by Kay Hooper
She knew the worst of him.
And the rest? Her wariness, her uneasy awareness of the dark strength in him, the ruthlessness? Was she truly afraid of these qualities, or was she simply afraid she loved even that about the man? No. It was something else. And she thought she knew now what she was afraid of.
She accepted, fully and for the first time, that she loved Andres. She had awakened to find him kneeling by her bed, had seen, just minutes ago, what might have been his soul. Nothing would ever be the same again. Her driven need to tear at him was gone, and she couldn’t sit silently by and watch him tear at himself, convinced he was destroying whatever she felt for him, certain he was helping to end things for her with a minimum of pain.
Sara laid her book aside with unnatural care and got up from the couch. She left the library and went down the hall to Andres’s study, knocking briefly before opening the door and going in. And she totally ignored the startled presence of Colonel Durant when she asked a stark question.
“Do you know that I love you?”
Durant melted away without a word, and Andres stood at his desk where they’d been working, studying a map of the island. He was looking at her, his face a hard mask and his eyes blank. He didn’t go to her as he would have the day before, didn’t move to touch her.
“Do you know that?” she asked again.
“Sara—” His voice was harsh with strain, giving him away as it always would.
“Do you know that I didn’t run away from this island because you let terrorists stay here?” Every word emerged clear and calm, and she walked toward him slowly. “I ran because I loved you despite that, and it scared the hell out of me. It didn’t seem possible that I could love a man who could shelter the very terrorists who had killed my parents and so many other innocent people. But I did, and I knew it. So I ran. It was too much, too strong, and it still is.”
She stopped an arm’s length away, looking up into the handsome face that was losing its mask, into eyes with no shutters hiding them. “I don’t know if I can handle something that strong,” she went on steadily. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough. But I do know one thing. I can’t let you tear yourself apart thinking that something inside you could destroy my love. I love you, Andres. And nothing could change that.”
Sara wasn’t surprised that he still didn’t touch her, didn’t move toward her. She could feel the tension in him, the battle to hold himself away from her. She knew why. Because the feelings were so violent. Because there weren’t, couldn’t be, any half measures between them; there were only complicated questions with complex answers.
“You’re still afraid,” he said finally, roughly. “Why do you come to me when you’re still afraid? Is it pity, Sara?”
She knew he was remembering the night before and the broken, uncertain prayers by her bed. Knew he was wondering if that memory had brought her here. “You’re too strong to be pitied,” she told him quietly, honestly. “And, yes, I’m still afraid. The difference is that now I know why. Not of anything in you but of how I might react to it. I’ve never felt so strongly before, Andres. How you make me feel is so frightening—the power of it, our ability to hurt each other. It’s a—a kind of bond, and there’s no escaping it.”
“Is that what you want? To escape it?”
Sara shook her head a little. “I tried before, Andres, and I couldn’t. Even if you hadn’t brought me back here, I wouldn’t have escaped it. I would have kept running, but I wouldn’t have gotten away from it. From you.”
“But is it what you want?” he asked harshly, demanding an answer to that torturous question. “To escape?”
“No, not anymore.” Her voice was very soft. “I’ve realized I love you too much to want that now. But I have to know that I can give you everything you need without losing myself. Don’t you see? I have to match you, balance you, or I’ll be overwhelmed by you. You’re stronger than you know, Andres. And much of that strength comes from the intensity in you, the ability to be ruthless when you have to. I have to face it, find out if I can understand and cope with it, or it’s no good—it’ll never be any good. If I’m not strong enough to love you, we’d be better off apart. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She took a deep breath and lifted her chin. “And that’s why I won’t let you push me away, Andres. I won’t let you hurt yourself, or me, by trying to end it. You can’t end it.”
His hands rose, as though they had minds of their own, and rested very carefully on her shoulders. “You said you had to see the worst of me,” he reminded her, his voice still rough.
Sara hesitated, shaking her head a little and thinking of the clumsy uselessness of words when feelings were so powerful. “I do. But, Andres, I’ll never see anything in you to make me hate you, or be afraid of you. I know that. I think I always knew it. I just have to find out if I’m strong enough. Do you remember in the garden when I said I didn’t have the strength for this? You said I had to have it, and you told me—”
“That the love I have for you is the best of me?” he said, finishing for her.
She nodded jerkily. “Yes. To feel so much takes strength, Andres. It isn’t a tame thing between us, a gentle thing. Nothing in my life prepared me for you.”
“Sara!” his hands tightened on her shoulders, and she could feel a tremor in them. “My love, you have strength, great strength. I know it. I feel it.”
She half closed her eyes in relief at the endearment, knowing only then that he wouldn’t go on trying to push her away. Until that moment she hadn’t been sure she would win. “I have to be certain,” she whispered. “I have to know that I’m strong enough to handle this, strong enough to give you everything you need. Just give me a little time?”
Andres pulled her into his arms and held her very gently. “As much as you need,” he murmured huskily. “Even if I have to steal it.”
Sara knew what he meant. Time was a luxury in Kadeira; Lucio and his army made every single day’s survival a victory. She also knew that this new and fragile understanding between them had to be protected and nourished if it were to survive, and that they were both raw and vulnerable right now from everything they had fought their way through. They both needed time. Even if they had to steal it.
