Aim For Love (4 page)

“You’re tired, Sabrina. You should never have agreed to them moving the filming up a month—you could’ve gone with Mother, Alana and Sophie to the Seychelles and had a good rest.”

Trust him to tell her what she
should
have done. “Natasha is my
friend
. She needs this film to hit. She had to bend to the demands of the producers. They’re putting up the money, so they get to call the shots and set the schedule.”

“Look, you have three weeks. Get some pointers from Kaz to get your shoulder into shape, then kick back a bit. The rest will work itself out.”

She scooted up against the pillows and pulled her legs up under her. “Right. Like you’d do that. Like you’ve ever kicked back a day in your life.”

“I make some mistakes so you don’t have to make them all.”

The warm grin she loved curved into his face and lit his eyes. But it didn’t banish the chill she’d felt since she’d awakened from the images in the night. She wiped her palm against the sling, wishing she could as easily wipe away the dread tightening her chest.

“I invited Kaz up to spend a few days with us,” Alex said in his big-brother-in-charge voice. “He’s wanted to see our vineyard for a while; his family has an heirloom peach farm in the Central Valley. They need some advice.”

“Derrick’s coming this weekend.”

Alex stiffened. He might be able to control his body reactions so pitchers wouldn’t know he had their number, but he’d never been good at hiding his feelings from her.

“We’re going over our lines,” she added quickly, not liking the defensive tone in her voice. She didn’t need to make excuses for Derrick. He was her mentor and her co-star, and though she hadn’t yet slept with him, he intrigued her. There was a beguiling chemistry between them that captivated her in ways she couldn’t explain. As if she’d explain her interest in a man with her brother.

“I got a pretty good dose of him when I visited you in LA. He’s not what you need right now.”

She should never have invited Alex to the party at Derrick’s Bel Air mansion the week before Christmas. Alex had made a snap brotherly judgment against him. When she’d asked why, Alex had said it was a hunch. A deep and unrelenting hunch from what she could tell; he wasn’t being his usual fair-minded self.

“Don’t give me that glare—he’s
my
guest, Alex. And my co-star. All I ask is that you be civil.”

“I’d rather hang him from the west tower.”

“You never like any man who takes an interest in me.”

“That’s not true. I liked Colin Bentley.”

“I dated
him
in high school.”

She swung her legs around Alex and rose from the bed, squaring her shoulders. “Derrick has taught me more about acting than I could’ve learned through years of experience. You can at least be kind to him.”

“I might manage civil,” Alex said as he turned and strode toward the door. “Kindness is asking too much.”

Chapter Three

It was only ten miles from the Tokugawa farm to town, but when Kaz was a boy, Valley Cross had felt like another country. He’d learned early on that the customs and language of his family had little place in Valley Cross.

He pulled into the last parking space in front of the old brick courthouse. The building had been constructed around the time of the Gold Rush and had recently been designated a heritage site. The heritage of Japan reached back thousands of years in his family, but none of that counted here.

Hallie’s Place, the local café, had a line out the door, with farm workers lined up for bear claws and coffee. His stomach growled, but he beelined for the courthouse. He was a day late paying the farm’s property taxes. One good thing about a small county town, they cut people slack. He didn’t like depending on slack, but he’d had to cash in the last of his treasury bonds just to pull together the money for the taxes.

He spotted Martin Erickson, the owner of the ranch that abutted his family’s farm to the west, sitting at a front table near the window of the café. Martin saw Kaz and tipped his hat. The man sitting with Martin turned away. Kaz wasn’t sure but from the man’s profile, he looked like Tuco Ortega, a man known to be involved in running drugs and worse. What Martin was doing with a man like that, Kaz couldn’t imagine. But maybe he was mistaken. He made a mental note to have a better look on his way back to his truck.

When he stepped out of the courthouse and walked back to the café, they were gone.

