Slightly Imperfect (35 page)

"Why isn't Victoria here, Zac?"

"Complications."

"You're hurting... just as I knew you would."

"Yeah. It's bad."

"I'll take Jan home. Luke can stay and talk."

He thought maybe he would rather take advantage of her, talk to her, use her gentleness to salve the hurt. "Thanks, Maggie. Thanks for understanding."

* * *

Zac caught Luke's eye where he lounged at a table on the far side of the pool. He motioned and Zac ambled that way, noting Luke had done his share of drinking during the party. Zac dragged up a chair and straddled it backward. Luke shoved a stack of comical T-shirts and gag gifts aside and braced his elbows on the glass-top table.

"I guess she was playing with you, Zac."

Their eyes locked in the wavering light of a hurricane lamp. With Luke, alcohol had the effect of a truth serum, usually resulting in sage advice. Tonight was no respecter of persons.

"I guess so, Luke."

"It's the Latin lover syndrome. Those
gringas
hear the propaganda all their lives. They have to explore."

Apparently Luke had forgotten about Victoria's venture with Tomas Cordera. She was a seasoned explorer. To Zac's detriment.

"Either we don't measure up to the rumors—" Luke smiled evilly. "—or they can't hack the commitment to accepting prejudice on a long-term basis."

"Jan's doing all right with it."

"For now." He shrugged. "We'll see. I'm never comfortable with it, or seeing how it affects her. You want to live like that, Zac?"

"Elaborate for me."

Luke fell quiet. He swigged Corona, watching Josh drag chairs and lounges back in place and pick up wet towels. Sylvania sang "Amazing Grace" while clearing up remnants of food.

Zac slapped a mosquito off Luke's muscled forearm.

"Jan's parents are another generation, Zac, just as Papa and Pierce Chandler are. They're not into
enlightenment
. Definitely not change. I can never go to her parents' house with her, especially after the way I carried on about the divorce. Once a savage, always a savage."

A good description of Luke's reaction back then.

"So Jan visits alone, and when she gets home the tension can be sliced with a knife."

Zac nodded, remembering the days when he and Maggie were splitting up. Luke's pain had a familiar ring.

"I put a lot of pressure on Papa and Mama to take up the slack, give Jan and me the loving family atmosphere we need—that Tita needs. I scrutinize everything they do or don't do to make sure they aren't slighting us. Nice, huh?"

Zac nodded again.

"Have you ever heard that old expression? Keep them pregnant and barefoot?"

"Once." He hated the theory. "I tried to forget it."

"I always have this nagging urge to keep Jan pregnant so she'll be beholden to me—and to keep her barefoot to guarantee it. A real chauvinist view, I know, and it doesn't work. Jan's an independent woman. She has babies when she wants to, and she buys her own shoes. So... " He shrugged. "I let her go out every day and hope she won't meet some
gringo
out there who might solve all her problems."

"Jan wants you. The hell with the problems. And if it's so God-awful, why'd you grieve so much when she was gone?"

Luke's laugh was more of a grunt. "Do you want to live that way, bro?"

"Yeah. I do—did. With Victoria. I thought she did, too. I thought we could make a big dent in all that racial crap. We could have been the rainbow coalition, especially with our own—" His eyes burned. He swallowed hard, feeling the margaritas and beer. He wanted not to feel anything.

"Let it go, Zac. You're beating a dead horse."

"Aren't you going to say I told you so?"

"If it would change anything—yeah. It won't."

"That's what I love about you, Luke. You never keep score, no matter how many times I screw up."

"Hope springs eternal, Zaccie. Some people screw up and walk away untouched. You're the walking wounded." Luke looked away, looked back, glazed despair clouding his kind eyes. "I hate it when you hurt."

Zac tried to shrug, smarting with, but savoring, Luke's concern. "Consequences. God sees to that. I really tried this time—with Victoria. I had all the right intentions. But I think it goes back to when I didn't—with Carron." He could still hear Maggie, when she'd learned about Carron, asking him when he'd stopped loving her. And why.

"You told me you'd fight for Victoria."

"I am. I'm fighting the urge not to go over there and beg for her—beg her. I have a hunch, contrary to what I've been advised, that begging is the only way, though." He thought about it, let it run the gamut of his confusion. "Actually I'm fighting the urge to go over there and screw her into submission."

"You're drunk."

