Aim For Love Read online

  Dappled light danced through the budding trees as he walked out of the shrine and onto the meticulously raked practice circle. He raised the sword, then moved through the timeless sequences, crouching, testing, slicing the sword through the motions his body knew from hours of focused practice. Once satisfied, he replaced the sword in its bracket and bowed to the portrait of his stern-looking grandfather.

  Five years had passed since his grandfather died. Since the moment he’d asked for Kaz’s vow to save the Tokugawa peach farm. Devastated at the thought of losing him, Kaz had lovingly agreed.

  But next his grandfather had asked for the promise that Kaz now regretted. He’d asked Kaz to vow to marry a Japanese woman, to keep the old ways strong, he’d said. Overcome with grief, Kaz had agreed to carry out his grandfather’s wishes. But neither of Kaz’s vows had kept his grandfather from succumbing to the hungry ghost of death.

  Some vows weigh heavier than others. And some take on weight over time. At the time he’d made his vow, Kaz hadn’t considered what he was promising.

  As ichiban no mago, number one grandson, Kaz was expected to take over the farm, to accept his position and continue the family work and traditions. When he signed with the minor league team after college, his father didn’t speak to him for three months. Eventually they’d forged a sort of peace and a division of labor. Kaz spent every minute he wasn’t playing baseball working to keep the farm going, to make good on his vow. Some nights as he fell into bed, he was sure the pace would kill him.

  And when his father’s health failed and he could no longer work the farm, Kaz faced a dilemma. His brother, three years younger, had offered to give up his studies at UC Davis and help, but Kaz insisted that Seiji finish his degree—if the farm failed, and it looked like it might, his brother would need a career to fall back on. His sister had her life as an artist in LA, so she would be okay.

  Kaz rose from his knees and bowed again, then walked back out into the bright blue-sky day.

  He stretched his arms into the dazzling sky. A breeze stirred, and the aroma of wet soil and the scent of spring, of new life, rose to him. The storm the previous night had brought badly needed rain to the peach orchard.

  He stepped onto the pebbled path that his grandmother had laid out with ritual precision. The song of robins and wrens filled the air with bursting melodies. At the fork in the path, he headed toward the farmhouse.

  A few of the oldest peach trees along the path had budded early. He hoped they wouldn’t bloom too early for the bees. If the bees found the days too cold, they wouldn’t leave their hives and pollinate those early blossoms. But the weather guys had promised heat to follow the storm, unseasonable heat. After a dreary winter, Kaz was ready for heat.

  He gazed out at the older trees. Heirloom trees. Sun Crest peach trees. Trees that would bear the finest, sweetest, most delicately fleshed fruit.

  And that was the problem.

  His problem.

  The Tokugawa peach orchards bore fruit suited to another time. The fruit they grew couldn’t hold up to the demands of modern packing and shipping or to weeks of refrigerated storage. Heirloom peaches were meant to be eaten when ripe and juicy, when their perfume and flavor were at their peak. When his great-grandfather planted the Sun Crests, life had been slower paced and the taste and quality of a fruit mattered more than its suitability for long-distance travel.

  But the market didn’t care that his family had planted these orchards decades ago.

  Slow fruit, that’s what his family had. Slow fruit for a world spinning faster every day.

  He inspected the tree nearest the path. No signs of overwintering peach borer larvae. But that didn’t mean the worms weren’t there or wouldn’t come. There would be more work ahead. And more expenses.

  In the back of his mind he calculated again the costs of repairing the irrigation pipes, of the labor required for pruning, of the new sorter they needed to help with packaging the fruit. No matter how he did the calculations, the expenses always outran the profits. The market for heirloom peaches grew smaller every year.

  It was ironic that his dream of making the big leagues might be the only way to save the farm—an irony that his father wouldn’t appreciate, at least not until he could see the tangible results.

  The truth was, Kaz loved the farm almost as much as he loved baseball. Almost.

