Fielder's Choice
Authors: Pamela Aares
Tags: #Romance, #baseball, #Contemporary, #sports
All-Star shortstop Matt Darrington has more than a problem. His wife died, and now he’s juggling a too-smart-for-her-britches six-year-old and the grueling pace of professional baseball. Worse, his daughter is mom shopping. When they explore a local ranch, she decides the beautiful, free-spirited tour guide is premium mom material. Matt thinks the sexy guide looks like Grade-A trouble.
Alana Tavonesi loves her cosmopolitan life in Paris. But when she inherits the renowned Tavonesi Olive Ranch, she has to return to California and face obligations she never wanted. Selling the place is her first instinct, but life at the ranch begins to crack her open, exposing the dreams hidden inside her heart.
On a lark she leads a ranch tour, where she meets Matt Darrington. His physical power and a captivating sensual appeal fire her in a way no man ever has, but he has a kid—and being a stepmom is a responsibility Alana will never be ready for. Still... she can’t keep her mind or her hands off him.
When Matt’s daughter goes missing from a kid’s camp at the ranch, Alana organizes the search effort, knowing from experience the areas a bright child would be drawn to explore. As she and Matt work together to search for the little girl, Alana discovers that father and daughter have won her heart. Yet it may be too late for love…
For my brother Skip
who has a true heart.
And for readers everywhere
who love captivating stories.
Table of Contents
Prologue
She left me what?” Alana Tavonesi couldn’t believe what her parents’ attorney was telling her. The news of her grandmother’s death the previous week had come as a shock, but this... this was way beyond shocking. Surely, she’d misheard him. She’d spent the night café-hopping along the boulevards of Paris, topped with dancing until dawn at Batofar on the Seine, so she wasn’t in prime listening condition. She glanced at the clock—three o’clock already. She held back a groan.
“The ranch,” he repeated in that flat, all-business tone of his. “It’s yours. I’ll be faxing over the paperwork shortly from here in the New York office. You can overnight it back to me.”
Her mind reeled as she clutched the phone and sat up in bed. For the past several days she had both mourned and celebrated her grandmother's long and fascinating life. But she couldn’t believe Nana would leave her very dear ranch to
her
. Out of all the Tavonesi grandchildren, she was surely the worst to bequeath the California ranch to. A degree in art history wasn’t exactly useful for managing a world-class olive ranch, certainly not for handling the award-winning vineyard that Nana had painstakingly developed in the hills west of the main house.
“You’re sure?”
He sighed. “I’m sure. The property includes...”
Alana listened as he listed the rest of her inheritance. Forty thousand olive trees. The sprawling mansion and ornate pavilions.
And
the greenhouses and the frantoio, and, oh yes, the art collection. At least that part she was interested in. She’d stopped him from listing the entire inventory, though. He’d probably have told her how many tractors or plows—or whatever one uses on an olive ranch—she now owned.
“Okay, okay,” she said, not knowing what in the world she would do with all that now that she lived in Paris. “I’ll watch for the documents. Thanks.” She hung up the phone with a
click
, wishing she’d never answered.
She tripped over her heeled sandals as she made her way to the window and threw open the heavy drapes. Sunlight blazed in, and she squinted at the painful brightness. Paris was already living up to its reputation as the City of Light, but it was the adventure and excitement of the city’s nightlife that called to her.
With phenomenal clubs to satisfy every taste imaginable, Paris knew how to party. And she wanted to party. Wanted to laugh. Wanted to feel.
She wanted...
Well, sometimes she didn’t know what she wanted. She was only twenty-three.
She peered down at the bustling sidewalks filled with tourists and working folk, people busy with the activities of their day-to-day lives. Paris was fun, but as she watched the teeming crowds, the unsettling feeling in her chest made it impossible to deny that she was still searching.
She pulled the drapes back into place, shutting out the sun.
The attorney’s words reverberated through her as she fumbled to her kitchen to boil water for coffee. A good strong cup might snap her back to reality. She spilled some of the grounds and wiped them up with her palm. The aroma, rich and heady, met her nose, and she remembered that her first cup of coffee had been with Nana, on the ranch. She couldn’t help but think about her now. Until the attorney had called, Alana had thought she’d been the one person in her life who’d understood her. Now she wasn’t so sure Nana had known much about her at all, about what moved her. About what she loved. And as much as she wanted it to be a mistake, the attorney had been very clear: the Tavonesi Ranch was hers.
The hot coffee burned her tongue. She set the cup onto her table and took a deep breath. Patience had never been one of her virtues.
She waited a moment and then took a cautious sip, fighting back the hollow, bottomless feeling that wrenched her stomach. Even surrounded by the clamor of the city, by the voices of passersby in front of her apartment, by the whizzing and honking of cars along the boulevard, she’d never felt more alone.
