by Pamela Aares
Hype sold magazines.
And sometimes ruined lives.
Hers wasn’t going to be one of them.
She tapped out an email telling Alex she was going to Kaz’s the next day. She didn’t bother to address the tabloid shots. He knew better than to believe them.
The third time Derrick called, she turned off her phone. He might’ve had a few too many, but that didn’t excuse his drunken comments.
The worst of it was, she needed him. She wanted to succeed as an actor, wanted professional success more than she’d ever wanted anything. And Derrick had the magic. And the gift of being able to teach what he knew. The marriage thing would blow over while she was away, and then they could settle back into their work. Derrick was at his best when he was focused on acting. Still, evading his schemes wasn’t a price she’d expected to have to pay.
Chapter Eight
Sabrina turned off the two-lane road onto a gravel drive lined on both sides with budding peach trees. As she’d driven down the north side of the Tehachapi Pass and left LA behind, a sense of lightness had entered her. She took a deep breath. Now, surrounded by the orchard and under the spreading blue sky, she felt nearly giddy.
She pulled up in front of a well-kept farmhouse. A covered porch wrapped around the first floor and colorful flowers trailed from stone urns lined up beside the front door.
Sunlight glinted off paned glass as the door opened and Kaz stepped out. He lifted a hand in greeting, and the giddy feeling rolling through her screeched to a dead stop.
In making her plans and packing for her trip, she hadn’t really taken in the fact that she’d be spending three days with him. Three straight days with a man who she was pretty sure held her in disdain. A man who set her off in ways she had yet to sort out. She reminded herself that he was helping her as a favor to Alex and that Alex trusted him. She should trust him. But Derrick’s performance at the club had her on edge. It’d take a while before she trusted any man.
Kaz opened her car door before she could.
“Traffic?”
Already she could sense that he was more at ease on his home turf. She couldn’t say the same for herself.
“Not too bad,” she said as she stepped out.
“Do you have luggage?”
“Do you have sisters?”
He knitted his brows.
“One.”
“Then you must know that no woman goes anywhere for three days without luggage.” Her teasing words were more to ease her tension than to entertain. “Even Mother Teresa had luggage—she just had loads of minions to carry it.”
“Then consider me a minion.” Kaz opened her trunk and lifted out her two suitcases.
She was used to Alex lifting things effortlessly, but Kaz did so with a fluid grace that stunned her. She stared and wondered what his arm span was. Alex’s was seventy-two inches from fingertip to fingertip; they’d measured once. Kaz’s might be even broader, his chest was wider and—
“I asked if you preferred an upstairs or downstairs guest room.”
Evidently she hadn’t heard him ask the first time.
“Upstairs, thank you. I prefer a view.”
“Follow me then.” At the front door he kicked off his shoes and slipped into a pair of well-worn slippers.
She took the pair he handed her and donned them. So much for niceties. It could be a very long three days. At least he was walking ahead of her this time.
His jeans had the worn look that advertisers aggressively tried to copy. Slung low around his hips, they accentuated the muscles of his back. And his butt. And…his whole back body.
Back body. As they climbed the stairs to the upper floor, she tried to remember what he’d said about women and back bodies.
He opened a door and gestured her to precede him into the room.
“Why don’t you take a few minutes to settle in and then we can get started.”
“Now?” She’d imagined getting her bearings first.
He crossed his arms. The bulging muscles under his shirt made him look like a model for one of the fragrance ads her brother had once posed for. Alex had given the proceeds from the modeling gig to the Kids and Books Literacy Program, but not before the ad campaign had plastered his half-naked image all over the country. Standing there with the light from the hallway silhouetting him, Kaz could’ve easily been the perfect man for such an ad.
“You have a long way to go, Sabrina. And we have a very short time frame.”
There it was, that measured, flowing, exacting tone she remembered. She was wrong about disdain, at least she hoped so. There was no judgment in his tone. He was stating a fact in the way someone might announce the weather report.
