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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.

CHAPTER THREE
    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