Zac nodded, and things swirled a little.

"I used to use that tactic with Jan when we were split up that year. It works until they remember what the hell they were pissed about. Then you're back to square one." He reached a little unsteadily, catching Zac's face between his palms and penetrating his gaze. "Get your Mexican ass back to Margaritaville, bro. Find some little
señorita
who's immune to the Latin lover myth and wants nothing more than to have your babies and worship you the rest of her life."

"Just like Maggie did."

Luke eased his hands away, silently. Zac's face felt cold.

"You've got it, Zaccheus."

"Not anymore. I had it, Luke. I screwed it up."

* * *

Zac and Josh leaned against the Mercedes, watching Luke's taillights weave through the security gate. Josh had worked quietly, listening to Luke and Zac talking, and Zac was sure Lizbett had informed him by now of the afternoon's event with Victoria.

"I hate this sonvabitchin' car."

"Why, Mr. Z?"

"I found out in this car that Carron was really dying and there wasn't a goddamned thing I could do about it. Kind of synonymous with what's happening with Victoria."

"Don't think about it, Mr. Z."

"Yeah. Just change channels. Right?"

"You could try, maybe."

"Don't ever love an Anglo woman."

"We call them white women. Untouchables."

Zac did too, on a consciousness level he tried not to acknowledge. He swiveled on his heel, started walking toward the steamy black bay. Delilah rallied from the aggregate drive near his feet, flanking him, bumping, whining.

"Take your boots off, Mr. Z," Josh called from behind. "You'll drown."

Sounded good to Zac. He kept going, plodding determinedly, his gate jerky from not missing a single little chuckhole that had never been there before tonight. He persisted until brought down by the star tackle of Coast High, flattened on the dewy lawn, the breath knocked out of him in a loud whoosh. Josh rolled him over and straddled him, his rear end against Zac's chin. The threatening eel-skin boots were stripped off, tossed aside, and Josh rolled away, all in one fluid motion, rodeo style.

"Go for it now, Mr. Z."

He didn't need to go for it. He was suddenly sober and wanting to hide his defeat from Josh, to survive on pride. He knew he should make a stab at demonstrating a manly reaction to being stomped by a woman, as he'd wanted the chance to teach Allie—Marcus. Instead, he covered his face with his forearm. His body shook. Delilah lapped his face with her wet tongue.

"I know, Mr. Z," Josh crooned, placing his big warm hand on Zac's folded arm. "I know."

Josh didn't know, and Zac prayed he never would.

* * *

He lay in Carron's bed listening to the ghost of her raspy breathing, letting her die in his arms once more. Again, he heard Maggie.
"When did you stop loving me?"
He let his mind embrace Victoria's affirmations.
"It's good. It's so good. Oh God, Zac, I love you."

It was over with Victoria. The fact ate at his heart and his gut but it didn't change anything. All the conscious thoughts he'd wallowed in for the last ten days had been just so much denial. Victoria had been but one more infeasible fixation, a grasping at a pale paramour beyond his destiny.

God had the endurance to withstand those little left jabs Zac kept plying Him with. He had his way of watching for Zac's guard to lower, or even waver slightly. Then He?d land the deciding blow where it could do the most good—or harm.
Prejudice
. Zac couldn't argue the fact God had bestowed an ethnic heritage on him. It was the one thing He would never let Zac change.

"I give," he whispered in the night.

But he didn't. Not yet.

* * *

"Andrea, it's Zac Abriendo."

"Yes, Zac, darling." Andrea's marine phone combined with the truck phone made for a static-filled connection. "I've been expecting your call."

"Victoria tells me she's coming over there." He waited out a traffic light, drinking Burger King coffee, wallowing in the dregs of the past sleepless night.

"Yes. I'm in Portofino. Quite a coincidence, I'd say. Perhaps you should simply show up here and nip the whole thing in the butt. To paraphrase. Ever so romantic. No woman could—"

"What about next time we had a fight? How would I top showing up in Portofino? Show up in Baku, maybe?"

"I see your point. I assume she hasn't been completely honest with you and you're in a quandary."

Zac granted a bitter little laugh. "She's decided we're different."

"A real drawing card at the outset, as I recall. Well, darling, you deserve to know the truth, and with Victoria it very often comes through an interpreter. I am well seasoned in that regard."

Zac attempted to sift through her humor for a message. "She's evasive," he concluded.

