Slightly Imperfect (37 page)

"And a gift?" Her brows arched.

He had carried the box into the restaurant, passed it to her once they were seated. "You don't have to open it here. It's a red dress."

"That's sweet, Zac." She shifted the box to the side, eased the ribbon off one corner and peeked in. "Ooo," she exclaimed softly, inserting one finger, stroking the fabric. "We're into red these days, aren't we? People ask me if the new van was cloned from a fire truck."

He laughed.

"When did you get this?" She closed the box. "Did you go to the mall after we talked his morning?"

"I remembered a red dress I'd seen in a Neiman Marcus catalog. I called and asked for that dress. Four. Petite. That's right isn't it?"

"Then you drove into Houston?"

He shrugged. "They charged it to me, and a courier delivered it, all in a few hours. I'm finding out money can do anything."

Her smile didn't quite materialize. Her eyes glazed a little.

"Anything but rub out your past," he added.

"You'll manage even that. You're making giant strides tonight." She smiled, her derision friendly.

"Which leads me to the champagne. I've been working with an attorney to set a perpetual fund in place at the Art Institute in La Marque. A grant for Hispanic women who want to study interior design."

She looked surprised.

"We're going to call it the Angel Grant. What do you think?"

Exhilaration and wonder churned in her dark eyes, like a hot Texas whirlwind, before easing into tenderness. "I'm afraid of what I'm thinking."

"Which is?"

"I'll reserve verbal rights, for later maybe." She touched her glass to his. "To you, Zac. You never fail to amaze me." Incandescence took over her features. Her intimate smile propelled him backward in time, then forward in hope.

Maybe there was absolution on this earth after all.

"I think you're losing weight," he said suddenly. "Is it intentional?"

"Manual pursuit."

He cringed at her play on words.

"I'm perfecting my technique in search of a baby machine." She sipped champagne, smiling over the glass rim.

He had thought she was perfect. Compact, soft and firm in all the appropriate places.

"The body is a temple. Bible classes. Remember, Zac?"

"Yeah. I loved worshipping in your temple."

She rolled her eyes. Color rose on her cheeks. He saw kindling snap, catch, start to burn.

"It's the champagne." He tapped her glass. "To memories." The wine encouraged him to ask, "Why didn't you want Ian for the father of your baby?"

"I want a Mexican." No trendy labels for her. "I want another son. Like Allie. Like—"

"Like Marcus."

She nodded.

"Yeah. Me, too."

"Do you think you could arrange for us to see him? Maybe to spend the day together? The three of us, and Angel."

"It's over with Victoria. It might be best if I let it lie, rather than prolong a lost cause. You understand, don't you?"

"Perfectly."

Yeah. She understood prolonged hurt.

Over salad, he prompted, "Have you thought about moving in to Bay Shore? Is your sale going through?"

"It's going through. And moving in is all I've tried not to think about." She smiled, wistfully he thought. "Thank you. But I couldn't live in Carron's house."

"It's my home now. And that house had nothing to do with what happened between Carron and me."

"I think of the two of you there."

Irony nagged him like an old track injury on a damp day. Zac had spent a lot of time, lately, thinking of himself and Maggie in their little house on Navaro Street, the one where they spent their honeymoon, the one to which the new-born Allie had been brought. God was still up there moving his Knights and Queens around the chessboard of life, weighing the consequences.

"I want to help you and Angel."

"You do. You're wonderful. I couldn't expect more."

"The offer stands. I'd be glad to have you at Bay Shore. Your terms. It could be like your home for as long as you need it. It's so big I'd hardly know you were there."

"You'd know we were there. One-year-olds leave evidence. Surely you remember."

He remembered warmly, but he guessed she had missed the point.

* * *

Zac shut off the motor and killed the lights. "I'll come in and see Angel."

"She's been asleep for hours. It's late, Zac, and I have an early appointment. Aren't you fishing tomorrow?"

"I like to watch her sleeping."

"How can I say no to that, Poppie?"

She met him at the front of the car carrying the dress box, resignation in her carriage. He followed her up the walk, up the steps. He went into Angel's bedroom while Maggie paid the babysitter. Standing beside the crib, he watched Angel sleep, listened to her soft breathing, enjoyed her baby smell. Maggie came to stand in the door, her body outlined by light from the hallway. He held one arm out to her and eventually she moved against him. Rigid. Wary.