Chapter 1
How could an innocuous windmill, just a couple of slats reaching into the sky, create such an awful mess?
Of course, the major problem was that the freakin’ windmill was hers. That meant that all the headaches that came with it were hers too.
Alana kicked at the base of the windmill and looked out over the acres of rolling hills and the sun-washed buildings of the Tavonesi Olive Ranch. Had she really only been back in the States for three weeks? It felt like ages since she’d left Paris. Since she’d left her new life behind and been yanked back to California.
She sighed and looked around. Even from a distance she could see men pruning in the orchard just beyond the old barn. She hugged her arms across her chest and stared at them as they worked. Their movements were confident, practiced—the actions of people who knew what they were doing and why.
The attorney hadn’t told her that when she’d signed the papers deeding the ranch over to her, she’d also inherited the people. The ranch supported more than thirty families year-round and a small army of seasonal workers, men and women whose lives had centered on the ranch for the past two decades.
Nothing could have prepared her for that responsibility. Or for the sidelong, troubled looks the workers had given her since the day she’d arrived at the ranch.
She didn’t want to be responsible for them.
That meant their futures, their dreams, were dependent on her.
She wasn’t good at seeing to her own dreams—it was unthinkable that she’d be responsible for the dreams of others.
She shaded her eyes from the bright sun and peered up at the windmill.
Its graceful blades stretched unmoving above her, white arms reaching like a fine sculpture against the brilliant blue sky.
To her eye, it was beautiful. Yet evidently the locals and the Sonoma County planning commission didn’t agree. Or maybe they just didn’t care. Either way, they wanted it gone.
Nana might’ve been a rancher, but she’d had a fine eye for beauty. From the windmill site on the hill, Alana could see the sculpted bronze lizard hugging the roof of the octagonal ballroom her grandmother had built next to the ranch house, its fierce eyes guarding the rooftop and gazing out over the expanse of olive trees that stretched to the horizon.
A ballroom
. Only her eccentric grandmother would build a ballroom on a ranch.
And
commission a thirty-foot lizard to top the pagoda-style roof.
And spend a quarter-million dollars to erect a windmill
before
the permit for the damn thing had gone through.
Just another thing for Alana to deal with. She sighed and picked her way down the hill, the buzz of activity increasing with every step. The workers clustered around a knot of trucks parked in front of the building that housed the frantoio and the gift shop. They looked like bees jostling to get into their hive.
The frantoio was her grandmother’s most-prized creation. It served not only the ranch but also the community, processing olives from other farms during the harvest. The exquisite granite millstones at its heart each weighed nearly two tons, and Nana had sourced them from Italy herself.
As a little girl, Alana would sit and watch the olives travel up the conveyor and drop into the grinder where they were crushed into an aromatic paste before the oil was pressed out. There is no scent quite like that of freshly pressed olives. People use words like
grassy
or
peppery
to describe it, but those words only point to the rich, alluring fragrance. To Alana, milled olives smelled like a near-magical life force. And with one taste of the swirling oil, the memories of harvests of years past would come rushing back to her.
Those had been good times, days when her parents would drop her off for a few weeks while they headed off on one of their exotic vacations. She’d always thought she got the best part of the deal. She’d been tutored in the mornings and then had spent languid afternoons trailing her grandmother as she oversaw the harvest. But as a teenager, Alana had stopped visiting for such long stretches. Although she’d still loved spending time with Nana, boys and parties had lured her away.
She looked closer at the trucks in the drive.
Peterson and Sons Irrigation
was stenciled on the side of two of them. That meant there was another problem or scheduled maintenance was being done. That part of ranch life she didn’t remember. And why should she? Nana had shared the joy of the place, not the everyday tasks that made that joy possible.
When she was young, visiting had been like entering her grandmother’s dream. Only now did she realize how much work Nana had done.
She took a deep breath and picked up her pace. The other vehicles in the drive belonged to the ranch. Though she’d read and reread the file of notes Nana had left her, getting a handle on the day-to-day details of running the ranch was overwhelming. There were five different managers on the team that Nana had headed herself, one for each of the ranch divisions. She could've hired someone to do the job, but Nana was an independent, creative spirit. She knew her mind, knew her dream and couldn't bring herself to put the guidance of it into someone else's hands. That she'd handed Alana such a precious responsibility made no sense.
The retail and gift store Alana had a sense of, and she even knew a bit about the marketing for the body-care line—years of retail therapy had taught her a lot about how products were bought and sold. But the actual farming aspects of the ranch, the growing of the olives, the expansive drip irrigation system, the on-site composting—not to mention the new grape-growing and winemaking initiatives—were way over her head.