Slightly Imperfect (4 page)

"Andrea is back," Victoria announced when the
Andrea Elena
came into view. A Bell helicopter nested on the dockside landing pad. "You have to meet her."

Zac stopped walking. "I want to, but let's say our goodbyes here first."

She turned her hand in his, changed their union into a handshake. "Thank you for the evening, Zac. Thank you for being so kind—listening."

"Thanks for sharing. I'll think of you and Marcus and the twins. I'll pray for your strength."

Some unknown current jerked her hand within his grasp. Toying with a smile, she cocked her head and eyed him, assurance that prayer was a brand new concept. Or a discarded one. He should let it go, but what the hell did he have to lose?

"There's something you should remember. Only God has the power to heal. We judge ourselves, but only He can grant absolution."

She squared her shoulders, stood a little straighter in the light filtering from the
Andrea Elena II
. But she was captive, and he wasn't stopping there.

"The only real power we have is love. If you can impart that to Marcus—and don't forget the twins—it's the best heritage they could ever hope for."

"Thank you." She slipped her hand from his, then moved into him slightly and tilted her head to touch her lips to his. Her mouth was warm, full. She tasted of Chianti.

He steadied her, briefly prolonging the moment, his hands on her waist, fingers almost joining at her slender spine. Her vulnerability appealed to his decency. He had visions of feeding her, bringing her coffee in bed, pampering her. Making it all right for her, bringing a smile to her eyes, banishing her ghosts. Maybe they could send their ghosts out collectively, and somehow start again.

Maggie and Angel drifted across his fantasy, resting gently on his mind. He set Victoria back from him and lowered his hands.

"If you need a friend in Puerto San Miguel, I'm in the phone book." Not anymore. "Or call any Abriendo. They'll find me. If you're serious about that culture fetish, where Marcus is concerned, I'd like to help."

"Thank you, Zac." No commitment.

Taking his hand, she led him up the gangplank onto the
Andrea Elena II
where operatic melody filled the elegant navy and white appointed salon. She addressed the flame-haired woman who sat sipping brandy and playing what looked like solitaire.

"Andrea Von Felsberg, this is Daniel Zaccheus Abriendo."

Andrea unfolded her willowy, statuesque body and stood, offering her hand.

Victoria smiled coquettishly. "Zac is my new best friend."

* * *

Zac lay in his narrow bunk, the ship's ritual night sounds and smells settling around him as he waited for sleep. The craft pitched in her moorings, matching the beat of a midnight squall. He folded his hands behind his head and let what he could recall of Victoria Chandler Michaels's past fill his mind.

He remembered well
Chicano
Pride Day and the party she claimed preempted her wedding reception. The Hispanic population of Galveston County showed up in mass at the Valdez, the old hotel belonging to Tomas Cordera. Although absent, Cordera provided food, swimming, free tequila and dancing in the palatial ballroom. With Gringos and Mexican's alike, the historic Valdez had bought Cordera's ticket to near respectability.

Zac delved deeper into his recall of the scandal Victoria had so sparingly sketched tonight. Cordera had been accused of murder. Victoria came forth, admitting she had left a new husband's bed to be with Cordera in a clandestine rendezvous at the time Marcus's mother was beaten to death. When Victoria exposed her relationship with Cordera, clearing him of murder charges, the ensuing scandal had led her father to withdraw from a lay-down senatorial race.

Her association with Cordera wouldn't have enticed many voters. Allegedly he grew up in a whorehouse in Mexico, had been imprisoned once for manslaughter, once for dealing drugs. Zac had difficulty aligning him with Victoria, but according to the newspapers, his infamy sprang from an era prior to their acquaintance. She apparently gave him cause to turn his life around. Voters, however, would be more interested in the infamy than the transformation.

Then her cousin had murdered her lover before a throng of people, Victoria among them, and gone in search of her husband with the same intent. Christian survived. The locals thrived on the violence. Her father had crumbled under the pressure, and in Zac's thinking, for some undisclosed reason, now wore the villain's hat.