“I’ll meet you on the porch in, say…twenty minutes?”
“Fifteen,” she countered, knowing it was an absurd way of showing that she was up for whatever he wanted to shovel her way.
A slight smile curved into his lips. “Fifteen, then.”
He walked out, closing the door behind him.
In most old farmhouses, a man with his height would’ve had to duck to clear the door transom. This house had clearly been built with tall men in mind. Maybe his father was tall. Or his grandfather. Alex had told her stories about Kaz’s samurai grandfather. Too bad he’d passed away; she would’ve liked to have met him.
The sparely furnished room had a timeless quality. It might have looked the same five or ten or fifty years before. And yet the clean lines and simplicity lent a modern flair. The muted colors of the chair near the window and the cloth draping the bedside table gave it a Zen-like feel.
Peaceful.
Two deep purple irises and a single branch arranged in the elegant but simple Japanese style rose from a stone vase on a burled-wood chest of drawers. A mirror hung on the door leading to the bathroom, framed in the same polished wood. A simply woven off-white bedspread covered the bed.
Serene.
She adjusted her sling and began to unpack. She’d packed quickly—a pair of her favorite jeans, yoga pants in case she had to do mat work, a skirt, shorts, a tank top and T-shirt, and cotton blouses. She fingered the cotton dress she’d thrown into her suitcase at the last minute. It was her favorite; she loved the delicate sweetheart neckline and the tiny pearl buttons down the front. Why she’d packed it, she wasn’t sure.
A squat wooden Japanese-style tub stood in one corner of the en suite bathroom. She was relieved to pull aside a curtain to find a fully tiled modern shower. The buff-colored tiles were hand cast, similar to those her mother had commissioned for Trovare. One row had elephants marching tail-to-tail and the row above sported swimming salmon. Playful geckos ringed the top row of tiles nearest the ceiling. The geckos made her smile. Someone had a sense of whimsy.
She unstrapped her sling and washed her face. As she closed her eyes and splashed warm water across her cheeks, Kaz’s half smile rose in her mind. A smile shouldn’t shoot anxiety through her, shouldn’t feel like a challenge. But she was coming to believe that Kaz’s every move, his every word, was packed with a coiled power, a force held in check and waiting to spring.
Ridiculous.
Her imagination was wandering off with her. Five hours behind the wheel had turned her brain to mush.
Pain pinged as she reached for a towel. The long drive from LA hadn’t done her shoulder any good.
She lined up her toothbrush, hairbrush and a few make-up items on a tray near the sink. She rearranged the items and then arranged them again. A quick glance in the mirror confirmed what she didn’t want to admit.
She was stalling.
But putting off going downstairs wasn’t going to make the ordeal any easier. She spotted a tall glass next to the sink and ran water into it, then downed the tepid water in a few thirsty gulps. The daytime temperature was at least fifteen degrees hotter here in the valley than it was near the coast. No wonder the fruit blossoms were weeks ahead of those at Trovare.
She rinsed the glass and placed it by th
e sink. Then moved it to the other side next to her make-up and hairbrush.
Still stalling.
She strapped on her sling, grabbed the wide-brimmed straw hat from where she’d left it on the bed and headed for the stairs.
True to his word, Kaz was waiting for her on the front porch.
“Do you live here alone?” She’d thought there’d be other people around, family members, maybe workers. Instead, the farm was eerily quiet.
“Off-season, when I’m in town, I live with my parents and grandmother here in the house. But my parents and brother are in Japan visiting relatives and my grandmother is away at a meditation retreat. She’ll be back on Thursday morning.”
Sabrina hadn’t considered that she’d be alone with him. Alone in practically the middle of nowhere with not another house or person in sight.
“What about workers?”
“A family wedding. Half the county is down there for the next couple of days.” He crossed his arms and raised a brow. “There’ll be no one around to hear your cries for mercy.”
She let out a nervous laugh. If he was offended, he had every right to be.
