Aim For Love
Authors: Pamela Aares
Tags: #romance, #woman's fiction, #baseball, #Contemporary, #Sports
Books by Pamela Aares
The Tavonesi Series:
Love Bats Last
(Book #1, Alex and Jackie)
Thrown By Love
(Book #2, Chloe and Scotty)
Fielder's Choice
(Book #3, Alana and Matt)
Love on the Line
(Book #4, Cara and Ryan)
Aim For Love
(Book #5, Sabrina and Kaz)
also available:
AIM FOR LOVE
Book Five in the Tavonesi Series
Sabrina and Kaz
© 2013 Pamela Aares
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A note from Pamela:
What a journey it has been writing about All-Star Alex Tavonesi and the emotion-packed love stories of his teammates and family! I'm so lucky to have the most wonderful readers in the world--your emails and tweets asking for more of the Tavonesi clan and their captivating friends keep my fingers flying.
Stay tuned, as the next books in the series will bring the unexpected arrival of the Tavonesi clan from Italy. With their passion for wine and polo and their exuberant love of life, the wine country of California will never be the same.
If this is your first time reading a book in the
Tavonesi Series
, each book can be read as a standalone--and I hope each story carries you away!
Thanks to all of you who've written to tell me how much you love the whole series--it means so much to know that the happy-ever-afters of the
Tavonesi Series
are as much fun to read as they are to write! Strong women determined to follow their dreams and sexy heroes fighting to open their hearts make for some sizzling romance!
I hope you enjoy getting to know Alex's intriguing sister Sabrina and meeting his irresistibly sexy teammate Kaz who finds his way into her heart.
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Pamela Aares
In internationally bestselling author Pamela Aares' AIM FOR LOVE, rising movie star Sabrina Tavonesi has only three weeks to heal her shoulder before shooting her next film. Sexy baseball pitching phenom Kaz Tokugawa has a solution—a mysterious Japanese healing method she’s too desperate to turn down. Soon, they’re not just working on her shoulder; they’re falling in love.
But Kaz has made a promise he’s not sure he can keep, and Sabrina faces inner demons that threaten to overwhelm her. When violence strikes, their secrets may destroy their dreams, their love…and their lives.
Table of Contents
Prologue
he trouble started with the dreams. Nightmares, really. But she couldn’t think about those dark nights.
Not now.
Not when in ten minutes she needed to be smiling and waving at fans, pivoting to show off the back of her gown for the press and projecting a carefree, untroubled image to all.
Sabrina smoothed her hand along her heavily beaded silk skirt and sat forward on the limo’s bench seat. Traffic was snarled, but an LA police officer directed her driver through an open lane to the front of the theater.
She slipped her feet back into the heeled sandals she’d kicked off on the drive from the Hotel Bel-Air. She surveyed the crowd pressed up behind the barricades as the limo passed by and wished she’d brought Alex to the benefit screening. He’d achieved baseball’s highest honor,
and
he was a darling of the press; his All-Star status would’ve drawn some of the attention off her. And since he was her brother, there’d be no salacious speculation.
But Alex had work to do up at Trovare. Their vineyard had taken a beating in last week’s storm, and he’d work beside his foreman and crew to see that every vine was tied, every irrigation line was intact and all debris was cleared.
But she wished he were with her.
Fans lined the sidewalks behind the barricades, shouting and waving, taking pictures with their phones.
There were moments she regretted accepting the part in the film. Many moments.
But she’d promised her best friend that she’d give her indie film a go. Natasha had been persuasive. She’d been so sure Sabrina was a natural for the leading role that she’d swept Sabrina into her dream. And Sabrina had vowed she’d stick with the shooting to the end.
Promises and vows—important to make, impossible to break.
If
you made them with your heart.
Sabrina wanted her friend to succeed, but she’d never counted on Natasha’s film,
Exigent
, winning Sundance. Or being nominated for a Golden Globe. Or that she, Sabrina, would win Best Actress at Cannes. No one had.
And it had been fun at first. Hard, but fun. Surrounded by the swirl of Natasha’s carefully chosen actors and quirky film crew, Sabrina had felt part of a thriving, creative community as she never had before. She’d discovered she loved film acting. The stage acting she’d done in college was done all at once—two hours and the performance was over. But film acting was scene by scene, take by take. If an actor didn’t get it right, the scene could be reshot. And reshot. And the performance could improve with every take.