"She's precious, Maggie."

Memory took him back to the day he'd discovered Maggie was pregnant, moving to Houston, taking Allie and the unborn Angel. He had begged her not to go. She had challenged him, standing in the center of the carton-strewn room. Would he leave Carron, come back to her, if she complied? Her eyes had been as dead as her voice. Foolishly, cruelly, he had asked for time to consider. Her tiny laugh got lost in a tinier sob. He had longed hold her, place his hand on her stomach, but he had the feeling she'd claw and bite him, so he had pleaded again, "Don't go Maggie. Don?t move away just to punish me."

"You did it, Zac." She stood with her back to him, trembling, shoulders hunched, arms gripping his baby tightly, her voice floating on faraway retrospect. "There's nothing left for us. You killed my hope and my self-respect. I almost had an abortion, but I didn't. This is my baby now, not mine and yours."

Tonight, as they watched Angel sleep, he felt God had given him an undeserved reprieve.

"Thank you,
querida
. For having her all alone." He let that run his mind... once more for emphasis. "And for sharing her with me now. She's all I could ever have wanted."

"I was once all you wanted, Zac."

He drew her toward him, seeking her mouth, finding it warm and sweetly familiar. She didn't pull away. He felt her open to him, accept him. The sting of her words waned on the reality of holding her again. He pushed the neck of her dress aside gently, lowered his mouth to the hollow of her shoulder.

Her fevered response discredited her husky, whispered denial. "No."

Angel jerked.

"No?" he whispered back. He grasped her waist and drew her lower body gently against his desire for her. "It all happened two years ago, Maggie. Sometimes I can't even remember it clearly. Like right now, for instance."

He felt her humoring smile in the darkened room. "It's not Carron."

And it wasn't Allie's death. She had stopped blaming him for that long ago.

"It's too soon after Victoria," she said. "I don't want to be a stand-in."

At that instant he thought maybe Victoria had been a stand-in for Maggie. He released her. "I'd never want you to feel that way,
querida
."

At the door she said, "Thank you for dinner, Zac. And the dress, and the grant in Angel's name. It was a wonderful evening."

"Did I ruin it? I'm not using you, Maggie. If it feels like I am, I don't want it to."

"Do you think you could arrange for us to see Marcus?" She tiptoed, kissed his cheek, sealing the fate he'd been avoiding.

"I'll think of something. If you're sure."

"I'm sure."

"More wine, Ms. Victoria?"

Janus, the black butler, had been at Chandler House longer than her memory. She shielded her glass with her hand, trying to focus on the conversation around her.

At the head of a table, surrounded by his family and sixteen political constituents, Pierce held court. He surveyed her, Coby and Christian, at the opposite end, his gaze distinctly focused on possession, edged with control. Her eyes riveted on him, powerless to look away. She saw him so sharply that each feature, each characteristic, seemed exaggerated. His hair, once so near the color of Coby's gold and honey locks, now tri-blended into ashes, pewter and ivory. His once taut, tanned flesh slacked into pallor beneath the reticent glow of the crystal chandelier. Polished-steel eyes had run to dull aluminum. For a moment she no longer knew him before she remembered she had never known him. It seemed unjust for this stranger to govern her life and the life growing inside her.

Her gaze moved to the right, to Coby, to rest on his cherished, familiar features. His deep, drawling voice registered in her mind as she basked in the assuring pressure of his ankle pressing hers beneath the table. He always touched her, whether a physical or spiritual fusion. Across a room, a state, a continent. Realization visited her as suddenly, and as brilliantly, as a lightning flash in a Texas thunderstorm. Her reinstated access to Coby, a blessing for an interim Pierce deemed feasible, had provided the catalyst for prodding her into line, insuring her support and compliance.

Christian's voice drifted to her, cushioned by the opulence of the old room, resonant among the brocade and cherry wood splendor. His words blendedtastefully with the clink of silver against fine china, the sound of priceless wine tumbling into crystal glasses. She heard herself referred to as, "My wife, Victoria" and saw possession in his brief glance.