She drew away slowly after a moment, smiled at him before moving around the desk, putting needed space between them. And her voice emerged more naturally than she would have believed possible when she spoke. “You and Vincente were working on something when I interrupted. Why don’t you get him back in here, and I’ll just sit and listen.”
Andres was watching her, smiling, his face more tranquil than she had yet seen it. And his black eyes were burning, intense, hungry. Softly he said, “I can barely think when you’re in the same room.”
Sara caught her breath, felt the leaping response of her heart. But she was light, careful. “You’d better learn to,” she murmured, and wandered over to the shelves of books he kept near his desk. She heard a quiet laugh from him, then his footsteps as he left the room. She chose a book at random and went to sit in an overstuffed chair.
How easily he makes love with words! Like no other man she had ever met. He held her captive. Intrigued. Enthralled. Was it Donne who had said something about never being free until—? She frowned a little, then looked at the title of her book and laughed aloud. She wasn’t surprised to find Donne among the pages, and to find the quotation she had half remembered. “Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free.…”
She slowly turned the pages of the well-thumbed book, wondering how many times Andres had searched here and found, as she did, the words of kindred spirits struggling with similar baffling emotions. They shared a love of words, but Andres had the better command of them. Probably he could talk the devil out of hell, she thought, given a few moment’s grace and a fan to hold back the flames.
She looked up as Andres and Colonel Durant came back into the room, faintly amused to see the colonel eyeing h
er a bit warily. “I won’t blow up in your face, Vincente,” she told him gravely.
Andres chuckled as he moved to his desk, and Durant followed his president, murmuring, “No. You already did, I think.”
Sara smiled and bent her head over the book again, reading a line here, a verse there. And she listened as Andres and his colonel went back to work, quickly realizing they were trying to pinpoint Lucio’s most recent camp from their knowledge of previous ones and of the terrain. It was a slow, frustrating business, hampered by the sheer size of Kadeira’s jungles and by Lucio’s almost magical ability to hide within them.
She only half listened at first. Gradually she felt more and more of herself drawn toward the desk. And Andres. She felt his gaze on her from time to time, as tangible as touch. She heard, as always, his voice give him away at such moments with tiny breaks, almost infinitesimal lapses in the rhythm of his sentences to Vincente. And she could feel, as if her own mind had wandered, his struggle to gather strayed thoughts into coherency.
“I can barely think with you in the same room.”
It was desire. She knew that because she felt the effects of it herself. But it was also more. It was an affinity, a connection between them. The unnerving awareness of being a part of another mind and heart, less alone than before, and so vulnerable because of it.
No wonder she had run. Cut Andres and she would bleed; hurt him and she would feel the pain. And she knew it was the same for him, knew it from an anguished voice in her memory saying broken prayers at her bedside.
And from other voices, other memories.
“ ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you; is not that strange?’ ” His voice had been rough with feeling.
Yes, strange. How very strange, she thought. They hadn’t been looking for it, either of them. In truth they hadn’t wanted it. But it had them, captured, compelled.
She hoped she was strong enough for this, hoped it desperately. Because, just like Andres, if she lost this, she would lose the best part of all she could ever be.
FIVE
WHEN IT BECAME obvious that Andres and the colonel were going to be up very late working over their maps, Sara quietly excused herself, deciding to go to bed. Andres came out into the hall with her, closing the office door behind them.
“You should rest,” she told him, anxious.
He was leaning back against the door, looking down at her. “Lucio is a threat to you, Sara. I have to remove that threat.”
She was tired and knew she should go to bed, but she lingered, wanting to look at him, talk to him. “When you do defeat him, what effect will it have on the revolution?”
“It will be over.”
Sara was surprised. “Is he so strong a leader?”
Andres shook his head. “Only partly. He is a strong leader, but the point is, he fights out of hate, Sara. There’s no burning sense of injustice driving him, no all-consuming dream of a better world. It’s said that in every revolution there’s one man with a vision; Lucio isn’t the man.”
“Then why do his men follow him?”
“Sheer habit.” Andres sighed tiredly. “They’ve known nothing else, most of them. Only fighting. And he’s the flag they follow into the only life they know.”
“Then, when he’s gone?”
“He hasn’t a single lieutenant strong enough to take over as leader. His army will scatter into the jungles and hills. After a time, when they learn that I mean to exact no vengeance, they’ll come out of hiding.”
“You won’t punish them?” She wasn’t surprised somehow.
“How could I?” He smiled faintly. “I followed a leader into revolution, became one myself.”
“But you had a vision,” she said in a soft tone.
“I thought so.” After a moment Andres said quietly, “In any case, with Lucio gone, the fighting will end. For a while,” he added with faint bitterness. “Until someone else comes along, full of hate. Or seduced by a vision.”
“Does it have to be that way, Andres?” She was trying to understand. “On and on with no end—just moments of peace and hours of war?”
“Without change, yes. And change takes time, Sara. If I can keep the peace long enough, if I can show my people there is a better way … If. Always if.”
