“What happened?” Sofia asked, her wineglass cool against her racing heart.
“He said he was doing some last-minute checks before he came to the party, thought the winery was empty, then was surprised by some guy trying to mess with one of the tanks. The guy roughed him up and then ran.”
Carmen Louisa asked, “Did he recognize him?”
Roman shook his head. “Said he wasn’t local. Brown hair, early thirties. He didn’t speak so we don’t know what language.”
“How did he get in?” Aish asked.
That was a good question. Her walls were actually pretty good at keeping out pests. Except Juan Carlos.
Juan Carlos. She leaned back from the group to shoot a glance at him now. The winemaker looked relaxed in his circle of sycophants. Would he really be so afraid of Sofia’s success that he ramped up his intimidation tactics to include breaking and entering, sabotage, and violence on her workers?
“Not sure,” Roman said, drawing her attention back. “Since everyone’s taking a day off tomorrow, we’ll have downtime to review security and fill the holes.”
He licked his full lips and slid a hand into his slim-fitting suit pants. Her soldier brother had become a bit of a fashionista in the time she’d known him, and she appreciated the dichotomy of it, enjoyed seeing him in something other than his bodyguard black. Right now, she hated the guilt on his face.
“We never did catch that fucking vandal,” he said, his green eyes troubled. “I’m real sorry about this, Sofia.”
Her half brother was adept at bearing the weight of the world. He was a war veteran who’d saved his platoon, an entrepreneur whose company protected movie stars and human rights advocates, and a retrieval specialist who’d entered the international spotlight when he’d rescued a Mexican teen heiress after others had abandoned the mission. The only thing he’d been unwilling to take on was his role as a member of the royal family.
Although his relationship with Mexican tycoon Daniel Trujillo, the heiress’s father, had provided loans to get the Monte through the worst economic times, Roman still acted like a guest whenever he was in the kingdom.
“Basta, hermano,” Sofia said, patting “enough” on her brother’s chest. “You’ve done so much for us. You’re a huge part of the winery’s success. In fact, this is probably just a byproduct of the success, an overeager tourist who snuck in then panicked. I have every faith you’ll figure out what happened. The only thing I feel bad about is that you can’t stay for the party. This is your celebration, too.”
As always, her brother gave her his steady nod. But both she and Mateo still had a lot of work to do to get him to embrace that he was an essential member of their family.
As he turned to go, Sofia pulled Namrita and Carmen Louisa close. “Beberse todo, mujeres,” she said, grabbing wineglasses from a passing waiter and handing them to them. “Drink, laugh, dance. You’ve worked so hard.” She kissed them both on their cheeks. “Roman will find the attacker and shore up our security. I want to see you smile.”
Both women looked surprised by Sofia’s enthusiasm.
She would visit the worker tomorrow, make sure he was comfortable and well compensated, and invite him to the castillo’s dungeon with her once Roman found whoever dared to hurt one of her people. She liked to keep the manacles oiled down there specifically for such a purpose.
But Sofia wanted to stay riding high on the wave instead of drowning under its weight. All their hard work had paid off. The world’s excitement about Bodega Sofia would translate into a brighter future for her kingdom. For once, her need to be needed was a benefit to the people she cared about, and not a burden.
With the guitar strum of her homeland’s music drifting over the crowd and glasses of her wine in the hands of laughing and chatting interns, an unfamiliar bubble of hope filled Sofia’s chest. When she looked at Aish, he looked back like he’d never taken his eyes off her.
He tilted his head and gave her the gentlest of kisses. But beyond him, just before she closed her eyes, she saw Juan Carlos watching.
* * *
Two hours later, with the party in the courtyard roaring along as the wine flowed and the band played, Sofia tried to look regal as she held up the edge of her long skirt and fast-walked along the ancient terra-cotta tiles that lined the hallways of her childhood home. Just like when her brother used to sleigh her along these slick floors on a blanket, she hoped she didn’t get caught by any El Castillo staff. They were loyal, hardworking, and willing to adapt to Mateo’s budgetary restraints and an overall minimizing of pomp and circumstance.
Seeing the princesa they adored tipsy and horny and rushing through the halls to screw a rock star in her canopy bed might put them over the edge.
She’d given Aish a head start. She hoped he could read the directions she’d scrawled on the cocktail napkin.