He pushed away from the railing he’d been leaning on. “We should get started.” He looked down at her delicate strapped sandals. “Change into sturdier shoes. We’ll be walking first.”
“I can walk fine in these. They’re very comfortable.”
“We’re walking on uneven terrain. And there are snakes and ticks. Closed shoes are best. I’ll wait here.”
They had snakes at Trovare. Not many, but some. Ticks were just part of life in the country. But the paths she walked at home were manicured, graveled or spread with loamy vineyard mulch.
She dashed upstairs, feeling more out of place with every passing minute. She’d brought her gym shoes. She didn’t like wearing them outside, but they’d have to do. She laughed to herself when she thought of her closet with racks of heeled designer sandals and strappy, delicate evening shoes. Kaz would probably have her throw them all out.
“Much better,” he said as she stepped back on the porch.
He picked up a backpack and a small cardboard box and walked down the steps to the driveway.
She stayed put on the porch.
“One thing we need to get straight,” she said in her firmest voice, “is that if we’re going to work together, you have to tell me what to do. I might have good instincts, but I can’t read minds.”
He turned back to her.
“Right, I forgot. Hollywood and direction. Somehow I had the impression that you might be tired of people telling you what to do.”
She pressed her lips together and resisted the urge to glower.
He gestured to the steps.
“Walk down those three steps,” he said with what was almost a grin. “And then follow me.”
Sabrina Tavonesi was no easy assignment. He ought to send her back to her castle or her brother or Hollywood—anywhere but the farm.
It was a bad week to have company of any sort. With only two weeks remaining before he left for spring training in Arizona, he should be throwing more than he was. And with Roberto and his crew away for three days, mowing weeds and tending to the irrigation system added to the list of pressing to-dos.
That morning he’d ignored the spreading brown stain on the driveway that told him there was a leak in an irrigation pipe. Fixing it could wait a day, maybe two, but the work was piling up. And he wanted to do some research about the meth labs and stop in the sheriff’s office and see what they had turned up. Finding an abandoned meth lab on his land had spooked him, as if evil forces had come much too close.
Twigs snapped and popped under Sabrina’s feet as she followed him. He knew she felt more comfortable behind, less observed. He’d thought a woman whose face was stretched across screens all over the world would be used to observation. He remembered Alex had said it was a fluke that she’d taken the part that had thrust her into fame, but Kaz had seen Exigent. He didn’t think luck had played any part in Sabrina’s gut-wrenching and excellent performance. Performance had its own rules, its own standards. There was no faking excellence.
If he was lucky, he’d figure out what was kinking her up and get her on her way tomorrow, then get back to his chores.
But that wasn’t likely.
Her injury had a physical component, he had no doubt about that. But experience told him a knotted web of emotion was binding her. Even if he released the spasm, without them breaking through the mental and emotional matrix of her problem, the spasm would return and could bring with it spinal or nerve damage. That he knew about. If his grandfather hadn’t helped him work through a shoulder injury he’d sustained his first year in the minor leagues, Kaz would’ve been out of the game.
Sabrina hummed a faint tune as they walked under the earliest-blossoming trees. She’d better enjoy the brief time of walking the path behind him—what he had planned for her wasn’t going to be comfortable in any way. To give her a longer warm-up, he headed along the ridge. When he reached the narrower path that led south, toward the stream, he stopped.
“Warn me before you do that,” she said as she bumped into him. “My thoughts were a million miles away.”
“That’s part of your problem.”
Her eyes sparked. “I have an injured shoulder. I didn’t sign up to be analyzed.”
“Then walk down that path, the one to the right.” Words would be no help; he might as well skip those that weren’t necessary.
“Me first?”
“Yes.”
She picked her way along the rutted path. The breeze caught her hair. It gleamed in the sun, strands of amber lacing through rich, deep brown.
