandly uncommunicative; she merely had been disturbed.

At the time she had seen his invitation to come with him to Kadeira as an offer of escape from the media, and because he fascinated and charmed her, she had accepted. Yet even then she had sensed something dark inside Andres, something that both attracted and repelled her. Common sense had told her that a man who had won his country’s leadership with his own hands had to be touched by a certain ruthlessness, yet she had not allowed that knowledge to prevent her from becoming involved with him. He intrigued her.

And here on Kadeira she had seen glimpses of that darkness, though never in relation to
herself. He was, she had discovered, passionately devoted to his country, and quite definitely ruthless in seeing to its good. The revolution still attempting to depose him had had its beginnings more than a year before they’d met, and Sara had seen him deal with some of the problems it caused.

The rebels had infiltrated the one weekly newspaper of Kadeira; Andres had immediately shut it down and allowed only international newspapers, shipped in weekly, to be available to his people. The television station, picking up and broadcasting international programs by means of a satellite dish, had been captured and used for propaganda three times by the rebels before Andres, lacking the manpower to protect it around the clock, reluctantly closed it. The radio station was taken off the air for the same reason. He strictly curtailed trade with other countries because the danger to their ships was great, and he adopted a policy of politely but firmly warning off casual visitors to Kadeira.

The majority of the people of Kadeira, loyal to Andres, went about their daily lives as best they
could. Unlike many other dictators, Andres taxed his people as little as possible, using every other means at his disposal to raise the necessary money to keep his country going.

Including …

The house was quiet, and it was long after midnight. Sara opened the French doors of her little balcony and stood out in the warm night, listening to the silence.

Finally facing herself, she silently agreed with at least one thing Andres had said in the gazebo. He was right in believing that she wanted the answers to be simple ones. Yes or no; black or white; right or wrong. But what she wanted was impossible in the real world. He said truth wasn’t simple, and she knew he was right about that.

If life were simple, Andres, who undeniably loved his country, would have looked at the havoc of revolution and quietly stepped down just to stop the destruction. But it
wasn’t
simple, and he couldn’t do that. Lucio had made it obvious that his own regime would be a merciless one. So Andres remained in power, struggling
daily and sometimes ruthlessly just to keep his people fed, clothed—and alive.

Right or wrong?

Sara leaned on the balcony railing and sighed as she looked down onto the darkened terrace. Then she saw a glowing red ember and realized that Andres was there, smoking one of his thin cigars and watching her. Before she could draw back into her room, he spoke.

“Shall we play the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet
?” His quiet voice reached her clearly in the silence, not really amused, not really teasing.

After a moment she said steadily, “Let’s not.”

The red ember flared brightly as he drew on the cigar, and his face was revealed in a faint but hellish glow; in that instant he looked so implacably dangerous that she caught her breath.

“No. I suppose not. It doesn’t really suit us, does it?” He gave a low laugh, half sitting on the balustrade behind him to look up at her: he was almost directly below her, and only a few feet separated them. “For us, it’s
Much Ado About Nothing
.”

Sara swallowed, but the ache in her throat remained. “Which line?”

“A line for you? That’s easy. ‘I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books.’ ” Andres laughed again, mockingly this time, and flicked his cigar out into the garden. “My line is easy as well.” He drew an audible breath and his voice lost its mockery, rasping over the simple words. “ ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you; is not that strange?’ ”

Sara straightened and took a step back toward the doorway, conscious of her heart pounding and her eyes stinging. Damn him! How could he make her feel this way when—

“Sara.” He spoke quickly, still a little rough. “Walk with me in the garden?”

“No.” She fought to steady her voice. “I’m not dressed, Andres. I—”

“It’s dark. No lights, no moon. Come down, Sara, please.”

She wasn’t sure, even after she withdrew into her room and closed the French doors, if she would go out to him. She wasn’t even sure when she found sandals in the closet and put them on,
or when she left her room and went out into the softly lit hallway. It wasn’t a conscious decision. And as she walked through the library to the open terrace doors, she knew why she had refused any and all contact with Andres after leaving Kadeira.

Because she had known that if he had once said “Come to me,” she would have gone, in spite of everything. Just the way she was going now. And she knew why. Yes or no; black or white; right or wrong—truth wasn’t simple. Not simple, and never to be avoided even if it hurt.

His verses from Shakespeare triggered something in her mind, something she had read here in this room and had not forgotten because the words had rung so utterly true. Lines written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.