“Aish!” Sofia spat his name, loud and clear.
“What?” he said, arms out.
She was trembling, twin spots of color high on her cheekbones.
It was with rage. At him. “Stop. Talking.”
He shook his head at her. “Why aren’t you saying anything? Why are they even here?”
“It’s none of your business.” She could barely choke out the words. “Why are you even here?”
Speechless, Aish slapped his hands against his jeans. The sound cracked off the stone surrounding them.
“Que vergüenza,” Juan Carlos purred. “Is this the end to #Aishia?”
Sofia turned on her heel and walked through the open bay door, into the dimness of the winery.
No.
How could he do better when she wouldn’t give him a chance?
Aish went after her, blind to everything but the darkness that she’d disappeared into.
September 11
Part Two
Fury shook Sofia as she sped through her winery, desperate to reach the cellar door, desperate to disappear down into the dark. As her fingers grabbed on to the cool metal of the handle, she heard Aish’s urgent “Sofia!” burst through the empty warehouse.
With a barely repressed snarl, she wrenched open the cellar door.
She grabbed a LED lantern hanging on a hook and flicked it on so she wouldn’t kill herself running down the steps to the cellar floor. Once there, she could turn it off and disappear into a dark so complete that Aish would never find her. Would never come near her. Would never come close enough to warm her again.
As she tried to tug the heavy door closed, a hand caught it on the other side.
Abandoning it, she began to race down the metal steps as fast as she could.
“Fuck! Sofia!” Aish cursed. “I can see you.” He pulled the door closed and then she heard the steps clang above her. They were in absolute darkness except for the hovering glow coming from her lantern.
He was taking the steps two and three at a time.
Gasping, her heart pounding in her ears, her feet flying down the steps, she felt like she was shooting off sparks.
No. No, no, no, no... She’d made herself cold. During the humiliations handed out by her mother and Juan Carlos, degradations she’d become accustomed to and been anticipating and just wanted to get over with, she’d made herself ice. Ice hurt. But fire.
Fire burned.
And Aish was setting tinder and kindling and match to her when he thanked her for his music or pretended to care about her vines. When he played the rocker-in-shining-armor in front of the interns. When he demanded more of her, demanded she do better—“Why aren’t you saying anything? Why are they even here?”—without giving her a way to see it as self-serving.
He blew life into the flame when he’d made her believe, just for the tiniest second when he’d defended her from her mother, that he really did care.
She heard a clatter directly above her and her heart lurched at the thought that he’d fallen. But no, he kept coming, and that, that impulsive concern, made her consider for a moment simply pulling herself over the railing.
But then her feet hit the black marble floor she’d paid for, an extravagance she’d financed from her own account, and her suicidal self-pity disappeared in a flood of righteous fury. Fuck him, she thought as she turned and strode backwards into the center of her cathedral-size marvel. Fuck him for being here, for challenging her, for making a difficult job impossible. Fuck him for using his joy and his beauty and his American goddamn good fortune to destroy her ten years ago, and fuck him for trying to do it again now.
She dropped the lantern to the floor and stood in the circle of its light. Let him come.
His steps were cautious, so different from the heavy weight of him as he chased her down the metal stairs. As he walked into the light, he looked like the boy she’d known, with the tan of her valley’s sun on his skin, his soft black hair, worn surf shirt, and work boots. His long-fingered hands were palm up, and she hated him for it, hated that he surrendered his big body when it would have been so much easier if he used it against her.
Anger stoked the flames higher.
“You’ve broken every rule you agreed to,” she said, clenching fists that dug her short nails into her palm. “Leave now or I’ll give my evidence to the press.”
“If that’s what you have to do,” he said, his deep voice echoing in the massive chamber. His breath moved deeply in his lean chest; he still held his hands up. “But I’m not leaving.”
Leaving had been one of a million crazy thoughts she’d had last night in her canopied princess bed. She’d considered chartering a plane and disappearing into the world. Abandoning years of effort and the best hopes for her kingdom’s survival because they’d almost kissed.
His inescapable relentlessness, the injustice of it after what he’d done, made her want to howl. “I hate you,” she spat. “I wish you were the one who’d died.”
Pain like she’d punched him creased his beautiful face before he smoothed it out. “I wished that sometimes, too, baby,” he said, coming closer, putting himself in range of her fists. “But I wouldn’t have done it. Not when I still needed to tell you how sorry I am.”
The sound she let out was animal. “Don’t.” It was the plea of the thing that couldn’t claw itself free.
“What I did to you was the worst mistake of my life.”
She took a step toward him and raised her fists.
“Sofia,” he groaned, the animal too. His eyes were bright in the darkness as they searched hers. “Why won’t you let me apologize? Why won’t you let me try to make this better? Talk to me. Tell me how I can make this better.”
“Tell me,” he’d whisper to her in the dark. “Tell me what feels good. Tell me what you need.” Their lovemaking had been crowded with words; Aish’s mother had told him that women make love with their minds, and he’d put that advice to good use when he’d talked to her in his thrummingly low voice.