Kaz dragged his attention back to her movements. And didn’t like what he saw. Fear lived there, buried deep. What troubled Alex’s sister was more than a few injured muscles and tendons.
Fear was a stubborn adversary.
And a worthy opponent.
He had two and a half days with her to accomplish what should take weeks, if not months. Challenge fired its siren call in him. But caution fired too. He had a taste for the heady energy that came with rising to a challenge—it was one of his weaknesses.
“Your fence is down over there.” Sabrina pointed to the eastern border of the property.
Kaz walked to the fallen section of fence. A steer chewed grass just on the other side of it, as if daring him to complain.
“Why don’t you use barbed wire?”
“My grandmother won’t allow it.”
“It doesn’t hurt the animals, it just keeps them from rubbing on it and knocking the posts over. At least that’s what Alex says.” She made a shooing gesture at the steer, who just stared at her. “Surely your grandmother would understand that.”
“My grandmother faced enough barbed wire as a child,” he said as he put the box and backpack down. “She was locked up in an internment camp during World War II. Barbed wire brings back terrible memories.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
She watched his face and he fought not to wince. Sympathy was not an emotion he trusted.
It hadn’t mattered that his relatives had been in Valley Cross for decades longer than the officers who rounded them up and took them to the camps or that the Japanese farmers were growing crops that fed the community. The Tokugawas and the hundreds of other families locked behind high barbed-wire fences had blood ties to the enemy and so were considered dangerous.
The Tokugawa orchard had nearly gone under before the war ended and the families in the camps were released. If it hadn’t been for their neighbor to the south, a man not blinded by prejudice or fear, every peach tree would have died. Their neighbor had doubled his own work, had irrigated the Tokugawa land and saved the orchard that Kaz’s great-grandfather had planted with his bare hands. When the neighbor died, the Tokugawas were the only Japanese family at his funeral. But that was not Sabrina’s problem, or her business.
He cleared the debris and right
ed the fallen fence post. Every year there were more and more repairs. His grandmother had eventually conceded to one stretch of barbed wire along the north boundary, out of sight, but that was all. He’d just have to schedule the repairs and put in extra posts to reinforce the fence. Sabrina started toward him, and he waved her back.
“That steer could charge you. Or me. Trust me, death by animal charge is not anything for your bucket list.”
The steer moved off about forty feet and then turned and eyed him and Sabrina again.
Sabrina lifted her hands and hugged her elbows. She now looked doubly uncomfortable.
He nodded toward the path down the hill. “You can follow me again if you prefer.”
They walked in silence. He guessed she expected him to talk about his family’s past, but the topic wasn’t one he pursued.
“Stop here,” he said. He put the backpack and the box in the middle of a patch of wildflowers. “I need to release these ladybugs.”
“Ladybugs?”
“They’re beneficial insects. They keep down aphids and mites and other predators that feed on the young shoots of the peach trees and vines. But you probably know all about that. Alex uses them in your vineyard.”
“But I’ve never seen him release them. I didn’t know you could buy them in a box.”
“Would you like to let them out? He held out the box.
She nodded.
“Open the lid slowly,” he cautioned. “And just settle them in among those blossoms.”
She opened the box and tipped it toward the tiny flowers. In a hover of red, some of the beetles rose and took flight.
“It’s like magic.” Her awed tone and bemused smile only made her more beautiful.
“Nature’s magic—the best kind.” He reached out and brushed a beetle from a strand of her hair. She caught him in her gaze, and for a moment he was transfixed by the delight he saw in her eyes. It took an act of will to look away.
“But I’d prefer if they stayed put,” he said, marshaling words to shield him from the powerful tug of desire sneaking through him. “Ladybugs have been valued since medieval times as farmers’ helpers. Some cultures believed that the ladybug was divinely sent to rid crops of pests. In fact, that’s how it got its name in English. People dedicated the bug to the Virgin Mary and called it the Bug of Our Lady, which got shortened to the present ladybug. My grandmother calls them God’s little fairies.”