  And if things went well in spring training and he made the team, this would be the year he could set things right.

  Spring training was only three weeks away. He had a chance to prove himself, a chance to change everything. If he made the Major League roster and signed the big-league contract, his salary would keep the farm going. He’d make enough to hire additional workers, pay a manager and fund badly needed repairs.

  He’d been called up during the playoffs at the end of the previous season, but the thrill had worn off quickly as he’d had to warm the bench and watch. It was just his luck that the Giants had phenomenal pitchers and they’d been free of injuries through the playoffs.

  After coming so close to tasting his dream, he sure didn’t want to go back down to the minors. But there were a hundred men who’d be playing the spring games, men who all wanted a place on the team. Only twenty-five of them would make the cut.

  But there weren’t a hundred men who’d trained as he had. Kaz was pretty sure that this year, when they saw him pitch, he’d make the twenty-five-man team roster.

  He let out a deep sigh as he ducked under a low-hanging branch. If he didn’t ... he’d come up with another plan to fund the farm. He’d figure a way to cut costs. Maybe the family could make it another year on his minor league salary and the slim income that the peaches brought in.

  But if events went the way he’d planned, he could see to it that he kept his vow. At least one of them.

  When he reached the steps of the farmhouse’s back porch, his grandmother stood waiting. Though she was three steps above him, she barely reached his shoulders.

  “You work too hard, Kazi,” she said in Japanese.

  Though her English was fluent, she always spoke to him in her native language. She’d resisted learning English, but Kaz’s father had brought in a local tutor, a man originally from London. Neither she nor Kaz had ever lost the flat vowels and formal sounds they’d learned from him. His formal English accent had been one more thing Kaz had been razzed about by his schoolmates.

  She moved into the house with the grace of a much younger woman. She still had agility and strength from years of practicing aikido with his grandfather. Kaz followed, kicking off his street shoes as she had and donning indoor slippers.

  “Mr. Erickson called,” she said over her shoulder. “Your father is considering selling him the north acreage.”

  “Over my dead body,” Kaz spat back in English.

  She whirled to face him.

  “Do not say these words, Kazi. It is your father’s decision. You will respect that.”

  She stopped near the door leading into her herb-drying room.

  “And your friend Alex called. His voice is on the machine. And I answered a call from Miss Kingston. She said she would call again.”

  She watched Kaz’s face, and he knew she was searching for emotion. He put up his most impenetrable stare.

  Her face mirrored his. She was samurai and could call up niramiai, the practiced stare that could melt defenses. And she’d been by his grandfather’s bedside when Kaz had made his promises, when words spoken had become vows of honor. Of all people, she knew the vows that bound him. Since that time, he’d learned to be careful of words. They could harm and they could heal, but in a sacred vow, they shouldn’t be spoken impulsively, driven by emotion.

  He stared her down. The relationships he had with women before he married were not her concern. But she knew the hurt he’d suffered over Stacy.

  His grandmother pivoted and stepped into her herb room.

  Miss Kingston. Stacy. Except for a brief conversation at his grandfather’s fu
neral, he hadn’t talked to her since his senior year in high school. Since her father had discovered that he and Stacy were dating and had sent her off to a boarding school back East. He was an old-fashioned German who didn’t want his darling mixed up with a Japanese-American boy with no prospects. He hadn’t said as much. He hadn’t had to.

  Just knowing Stacy was back in the area sent a stab of warning into the protective web Kaz had so carefully cloaked around his heart. Friends, Stacy had written in the note she’d sent, breaking things off. They could be friends. But she hadn’t phoned or emailed, and he’d known better than to contact her. Not long after he’d received the note, Kaz had seen her driving the sports car her father had probably given her as a bribe to move on. To help her forget.

  The summer before Stacy left, she’d fallen in with a fast crowd—heiresses and party girls. She’d messed around with drugs and been sent to rehab. That wouldn’t have happened if she’d been his girl.