For Victoria, Zac had painted a picture of his past as sparse as her own rendering. Knowing that Maggie had banished him from Angel's birth would repel Victoria. No way could he have told her Allie died while Zac was in the middle of the Baltic Sea and had been buried without his knowledge, or that he had never held his daughter. Knowing that he still dreamed sometimes of Allie being there when he got back to Ramona, dreamed of the unmerited reprieve of Maggie's forgiveness, would have done nothing to erase Victoria's own grief and guilt.

He and Victoria were God's pawns, opposites whom He had deemed fit to share rancid stories and go their separate ways. But Zac believed in fate. Victoria Chandler Michaels, as the keeper of the Mexican child, Marcus, was part of his destiny.

When Victoria re-entered the yacht's main salon after checking on the twins and Marcus, Andrea greeted her with, "I knew you should have gone to Rome with us." An indulgent smile tempered her curt tone. "Wherever did you find him?"

Victoria accepted the snifter of brandy Andrea held out to her. They clinked glasses as they faced one another in the center of the magnificently appointed space. "We found each other. We were both alone in the piazza this afternoon."

"That's impossible. I have never seen an empty Italian piazza. And Monique assured me you had the children in tow.
You
, darling, were not alone."

Victoria smiled. "Zac was alone. I invited him to join us."

"Well, he
is
beautiful, but still..." She seemed to consider. "His resemblance to Tomas played a part, I suppose."

"I couldn't take my eyes off him."

"And now he can't take his off you. Victoria, darling, is that fair?"

"You misunderstood. We've become instant friends."

Andrea's worldly laugh alluded to having shared a shady joke. "Darling, no man who lays eyes on
you
wants to be your friend. Regardless of what this one tells you, he has other motives."

"Life isn't a soap opera. I was attracted because of the resemblance, as you said—but then, the coincidence of Puerto San Miguel and Ramona—" She fell pensive.

Andrea sipped brandy, her eyes expectant. "Yes?"

"Zac's had a tragedy in the last year. He lost a son—six years old. He loved meeting Marcus."

"Maybe he only told you that."

"Why would he do that?"

Andrea smiled, drolly.

"No," Victoria insisted. "It's true. He cried."

"Well, angel, you have a way of making men do that."

"No more," Victoria whispered into the delicate glass. "I don't want anyone else to cry, ever, because of me." She grasped an insight. "Is it his hair that bothers you? He had a full beard when we met this afternoon. Even that wasn't intimidating, because he's so gentle. He's been on a freighter for a year. That presents a complex image, but he's very perceptive. Kind."

"It isn't the hair, God knows." Auburn brows knitted her exquisite forehead, her amber eyes clouding. "It's the resemblance."

"It's only that he's Mexican," Victoria argued. "He doesn't really look like Tommy at all."

"He isn't Tomas."

"No," Victoria said softly. She twirled the glass and peered into it. In the single soft light from a lamp across the room, the brandy turned translucent. "Marcus is Tommy."

"No, darling. He isn't." Her dissatisfaction unguarded, Andrea waited for Victoria's acknowledgement. "Tell me you aren't trying to make Marcus into his father."

Their eyes locked. Victoria didn't allow hers to issue a promise.

"Tomas is dead, Victoria. People will always remind you of him, but you'll never have him again. You are supposed to have realized that, accepted it over the last five years— particularly the last three, since returning to Christian." She paced then whirled and cocked a spike heel, folding her arms. "You were doing so well. A freak meeting with this freighter person has thrown everything off kilter."

Snippets of the last five years, the little progress she'd actually made, filed across Victoria's mind. "Tommy lives on through Marcus. Meeting Zac reminded me of my original intent to give Marcus everything Tommy didn't live to attain. A heritage. It isn't complicated, but I was swayed from my intent once the twins arrived."

Andrea grimaced. "What
about
the twins, for God's sake? I don't hear you scheming for A and A. They deserve equally as much thought and perseverance."

Victoria crossed the room and stood in the open doorway, gazing upon the strand of moored ships. Her eyes and her mind recalled where Zac had pointed out the freighter, at the far end. There, luxury transformed to commerce, one world blending into another. Zac Abriendo seemed ill suited to the kind of world his sailor stories had portrayed for her. She tried to imagine him in Ramona, but he had told her scarcely anything involving his life there. Still, she pictured him. No, not him, but fantasy. She had nothing else to go on.

"Victoria?"