Sara instinctively reached out her hand to him, hearing first the passion of commitment and then a return of the faint bitterness of frustration in his remarkable voice. She reached out her hand and touched his lean cheek, feeling a muscle go tense beneath her touch, seeing his black eyes flare briefly before they were half hidden from her by lowered lashes.
“If anybody can pull this country together, you can,” she told him. “Some things are worth fighting for.”
Andres didn’t move to touch her, but his hooded gaze was a tangible caress. “This is,” he said huskily.
Sara forced her hand to leave him, nodding half consciously. “I know. Good night, Andres.”
“Good night, my love.”
He stood still, watching her move down the hall toward the stairs. When he could no longer see her, he turned, finally, and returned to his office and his colonel.
In the penthouse office of a gleaming high-rise in New York City, a group of people sat around and talked with the easy camaraderie of those who have been through much together and emerged with close ties. It was late; outside the floor-to-ceiling windows the lights of the city glittered, and inside the building the normal hum of brisk business was muted by night.
The conversation had been going on for some time, and it had, finally, more or less come down to who would go to Kadeira and how. It had come down to what they knew and what they could do. The “if” had been decided long before.
Josh Long turned away from the windows and rested a hip on the corner of his desk. “It’s no use calling Rafferty and Sarah back from Australia even though we could use their help,” he said to the others. “I’m guessing that by the time they could get back, it would be finished. Besides, they haven’t been there long enough to get over the jet lag.”
“We can’t all go to Kadeira, anyway,” Zach pointed out mildly. “That is, if any of us goes at all.”
Josh looked at him, his flickering smile an indication of the understanding that Zach would prefer at least two certainly not to go, that Zach still thought there was an “if” in the matter. Then he looked at Kelsey, lounging in a comfortable chair and frowning at nothing. “Kelsey, are you sure that captain of Hagen’s came clean with you?”
Kelsey stopped frowning at nothing and nodded. “Sure as can be. Siran wasn’t happy about the situation at all, and he’s—well, sort of an old friend. He told me all he knew. This enemy of Sereno’s, this Lucio, has the ability to intercept radio transmissions. And Hagen sent a coded message to Sereno by way of the captain, warning that you just might be en route to Kadeira. Or words to that effect.”
“Which means Lucio also might know,” Zach said in a determinedly conversational tone, apparently to the room at large.
“If he broke the code,” Josh added.
Derek Ross, the most recent arrival to the penthouse, along with his new wife, Shannon, said lazily, “Not a hard code, if I know Hagen.”
Josh looked at the big blond man sitting on one of the two long couches beside the delicate Shannon. “How hard is not hard?” he asked.
“That,” Derek replied, “depends on Lucio. If he knows anything at all about codes, he’ll find Hagen’s pretty much child’s play, particularly if he speaks good English.”
“He does,” Kelsey said. “Quite good English.”
“Damn,” Zach said.
Josh was frowning. “Okay, look at it this way. Maybe Lucio could and did decode the message.
So what?”
Zach swore again. “So you’d make a hell of a valuable hostage, that’s so what.”
“You have a one-track mind,” Josh told him dryly. “Think, Zach. What the hell would Lucio want with me?”
From her comforta
ble and usual seat in Zach’s lap, Teddy asked, “If he can get Sara, you mean?”
“Exactly.” Josh gazed around the room at his friends. “From all we can find out, this so-called revolution is just a feud to Lucio. He wants Sereno deposed and destroyed—period. And yesterday wouldn’t be fast enough to suit him. If he can get his hands on Sara, that’ll do it. And you can bet he knows it. I’m not saying that under normal circumstances he wouldn’t think of a lucrative kidnapping to help fill his war chest, but I’m willing to bet his mind is on Sara right now.”
“Willing to bet your life?” Zach asked.
“What about your life?” Josh retorted.
“That’s different.”
“No. You just think it is.”
Lucas Kendrick spoke quietly as he leaned on the back of a couch behind his wife, Kyle. “For what it’s worth, I agree with Josh. There’s a risk, but not much more than usual.”
“Traitor,” Zach muttered.
Luc grinned faintly. “Sorry, Zach. Look, we can minimize the risk; we always do that, no matter what.”
“Place is a fortress,” Kelsey commented almost idly.
“Sure,” Lucas agreed. “But we can’t change that, not without declaring—and winning—an all-out war. So we’ve got two choices when it comes to getting into that fortress. We take the Corsair and hope Sereno’s navy doesn’t have orders to sink any approaching ships. Or we take the jet helicopter and drop right down in his lap.”
“Antiaircraft guns,” Zach said in objection.
“Why would he have them?” Lucas asked reasonably. “Lucio doesn’t have a plane to his name; there isn’t even a landing strip on the island. And God knows nobody else has bothered to attack Kadeira by sea or air.”
“There’s a relatively easy way to find out,” Derek said. “General Ramsey thinks the sun rises and sets on this crowd after the mess down in Pinnacle was cleared up so fast. Call in the favor. He can have a reconnaissance plane do a flyover of Kadeira and take some nice clear pictures. Infrared and the like. Within a few hours after he sanctions it, we’d know exactly what’s on the island.”
