Free Shades of Gray by Kay Hooper

recovered his body, Andres. Do you wish—”
    “Send him back to his family.” Andres’s voice was flat and hard. “Not in uniform. Not even a dead traitor may go home wearing the uniform he betrayed.” There was a slight pause, and then Andres added in the same tone, “Make certain everyone knows, Vincente.”
    “Very well, Andres.”
    Sara drifted away again, troubled by what she had heard.
    It was night when she saw the room again, the lamps turned low and everything silent. And Andres was standing by the French doors leading out onto the balcony. Awakened by the throbbing of her head, she lay and watched him, as still and silent as he was himself. Someone had dressed her in the green gown, and she decided not to ask who had done that. She thought she knew, anyway. She watched him.
    He looked so tired, she thought, so drawn. He had pulled back the filmy curtains with one handand seemed to be looking out through the doors, but his gaze was blind.
    She remembered, then, two strangely vivid scenes, one seen and heard, the second only heard. In the first, Andres as he had been beside her bed; in the second, his flat, hard order that had sent a dead soldier home stripped of his uniform and all honor.
    “Andres?”
    He turned instantly, crossing to her bed, his eyes anxious but his expression masked by control. “Sara, how do you feel?” His voice, too, was controlled.
    She watched as he sat carefully on the edge of her bed. “I feel sore. And tired. What happened?”
    “One of—of my soldiers seems to have been in Lucio’s pay.” Andres’s voice was low. “He took you out in the back of a jeep, hidden in a tarp. We followed. During the chase some of Lucio’s soldiers opened fire down on the beach. Teo was shot, the jeep overturned. You were thrown out. You had been injured, struck on the head either during the wreck or earlier—”
    “It must have been during the wreck.” She wasn’t surprised that in Andres’s voice and in his mind there could be the faintest question, the inescapable idea that she might well have had a hand in her own apparent kidnapping. “He told me you wanted me at the house, and it wasn’t until we’d nearly reached the cars that I wondered why you would have called me there. That’s when he—chloroform, I suppose.”
    “Yes. Some was found in the wreckage of the jeep.”
    He had accepted her explanation instantly, she realized, and with a relief strong enough to penetrate through his control and show briefly on his lean face. She thought of that young soldier. “You sent … Teo … back to his family. Without his uniform.”
    “You heard that.” It wasn’t a question. His eyes shuttered themselves. “Yes, I did. He was a traitor, Sara.”
    The harshness of that disturbed her, but not as strongly as she had expected it to. She just wanted to make it
fit
, make it somehow a part ofher unfocused image of him. “And if … if it had been my idea? If I’d asked Teo to get me out of here? Would he still be a traitor?”
    “Yes,” Andres said flatly. “A traitor to
me
, Sara.”
    She thought about that, wishing absently that her head would stop pounding. Was Andres’s action a harsh one under the circumstances? The leader of a revolution-torn country had to be certain of his army, yes; and treachery couldn’t be condoned or forgiven. In Andres’s world his action made sense.
    “Sara, I’m sorry. I believed I could protect you here.”
    She looked at him, at the masklike face and shuttered eyes. His voice, she thought, gave him away, and she wondered if, with her, it always would. It was a curiously comforting thought. “You couldn’t have known,” she said finally.
    He shifted a little, not quite a shrug, not quite a denial. “Perhaps. Sara, if you ever—if it ever comes to a point that you feel desperate to getaway from me, tell me, please. If Lucio was ever to get his hands on you, I—”
    “I won’t run away again.” Her voice was steady, certain.