The late afternoon sun slanted through the eucalyptus trees lining Highway 29 as Kaz wound his way up the Napa Valley. With mountains hugging it on both sides, the valley was a miniature version of the vast Central Valley. But the similarity ended there. Napa Valley towns were upscale. Unlike Valley Cross and the towns near his farm, the Napa towns he’d passed through were premier tourist destinations, drawing visitors from around the world. Boutique grocery stores, quaint bed and breakfasts and wine bars lined the road, and high-end wineries dotted the landscape. He stopped in town and met with a specialty grocer he’d discovered online. The man agreed that Sun Crest peaches would sell well there. The problem was transportation. It was a problem Kaz committed to solve.

He glugged the coffee the store owner had given him as he backtracked and took the curving road up over the Sonoma Mountains. Though he was behind his planned schedule, he stopped at a vista point, admiring the wide plain and rolling hills that stretched out toward the coast. Though he hadn’t grown up near it, the sea pulled at him. Maybe it was because his ancestors were island people. Or maybe it was simply the raw power and majestic grandeur. In his dreams he lived in a place near the sea.

A few miles later his GPS beeped and he turned off onto the tree-lined lane it indicated. A tasteful sign announced that Trovare, home of the Tavonesi Vineyard, was ahead. He rounded a bend and gawked. He’d known Alex lived in a castle—a place large enough to offer separate apartments for him and his wife, his sister,
and
his mother when she was in the country—but he hadn’t been expecting a real castle.

Turrets and towers reached high into the sky, and the stone walls shone in the bright afternoon sun. Carefully tended gardens flanked the castle, and rows of vines extended beyond them, reaching to the horizon.

Trovare had the look of a place out of the past. Maybe he and Alex had more in common than he’d suspected. Maybe Alex too was caught in a web of family dreams and expectations.

Kaz parked on a cobbled driveway and took the steps leading to a drawbridge—a real drawbridge—two at a time. He ducked under a carved dragon jutting out from the stone column at the end of the drawbridge and leaned over the railing. Camouflaged water pumps half-submerged in the stream running under the drawbridge told him that whoever built Trovare had an eye for practical details as well as for over-the-top, dramatic architecture.

He raised the cast bronze knocker on the massive wooden door, but it swung open before he could drop it to the strike plate.

“I’m Spencer, Mrs. Tavonesi’s butler,” an elderly man said with a slight bow. Instinctively, Kaz bowed back. The man smiled. “You’re expected, Mr. Tokugawa. I’ll send someone to take your bags to your room. Mr. Tavonesi and his guests are gathered down in the game room. I’ll show you the way.”

Kaz followed Spencer through an enormous room with a polished wooden table that could easily seat forty guests. The walls were painted with richly colored fresco-style murals, and several rows of portraits hung over a cavernous marble fireplace at the far end. Spencer opened a door at the end of the room, and Kaz trailed him down a curving flight of stairs. They stopped in front of a blank wall.

The butler pressed on a stone, and the wall swung open.

Kaz blinked, stunned.

Antique weapons and suits of armor lining the walls gave the vast room an anachronistic air. A woven tapestry ran across one long wall. Kaz’s scan stopped for a moment on a samurai sword mounted next to a set of fencing foils. It looked out of place. It
was
out of place. But such swords were collectors’ items, status symbols to some.

When he met the gaze of a woman standing at the side of the billiards table near the back of the room, his breath caught in his chest. She could’ve stepped out of one of the portraits lining the great hall he’d passed through, except she was far lovelier than the women depicted there. She had the look of a woman untouched by the troubles of the world. If not for the sling holding her arm and Alex’s account of the attack, he might’ve thought it was true.

His mind quickly retrieved images as he called up her face from his memory. Her hair color was different, a rich walnut brown—not black as it had been in the film he’d seen—and rather than being waist length, it fell just below her shoulders. Her eyes weren’t the piercing inky brown he’d seen on the screen, but were instead deep pools of blue. As she took him in, he watched the muscles around her eyes contract.