"The twins have a double heritage. Mine and Christian's," she concluded, turning, crossing to a richly paneled wall that had once been lined with framed images of children.
Los Niños. Los Niños and Tommy Cordera.
The photographs had been removed in deference to her grief. And to Andrea's. Victoria examined a large oil of menacing value, which had replaced the photographs. "Look at them," she murmured as though the wall still offered up children, and as if Alex and Ari had even existed when the banished photographs had been taken, and were honored there, too. "The twins will never want for anything. I have to make that happen for Marcus."

"They may not want, but they do have needs, love, and they will hurt if you close your eyes to those needs." She paused as if to measure the effect of her warning. "Marcus is your child, darling, by design, but he deserves no more, no less, than Alexander and Ariana."

Victoria turned from the wall, drawn by the wisdom in Andrea's voice, giving it validity. "I want to go home."

"Christ! Have you heard nothing I've said?"

"Yes. Yes, I have, Andrea. You're so kind to be concerned, but I've been thinking about this—"

"Especially since this afternoon," Andrea interjected. "I am clairvoyant, and a woman. I see into your soul. This Zac person tapped some instinct in you. He is somewhere down the pier now, tucked into some stale bunk, clutching a girlie magazine and sleeping off his Chianti. You are here wrestling with the future of three defenseless children."

Victoria smiled, trying to imagine Zac in a stale bunk. Her failed attempt melded into the mystery of him.

"Do I deserve the culmination of your thoughts," Andrea urged. "Or are you planning to leave me a note and steal away in the night with your charges?"

"I want to go back to London for a while—spend some time with Christian. I can put in an appearance at the London boutiques as well."

"You've decided then?" Her question reiterated the fact that Victoria's coming to a decision had been the point of the cruise. "Baku isn't in your future? Is this what I'm hearing?"

"No—Yes, it's what you're hearing."

"Oh, God." She rolled her eyes, her perfect mouth souring, uncharacteristically. "A rather expedient decision, dare I say?"

Victoria looked at her in question.

"Expedient as in convenient, after wrestling with it for weeks. Weeks prior to a candlelight dinner with Pancho Villa in a piazza cafe." She smiled derisively.

"He made me realize how difficult it will be to impart Marcus's own cultural heritage to him, because of me, because I can't cross the line without creating hardship on Marcus. Zac also helped me realize that trying to cross the cultural line would create the same hardship for Alex and Ari that Marcus faces now."

Andrea smiled. "Insightful. I'm sure he had a suggestion of value that included him in some profound way." In harried fashion, she ran her long fingers through rust-tinged, curly hair, lifting it from around her face. "I cannot believe that in the space of one afternoon, halfway around the world, you two just happened to share a table in a piazza. That would never have happened in Galveston County, Texas. Not in one million years. Fate is truly an asshole."

Victoria smiled, contrite. "He offered to help."

Andrea slapped her thigh in triumph, eyeing her skeptically.

"Zac Abriendo would be good for Marcus," Victoria mused.

"You don't know that. His skin is the same color, his hair, his eyes. And I'm sure he speaks Spanish well enough to order from a Taco Bell menu. Perhaps there may be nothing else you want your son to glean from this interloping stranger."

"Zac is only a catalyst for my returning to Puerto San Miguel, not the reason."

"What is the reason then?"

"The hotel. That's Marcus's heritage. That's what Tommy left him. I'm taking Marcus back to the hotel."

Interest flicked across Andrea's face.

"And the twins. Don't you see, Andrea? That old hotel is a Mecca of Puerto San Miguel history and heritage, and it enfolds all cultures. I'll raise the children—all of them—in the hotel, in the place Tommy recreated for
me.
For
us
. If I hadn't met Zac, I wouldn't have realized—"

"I haven't heard Christian's name in this plan."

"I know—or I don't, actually. I won't until London."

"All right, darling." Andrea sighed long and hard, a fatalistic acquiescence. "When you are ready to return to London I'll send Monique with you. I must say your management skills with the children don't qualify as state of the art, but I won't try to detain you any longer. I deem you are now sufficiently recovered from your three-year stay in the Indian hinterlands. Strength and beauty restored, and all that." She lifted her brandy glass in salute. "I'd venture to say, when Christian gets a good peek at you, you may be with child straight away, and trekking off to Baku after all."