  And if she’d been his girl, he wouldn’t have made the second vow to his grandfather. He couldn’t have.

  But since then, he’d moved on. And two years later he’d made the vow he intended to keep.

  Since Stacy, his relationships with women had been perfunctory one-night stands with women who hung around minor league ballparks, curious to sleep with a ballplayer for the thrill. Lately he’d stopped that too. Each time he had casual sex, although it felt good to have the physical release, the experience stole a piece of his soul.

  He had other concerns to focus on, other more important challenges. When his mother left with his father and brother for their trip to Japan, she’d made noises about finding him a suitable bride while she was in Tokyo. He hadn’t even had the energy to dissuade her. The farm and getting ready for spring training sucked up all his attention and drive.

  He grabbed a glass of water from the kitchen and then sat in the dim hallway and listened to Alex Tavonesi’s message, making a note to call the sheriff’s office after breakfast to speak with Greg about the meth lab.

  “…to invite you to come up to Sonoma.” Alex paused. “It’d be good for me to practice my swing against your fastball. And, well, my wrist is better since you helped me rehab it. And if you come up, maybe you can have a look at my sister’s shoulder. You’d be doing both of us a huge favor.”

  Kaz clicked off the machine. He could do without dealing with the sister, but he would like to spend some time with Alex. When Kaz had been called up last season, Alex had befriended him. The guy was what Kaz dreamed of being—he was more than an All-Star. Two years ago he had achieved one of baseball’s highest marks, the Triple Crown. And he had a world-class growing operation, Trovare Vineyard. It didn’t matter that he grew grapes instead of peaches; Alex was an entrepreneur.

  Kaz stared out the hallway window at the south orchard.

  He could use some fresh ideas. Particularly since there was no message from his agent.

  Not a good sign.

  There was one spot open in the Giants’ Major League pitching roster. Either he made the cut during spring training or… No, he wasn’t going to think about any other scenario.

  He’d make it. He’d trained. There wasn’t another pitcher in the league with his speed. And he’d worked on his placement. He’d spent months during the off-season honing his aim, his body mechanics, his concentration. Some people might think samurai skills were only useful for a time long past, but Kaz knew better. Any true samurai knew better.

  Chapter Two

  The quiet of the morning was unnerving. Not that Sabrina wasn’t used to quiet weekends at the Tavonesi family estate. No humming machines or equipment moving about in the vineyard, no shouting and laughing among the crew. Just the song of wrens, their drawn-out, cheery warbling accompanied by the occasional rustle of leaves in the breeze.

  It had stormed in the night, giving the air the washed-clean, after-a-rain scent that she loved, a scent that usually brought joy and peace.

  But not today.

  The nightmares had returned.

  She thought she’d left them behind in LA, had hoped that their strange power had lost its grip. But she’d awakened in the night to the sound of thunder and had lain, shivering, caught in the web the dark images had spun so tightly around her. As if in a macabre version of Alice in Wonderland, she’d fallen into a realm where elements of her life that once made sense now failed to guide her.

  After finishing her obligations for her first two films, she’d traveled the world, participating in projects that her family’s foundation funded—delivering supplies to newly built schoolrooms in Africa and sitting with village girls happy to have pencil and paper and teachers, visiting wild animal refuges where funding made it possible to keep elephants and rhinos safe from poachers, and learning firsthand about the customs of native cultures far different from those of her California home.

  But none of those experiences had prepared her for the inner world that Natasha’s film had pried open, for the stripping away of the known. And for the foreign, demanding darkness that insisted upon being navigated.

  When she’d first read Natasha’s script and had begun to grasp the depths and the challenges that the heroine fought to deal with, she’d never expected the dark forces to seep into her own life, hadn’t believed that such a thing was possible.