A familiar wave of nausea, easily associated with grief, washed over her, leaving her throbbing in its wake. She had experienced that sensation for the first time when Tomas Cordera had issued an ill-fated ultimatum:
Her father, Coby, Chandler House, her heritage—or him.
Grief from Pierce's reversed ultimatum, the roiling in her stomach and intellect, was no less acute now than then.

Reflections of Tommy ran their inherent sequence to Zac. Her imagery embraced his chiseled features, dark, sculpted body, the sleek heat of his skin. She closed her eyes for a moment and allowed his eyes to draw her in, devour her, spin her inside the obsidian granite depths that had made her desire and believe in his gentleness, his promises— Barren reality came on a wisp of consciousness. She was plunging headlong, blindly, into losing Zac Abriendo forever.

When she placed her hand on Coby's forearm, she felt his muscles, his very skin quicken. Christian's blue gaze darted to her hand, returned reluctantly to his dinner partner. "I have to check on the children."

She pushed back from the table. Coby reached for her hand, frowning, aware, attuned. She eased out of his grasp. He whispered a warning. "You can't leave the table, Tori."

She smiled, rising, feeling heads turn as conversation dulled like the thunder now rumbling low beyond the ancient leaded glass window.

"Victoria?" Pierce spoke from the opposite end of the table.

"I'll only be a moment. I told Lizbett I would call."

Sudden, knowing smiles materialized. Nods. Conversation resumed. She slipped into the kitchen, out the door and into the pelting rain.

* * *

Elbows on a drafting table, Zac stared out a plate glass window, watching a torrential autumn storm light up the night. Cushioned by the class murmur around him, he recalled that afternoon, how Marcus had looked across a Taco Bell table into Maggie's radiant face, charming her with compliments.

"You're pretty, Maggie," Marcus had said. Zac thought Tomas Cordera must have smiled just that way, sealing Victoria to him for life.

"You're pretty too, Marcus."

The child's face colored. He rolled his eyes, then sought Zac's approval or disdain.

Zac laughed.

"Don't you think men can be pretty?" Maggie urged. "Look at Zac. Of course beauty's not always an asset." She gave Zac a soul-stirring smile. "Or so he would have us believe."

"What should we do this afternoon?" Zac interjected, secure in the arrangement he'd made through Josh, by way of Lizbett, to be allowed to keep Marcus past an early dinner.

"Why don't we go to Bay Shore?" Maggie said. "Angel can take a nap, and the three of us can swim."

Her suggestion pleased as much as it stunned him. Her only appearance at Bay Shore had been for his birthday.

"And do the
Sunfish
," Marcus reminded her.

"My favorite thing. What do you think, Zac?"

"Perfect." He had thought it just might be.

Pushing the picture from his mind, he moved his ruler, and positioned his pencil. As the big window weaved eerily with each onslaught of wind, he felt vaguely vulnerable, oddly displaced. After class, when he swung into the circle drive on Bay Shore, his headlights sweeping the front porch, he understood the feelings.

The night had cleared; a few tentative stars peeked through a velvety, opaque sky. He stepped down from the truck, into a puddle of cold water that swamped his boot. In his peripheral view, he acknowledged a wrong-side-out umbrella prone on the pool deck. One errant shutter banged against the house as he approached. A form huddled on the top step, shoulder braced against a porch column, drenched misery evident. The figure rose slowly, gripping the post with one hand, shoes in the other. Zac stood two steps below, looking up. Only the relentless backdrop of the black-angry bay slapping its shell bank invaded the anguished silence. Zac's gut twisted in sorrow and confusion.

"Which is it tonight?" he said. "Insecurity? Loneliness? Lack of attention? Or hunger, maybe." With sinister pleasure he sensed any confidence she might have had drain away slowly, her misery a steel weight. "Or has something gone wrong in a relationship, and you think having sex with me might salvage it?"

"All of the above."

He barely heard her. Raw wind off the water caught his anger, whipped it away, leaving the residue of hurt and uncertainty. He brushed past, unlocked the door, held it open. She followed him wordlessly thorough the main house and bedroom, into the bath where he flipped on a small light, handed her a towel. She drew his offering to her face, held it there, her body jerking convulsively.