“Your round little clit...tell me if you like...you squeeze me so tight...does it feel good when I push...your cunt is so soft...tell me what you want...lick you for days...tell me if this feels...tell me...tell me...”
That boy melded with this man, bigger, broader, more intent and demanding, and what she wanted to do was tear him apart. She wanted to rip and demolish him into tiny pieces that she could scatter in the dark, sprinkle through the tunnels so that he could never tempt her again. Never make her want, never ever make her need.
She wanted to destroy him with her hands.
She leaned over and flicked off the lantern. Then she dropped to her knees and pressed her palms against the front of his jeans.
He jerked. His grunt of shock echoed through the darkness.
Blind, she cupped him with one hand, at his balls and base, and used the other to stroke up. And up and up. He was hardening beneath her touch. So thick and long. So hot and familiar.
She leaned in and pressed her face against that hardness between her hands, rubbed her lips against the warm denim and inhaled that basic essence of him, salt and sand. All the memories of a decade ago came crashing back.
He gave a sound like she’d stabbed him.
She reached for his button.
“Sofia, I—”
“Mira, guapo, if you talk, I will stop.” She felt the heat of her breath against his clothes. “Y no creo que quieras que me detenga.”
“And I don’t think you want me to stop,” she said in Spanish to ensure that he wouldn’t, regressing to that nineteen-year-old girl who believed in the power that her words, her voice, her mouth, and body had over him. Who’d believed without a flicker of doubt that he needed her.
As she pulled down his zipper, she gloried in the hitch of his breath like he couldn’t decide.
She knew exactly what she wanted. She stroked her lips over the skin of his abdomen, silky and tight and as familiar as her own skin, as she pulled down the elastic of his briefs in the V of his jeans.
His hot cock reared up against her knuckles, kicked into her fist, an eager old friend. Sightless and fascinated by the memories stored in her touch, she stroked down it, up it, focused her attention there at the rim, wondered if running her thumb over the velvety head still...
Ten years older and a million lovers later, he gave a full-body groan like she knew he would.
“Are you safe?” she asked him, her words haunting in the chamber. He’d always been adamant about this, a kid who’d seen a lot in LA, and she and Aish had been tested before they’d gone without condoms. About protection, he’d taught her a level of self-respect that she carried to this day. She wondered if this rock-and-sex god remembered the same level of self-respect.
Stroking and punishing his gorgeous cock for all of her abiding and unwanted affection for it, making him speechless and gasping above her, she leaned close and gave one tiny, delicate kiss to the steely shaft. “Hermoso, are you safe?”
His words were strained babble. “Yeah, I was tested a year ago and that was after the last time I—”
She put her mouth around his cock and swallowed him down.
“Fuck,” he yelled, and tunneled his fingers into her hair.
This was what she wanted. She wanted him filling her mouth and hitting the back of her throat. She bobbed over him, rememorizing the feel of him with her lips and tongue, relearning the sounds of his gasped breaths and caught groans. She pulled back when he was wet all over and licked at his tip, tasted the salty precome beading in his slit, worked her flat tongue all over his shaft and head. He was delicious in the dark, like he’d always been, but she could feel the razor-thin restraint in him. He panted her name above her, petting her scalp, combing through her hair.
She didn’t want his restraint. She wanted him desperate with need.
She took him deep again, worked him roughly until he was dripping, reduced to grunts, until those big hands clenched in her hair.
The pull on her scalp made her drop a hand between her legs.
She wanted mastery over him. She wanted him and could use him this way, could get herself off getting him off. Down here, in her ancient cellar, the dark behind her closed eyelids was the same dark when her eyes were open and it was like a dream she’d deny she had: Aish Salinger in her mouth with no responsibility or repercussions, only taste and feeling and his ocean smell.
Sofia unbuttoned her pants as she relaxed her throat, breathed through her nose as she slid her hand into her panties and spread her thighs. A wisp of cologne—who’d dared to wear cologne down here?—had her pressing her nose against his skin. Aish’s sea-salt smell was the only oxygen she needed.
Tears streamed down her face as she fingered her clit.
With a grunt, Aish yanked on her hair hard enough to hurt and pulled out of her mouth, then fell to his knees in front of her. He surrounded her jaw in his big hand and titled her head to the side.
“I can hear you fucking yourself,” he said against her neck, his breath against her windpipe. “You’re sloppy wet.” He grabbed her hand, pulled it out of her panties, and raised it. Then Sofia felt his hot, wet mouth surrounding her fingers, pulsing over them as he sucked them clean. His dirty words, his rough grip in the dark, were her filthiest fantasy.
She whimpered as her hips gyrated helplessly, her head still caught in his big hand.
“Goddammit, Sofia,” Aish groaned against her neck, dropping her hand to grab at her hip. Now it was him who sounded like he hated her. “Goddammit.”
Sofia willfully ignored the reminder of what was inked under his grip.
And then he was lifting her to her knees so he could shove down her pants and panties and she was leaning behind to flip off one shoe and they were struggling together to free her leg and then he was pulling her into his lap, thrillingly strong when she’d assumed he was weak, making her straddle him where he kneeled, all of it in the deep cool dark, a secret they could hide, and his lean hips between her thighs felt like the best kind of dream.