  But since then, she’d heard disquieting tales of actors falling into the characters they portrayed. Some of the actors she admired prided themselves on dropping into character and not coming out until the final day of shooting. And she’d heard the cautionary tales about those unfortunate individuals who hadn’t shaken themselves free of the roles they’d sunk into.

  But she’d never thought she’d be sucked into the psychological depths of a character.

  She slipped out of bed and crossed to the French doors that led to the balcony off her bedroom. The gargoyles on the east tower of Trovare’s castle grinned in the gentle morning light. Before his untimely and unexpected death, her father had lovingly tracked down every stone, every mantel, every fixture of the massive castle that she and her mother, her brother and his wife called home. Trovare had been his life’s dream. And she loved every quirky stone in the place.

  Dreams. How strongly they tugged and pulled and prodded. Sometimes they brought challenges beyond the imaginable. Sometimes they were a prod, sometimes an anchor. Often they danced tantalizingly just out of reach.

  She stared at the gargoyle closest to her. He was hunched, poised, as if at any moment he might fly away into the blue expanse arching over the vineyard.

  She pulled the balcony doors closed to keep out the morning chill and picked up the dog-eared script from her bedside table.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t spend her last waking hours trying to memorize the complicated dialogue. Perhaps if she only read the script during the day, when it was easier to keep her perspective about what was real and what wasn’t, the nightmares would stop. Perhaps…

  With a moan of frustration she threw the script across the room. Pain stabbed fast and hot, and she clutched at her shoulder, willing the throbbing to stop. She sank onto the edge of her bed. She’d forgotten to put on her sling. Forgotten that she wasn’t the woman she’d been before the assault.

  “Darts would be more effective.”

  She turned at the sound of her brother’s voice.

  “I didn’t hear you knock, Alex.”

  He picked up the script. “No better?” he asked, gesturing with it toward her shoulder.

  It wasn’t really a question. Alex was an observant man. His exquisite powers of observation had made him one of the best hitters in the Major Leagues. That and devoted, focused practice. And it hadn’t hurt that he had a body built for power. It took power to hit a ball hurtling at ninety miles an hour. Power and timing.

  “I wish you’d talked with me before signing that contract,” he said as he dropped into the chair by her window.

  So much for timing.

  She donned her sling and snugged
the strap into place. Supported by it, her arm and shoulder relaxed.

  “I hardly need to be chastised, least of all by you. I ask myself enough times what I was thinking when I signed.”

  “You signed because you’re kind, Sabrina.” He tossed the script on the table. “And because you were up for a challenge.”

  “Because I was naive is more like it. The character is fighting forces I barely understand; it’s even darker than the first film. You know I suck at dealing with the dark side.”

  “The princess of light goes to battle,” Alex said with a crooked grin.

  “If you read that script, you’d see it’s way beyond my ability. Natasha’s first film had sharp edges, but this one…this one cuts to the bone.”

  “You underestimate your ability, Brinny.” He tapped his fingers on the script. “Besides, quitting now would be like me giving up when I was in the minor leagues and got beaned by Gary Brady.”

  “Come on—you knew your whole life that you wanted to play baseball. This role fell into my lap, a fluke.”

  “Sure, and the judges at Cannes just happened to nominate you for a Palme d’Or because you’re gorgeous. Or maybe because you’re my sister and they thought I’d send them all free cases of Trovare’s best wine.”

  “Be serious.”

  “Not my best quality.” His eyes squinted with mischief. But his light mood didn’t distract her from the heaviness lurking in her chest.

  “I feel like a fraud. It was luck that Natasha’s indie project hit like it did.”

  He waggled a finger at her. “You know how I feel about luck. It’s ninety-nine percent effort and preparation meeting the opportunities of the world. And I happen to know how hard you worked on that film, as well as the two before it.” He sat back in the chair, all legs and muscles and energy. “I know you don’t like it, but you happen to be a Hollywood ‘It Girl’ right now—Natasha was more than lucky to land you for the sequel.”