But toward the end of the shooting, Kristen Emers, the dark and conflicted character she’d played, had started to worm her way into Sabrina’s soul, bringing the nightmares with her. The circles under Sabrina’s eyes in those last weeks of shooting hadn’t been painted there by the make-up artists. She’d awakened sweating at night, heart pounding, more times than she wanted to count.
Kristen’s struggle to overcome the forces threatening her had begun to feel like Sabrina’s own. Maybe that was why audiences loved the character. Why they loved the film. Facing down fear and triumphing was cathartic and inspiring. Empowering. Kristen’s battle made audiences feel, allowed viewers to experience emotions that craved expression and release.
In a heady moment Sabrina had made another promise—even more than a promise: she’d signed a contract to star in the sequel. There was no going back. The sequel was primed, the foreshadowing events set up.
After
Exigent
had wrapped, cast and crew had returned to their lives.
Everyone but Sabrina.
Day and night Sabrina felt the force of Kristen’s story unfurling inside her body. Kristen’s character had unfinished business. Business that taunted Sabrina.
The driver opened the limo door. The muscles of Sabrina’s shoulders and chest tightened like a suit of armor. She’d never get used to the sound of voices she didn’t recognize calling her name so familiarly.
But she loved the fans. Like her, they loved stories and like her, they had dreams. As an actor, she represented the power of dreams and the possibility of dreams coming true.
She pulled the train of her gown free from the limo and stepped out smiling. She angled toward the nearest barricade and signed books, photos, phone cases. Several fans motioned for her to sign their wrists or arms.
That
she wouldn’t do. That was creepy.
And then it was time to face the press.
She handed the pen she’d used to sign autographs off to one of the event organizers. A woman wearing a headset and toting a clipboard motioned her toward the bank of photographers cleared to be in the press stand to take official photos.
She reached the mark on the carpet where she would pivot and smile, and stretched a hand down to arrange her gown.
The sounds in the air shifted. Someone screamed her name.
She looked over her shoulder. A man streaked toward her. A big man. Pain shot through her as he wrenched her arm and shoved his camera in her face—close, too close.
She saw the flash of a badge as her knees buckled, heard screams as the security guard pulled the man off her, felt the torque of her shoulder and the sear of pain as she collapsed to the red carpet.
And then darkness fell.
Chapter One
Three weeks away from achieving his lifelong dream and nothing was going right.
The peach trees of his family’s farm seemed to be laughing at Kaz as he hurried through the orchard to assess what had to be dealt with now and what could wait for another day. But as he surveyed the land before him, he knew that the orchard had its own timing, its own demands. The forces of nature didn’t care about his plans and dreams. He’d just have to deal.
A glint of metal caught Kaz’s eye as he neared the largest stream at the western edge of the Tokugawa property. The smell of ammonia and burned wood overpowered the scent of the peach orchard, growing even more overwhelming as he approached. He stiffened as he surveyed what looked like a trashed campfire. White plastic bottles with the tops sawed off and a pile of plastic water bottles, tubing protruding from them, were strewn around a circle of charred wood. The soil was pitted and the grasses clumped in dead rings around several of the upended bottles. Kaz picked up one of the smaller bottles and sniffed. The acrid, sickening stench burned his nostrils.
At the sound of a breaking twig, he whipped around. His foreman strode toward him. Kaz held up the sawed-off bottle.
“Do you know what this is, Roberto?”
Roberto put his hands to hips, jaw clenched. “Remains of a meth lab.”
Roberto had the melodic accent of the Mexican south, but it didn’t hide the sourness in his tone. His family had lived in the Valley nearly as long as Kaz’s but unlike Kaz, he still had the accent of his people.
“They made meth
here
?”
Roberto kicked at one of the bottles and nodded.
Fury boiled like acid in Kaz’s stomach. He’d heard of the drug raids, of the crimes, of the irrational behavior of the “tweakers,” as the local papers called the amphetamine users and dealers. But a meth lab on Tokugawa land? It was unthinkable. But like every other problem he’d discovered that morning, it had to be faced.
Kaz tucked the plastic bottle into his pocket. “I’ll call the sheriff.”
Roberto shook his head. “It’s best to leave such people alone. This site is abandoned. They won’t come back here.” He turned to Kaz. “It’s best not to get involved.”
“I’m not asking you to be involved,” Kaz said, more abruptly than he meant to. Some of Roberto’s family, men who’d been working the farms for decades, had been deported in an immigration round-up over the winter. The law wasn’t always an immigrant’s friend. The meth lab was on Tokugawa land and a Tokugawa problem, not Roberto’s.