"Quite. She tends to hope things will go away. They only fester and burst. Victoria has never been one to show a great deal of erudition in the throes of lust. In this instance it seems the two of you have been compromised. By way of film."

He couldn't immediately identify the sensation that lay somewhere along his spine, ruffled the hairs on the back of his neck, clamoring to get into his memory.

Andrea spoke into his silence. "Pierce has pictures—I?m not sure how many as she was a bit hysterical—of the two of you involving some convenient fence arrangement, and somewhere in a thicket just outside an inn where the aggrieved grandfather's precious concerns were sleeping."

Regret ate at Zac like a slow acid drip, burning the sinister feeling he'd had that night in Kerrville into his recall. The sensation came back now, of being wary, feeling naked, spied on. He relived a peripheral, cryptic, mammalian stirring in the foliage, an accompanying sense of shame. He had known it was wrong, when she came to him. But he had viewed the event with a different head for those few minutes of folly, played to her need, what he had judged to be her desire for him. Payback was a bitch all right. Like always.

"Jesus." The pent up breath went out of him.

"Yes, darling. Pierce wants the relationship terminated. It's all muddled with Gerald Fitzpatrick, and gambling, and thwarted campaign strategies. But Pierce is citing the children—the twins actually—as the main concern. He's relying on the past scandal of Tomas's murder to prove Victoria's instability. He's threatened to take her to court for the twins, and see that Marcus is returned to the courts—"

"Jesus!" Victoria's stricken face flashed in his mind.

"I know, darling. It's very nasty. Victoria is a poor scrapper. Pierce knows this, and of course there is the convenience of Christian's timely re-entry to the scene."

"Pierce can't do that. No father would do that."

"She believes he can and will. He has reminded her she lacks the resources with which to fight him in court. He has assured her he will prevail."

"I'll fight him." Zac had the resources. Having suspected something of this nature, he had run a check and been awarded the satisfaction of knowing he could buy Pierce Chandler. Cash. "She loves me." Again he saw her face, how the tears flowed when he leveled his confused, pent-up anger on her. Hunger, need to right things, raged in his body and spirit.

"Yes, darling. She loves you completely. But trust me. It will be of no consequence. She loved Tomas as much, and she walked straight away from him, and, in the end, created a living hell. I stand on ceremony, Zac. You must create more grief than your adversary. It is the only way to triumph with Victoria."

Zac considered a lifetime of trying to stay ahead of recurring dilemmas. A lifetime of combating the prejudices hovering behind the scenes of the current trauma.

"She needs a keeper."

"Precisely, darling. Let me keep her for a while. I will attempt to reason with her while you referee your own inner struggle. Perhaps you would be wiser in the long run... "

Yeah. But not until he had pursued all angles.

* * *

Zac sat across from Pierce Chandler in his deep, dark study. Never having seen a house like Chandler House, he struggled to keep his eyes from giving him away. Splendid, mythical, magnificent beyond his wildest imaginings. He understood, now, some of Victoria's regal bearing, her naïveté , dissertations concerning her heritage and not being able to forsake it.

"I thought we should meet, sir, so you could see whose life you're playing with. Other than your daughter's."

"As far as I'm concerned, nothing I've done goes beyond Victoria," Pierce said, reducing Zac to a nonentity. "Actually, it does," he corrected. "I understand Gerald Fitzpatrick has offered Cailen a position as an in-house legal consultant."

"Yeah. And I understand Coby's been unable to get his legal license re-instated. He'd be unofficial at Gerald's office, but a grown man needs something to do other than warm a chaise lounge. Poolside."

Pierce arched one brow—so that was where the
twins
had gotten the trait—and smiled grudgingly. When he spoke, his voice was cultured, tinged with tolerance. Or maybe it was condescension Zac heard. "I have plans for Cailen. Part of my campaign will include enforcing the law that keeps psychiatric records closed, encouraging more people to seek treatment. Cailen didn't and he finally broke. He'll be speaking throughout the state on that issue, plus working with the legal system to encourage conviction and punishment for stalkers." He attempted leveling Zac with those steel-gray eyes. "The punishment should fit the crime. Too many people get hung up on libertarian rights these days." His pointed diatribe ended, he sat back in his leather chair, holding Zac's gaze. Pierce's eyes resembled cold blue flint. "Our friend Gerald's offer is generous, but unappreciated."