The familiar but unbelievable heat when he slipped inside her slapped Sofia with an icy dose of pragmatism. Aish Salinger was the flame she couldn’t put out? Then she’d feed it, get it high and hot, and incinerate this want out of her.
But when he tried to tilt her lips to him, she wrenched her face away. “No me beses,” she hissed. “I don’t want you to kiss me.”
The sound he made against her neck was awful. But he moved. Lifted slightly to surge that thick, long, hot cock inside her, that cock she measured all others against. And gave the gentlest of kisses to her neck.
When he surged again, she fell forward, pulled his shirt to the side, and sank her teeth into his collarbone.
“Fuck,” he groaned. Then he grabbed her by her hips and began to use her like she wanted to be used, like the sex doll mailed to his house for his pleasure. His jeans scraped the inside of her thighs and his fingers gripped bruises into her skin and his cock flashed fast and deep into her pussy. So good and deep. She clung to his biceps and let him fuck her.
She went off like a rocket after ten strokes. He went off after fifteen.
Their orgasms were searing. Earth melting. And silent. Sofia bit her lip bloody to prevent herself from making a sound.
As she pulled off him and stood, the taste of warm iron was in her mouth.
She worked to keep her gasping breaths shallow as she fumbled her pants back on. Fortunately, she bumped the lantern as she moved around. She turned it on, but kept her back to Aish. Found her shoe and headed to the stairs.
At the top of the stairs, she flipped the lights on and forced herself to look down. There, in the middle of her Corinthian black marble, small in her mammoth cathedral space, was Aish Salinger, head bent, still on his knees.
Head held high, Princesa Sofia went through her cellar door then pulled it closed behind her.
Ten Years Earlier
Sofia stared fixedly into the bonfire and tugged on her own braid to prevent herself from looking for the millionth time to see if the only missing worker’s truck had pulled into its space. Her crew, unfortunately, had been one of the first back, and over the last couple of hours—while more and more workers had joined the bonfire to drink and get high because no one planned to sleep in the few hours before harvest began—Sofia had gone from chatting with her coworkers between glances at the gravel parking lot to morosely yanking on her hair to stop herself from obsessing.
Que estúpido. Being in love was stupid.
This hole in her stomach and buzz around her heart, this ache she’d pulled her thighs against her chest to soothe while she sat on the cold ground and watched the flames snap, it was like suffering physical withdrawal from the few-hours absence of a boy she’d known for a month.
She’d been surprised when she saw the roster this morning. Then hurt. Then worried. Justin had said he had no problem with Aish and Sofia working together to monitor the grapes as long as they actually completed their monitoring, and Sofia had been diligent about feeling every grape for texture and ease of skin collapse, performing every test that determined sugar and acid and pH levels, and tasting the grapes for that hint of black cherry and spice that was essential to Laguna Ridge Winery wines. Only when their work was done would she attack Aish.
Nights alone in the truck or the fields or whatever dark spot Aish chose had been a gift; privacy was hard to find living in a bunkhouse with thirty kids. They’d done it a couple of times with the covers over their heads, both of them biting back the moans and words essential to their lovemaking. “Tell me if you like...yes, there, faster...mi estrella...mi fuego.”
She wondered, for the millionth time that day, if she’d done something wrong. She was dependi
ng on Justin Masamune’s recommendation for her University of Bordeaux application; French winemaking academia were unimpressed by her princess credentials. Once harvest began before dawn, it would be a crazy all-hands-on-deck scenario as the interns hauled and processed hundreds of tons of wine grapes, and alone time would be even harder for Aish and Sofia to find. Why hadn’t his uncle allowed them to spend this calm before the storm together?
And why was she acting like some moony-eyed Juliet over a few missed hours when they still had two months? She tugged on her hair again.
This, this impossible high when he was looking at her or laughing with her or listening to her—better than anyone ever had—and this bone-deep low when he was away, this was love. She’d never felt it before but had known it, had understood it, the moment she’d met him. She loved him. It filled her until it made her float, it weakened and flattened her, it energized her to her fingertips in the morning, and it made her communicate love songs with her body when she was with him at night. She loved him.
She was certain he loved her back. Although, for all their talking, he hadn’t said so.
She gave a little pant she hoped couldn’t be heard over the laughter and flickering flames. That click of thought—maybe he didn’t need her the way she needed him—made anxiety prickle all over her body, and she sucked down half her beer to drown it.
Was this the sensation that had driven her mother to become the vain, adulterous, egomaniacal woman she’d become?
Sofia knew a secret about her, a secret she didn’t know if the queen remembered giving up. The queen had been drunk when she revealed it, miserable, crying, her face still beautiful in the year before she began her addiction with plastic surgery. Sofia had been seven. They’d both been so young.
The queen had been so young when she’d married Sofia’s father, only three years older than Sofia was now. So young. So stupid. Her mother had married a prince who would be king. Sofia had fallen in love with a boy who wanted to be a rock star.
Hate Crush (Filthy Rich) Page 13