Perhaps he wasn’t as welcome at Trovare as Alex had led him to believe.

“There you are,” Alex said, pulling Kaz from his thoughts and away from the woman’s cool gaze. Alex levered the pool cue he held and sent the eight ball cleanly into the corner pocket. “Glad that storm we had this morning didn’t blow you off the road.”

“The winds were a beast in the Altamont Pass,” Kaz said as he finished his scan of the room and its occupants. A tall man leaned against the far end of the pool table. Though he wasn’t as tall as either Kaz or Alex, his rigid posture and the empty, practiced smile curving his lips made Kaz think of a caricatured
anime
villain.

Alex crossed the room with quick strides and clasped Kaz’s hand. “Thanks for coming.” He turned to the woman with the haunting blue eyes. “This is my sister, Sabrina.”

Sabrina leaned the pool cue she’d been holding against the table, adjusted her sling and then gently shook Kaz’s outstretched hand. Her hand was small in his. And cool. But the coolness didn’t match the heat he felt as he looked into her eyes. She slid her glance from his and released his hand, bumping against the table as she stepped away from him.

“Alex was just finishing trouncing me,” Sabrina said with a light laugh. It sounded forced. Perhaps she was nervous. But she was an actor; who knew what she was really feeling? She raised her arm in the sling. “But of course, I have an excuse.”

And then she smiled.

Some people had smiles that expressed pleasure. Others smiled as an expression of dominance or power. Smiles in Kaz’s family and culture were vastly different from those in the broader world he lived in. In the Japanese culture a smile could mean a person was embarrassed, angry, sad, confused, even apologetic. A smile could be bitter, cast out to the world after its bearer made a shameful mistake. His brother had told him when he’d called from Tokyo the week before that workers in Japan now had video-assisted smile training to make sure they smiled as the company thought appropriate.

But whatever Sabrina Tavonesi intended with her smile hardly mattered.

What shocked Kaz was the way that smile sent a wave of hot-blooded desire rolling through him.

“And her guest, Derrick Ainsley,” Alex added with a cool nod across the room.

Derrick eyed him. Kaz knew the effect he had on people. No one expected a Japanese man to be six foot four and ripped.

Ainsley tipped two fingers to an imaginary cap in a mock salute. Now that Kaz could put the name to the face, he realized where he’d seen the man before. He’d wondered as he sat in the movie theater watching
Exigent
if Derrick Ainsley was a good actor or if he was perhaps as fiendish as the character he portrayed.

“Don’t bet money against Kaz,” Alex said to his sister. “He gets paid to aim balls.” He turned to Kaz and held out the pool cue. “Give it a go?”

Relieved to break the tension, Kaz took the cue. Alex racked the balls and broke.

“You’re stripes,” Alex said as he levered his own stick.

Alex was good, but Kaz was more accurate. Soon there were only two of Kaz’s balls left on the table.

Sabrina nudged her brother. “Should’ve taken your own advice.” There was no mistaking the affection in her tone.

Derrick sidled close to her, pulled her aside and whispered something Kaz couldn’t catch.

“I’d rather not,” she responded, turning away.

“But I think it would be best for you,” Derrick said. His authoritative, manipulative tone irritated Kaz.

“I’d rather not,” Sabrina repeated as she stepped away from Derrick.

Kaz heard the wavering in her voice and missed his shot.

Alex sank two balls, apparently unaffected by the tension between his sister and her guest. Then he missed a banked shot, and Kaz wasn’t so sure.

Derrick spun and stalked to the far wall. He grabbed the samurai sword from its mounting bracket. “This is a cool piece of kit,” he said as he slashed the blade awkwardly through the air.

“You have no right to touch that.” The words jumped from Kaz’s mouth before he could stop them.

“Whoa, boy. It’s just a prop.” Derrick swished the sword through the air again and then crouched in a cartoonish squat.