He’d stuck to water as they laughed and danced and mingled, and that discipline in a man whose drunken slurring had landed him in her kingdom, in a boy who encouraged her to run naked into rainstorms, had proven irresistibly provocative. She didn’t want to wait to get back to the hospedería.
As she kicked off her Pradas, hid them behind a suit of armor, picked up her skirts, and ran through this endlessly long wing of the castle, she realized that sometimes discipline could be overrated.
Finally, she reached the hallway leading to her bedroom. At the end, her door was closed. Hopefully, Aish was behind it.
Her eagerness to find out meant that she didn’t notice the open door of a never-used sitting room. But she did hear the regal command that issued from it as she passed.
“Sofia. Ven.”
Joder. She turned to see her mother sitting in a tall, carved-wood chair, the slipcover thrown to the floor beside her. When was the last time her mother had been in this portion of the castle? Titi had soothed their childhood fears and nightmares since the king and queen had installed their suites in a separate wing. It was the one thing Mateo hadn’t changed with his cost-cutting measures.
Sofia glanced at her closed door before she sighed and, head held high, walked into the sitting room steeped in the mustiness of stale air and ancient furniture. She knew from vast experience that it was easier and faster to let the queen have her say. And don mental armor as the queen said it.
Her mother tapped rhinestone-studded nails against the chair arm’s carvings. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked in Spanish.
“Sneaking away from a party to fuck my lover,” Sofia replied. “You know all about that, Mother.”
The queen stiffened in her teal silk as Sofia eyed her. She was wearing an Elie Saab gown, not new but well taken care of. Sofia was almost impressed how straight and silky her mother’s platinum sheet of hair looked. She was naturally a wavy-haired brunette, and she no longer could employ a team of stylists.
Rather than the responsive rage and slaps Sofia had come to depend on, her mother stayed seated. “Lover. Interesting word. Do you love him?”
Sofia frowned. “What?”
Her mother smiled the smile that Sofia recognized in the mirror, the smile she’d practiced to obscure everything she didn’t want anyone to know. That smile was her most effective mask. She’d erred in forgetting it now and, instead, giving her mother an opening with her surprise.
“You obviously loved him once,” her mother said. “Do you love him again?”
The question, out of her mother’s lips, was strange and jarring. Not once in her entire life had the queen asked about her emotional state.
“Mother, having spent your child-rearing years striving to be as far from me as a private jet would allow, you have no gauge on what is obvious about me.”
“That’s still not an answer.”
Sofia rolled her eyes. She was a millionaire and had dual degrees in enology and wine chemistry. But conversations with her mother could s
till drag her back to her thirteen-year-old self.
“No... I...not that it matters to you, but no, I don’t love him.” She hated that she’d stuttered. She settled herself into her more dependable emotion of disdain. “I learned the tragedy of that mistake from you.”
Again, her mother surprised her.
“Did you?” the queen asked calmly. “I don’t think so.” She tilted her head, sending that sheaf of hair over her bare, bony, shoulder. And despite it all, the dye job and the tan and the plastic surgery and the self-hating artifice, Sofia still found her so pretty.
“Do you know why our relationship has been difficult?” the queen asked.
“You mean, why you hate me?”
The queen nodded. “Perhaps.”
Now. They were doing this now, while a gorgeous man who would be gone in four days was waiting, hopefully naked, down the hall.
Sofia squared her shoulders. “Because I know what you don’t want anyone to know. I know that you love your cheating, humiliating dog of a husband.”
That night in deep winter, that time of the season when the Picos de Europa declared their dominance over the sun and forced residents to remember they were tiny mortals living among forbidding mountains, Sofia had been so young, only seven or so. She’d still believed she could find a magic combination of words, deeds, and princess prettiness to draw her mother’s attention away from the trips and soirees and boy toys and drooling dukes. Discovering from staff that her mother was in residence, she’d crept into her suite—she wasn’t supposed to be in there—to recite the French she’d learned. Her mother liked non-Spanish things and her tutor told her she looked adorable when she spoke it.
Sofia had heard her mother before she’d found her, in a robe on her dressing room floor, sobbing in a pile of gauzy clothes she’d ripped off the hangers. An empty crystal decanter and broken shards of a perfume bottle glittered near her. The heavy ambergris scent of the perfume was choking in the small space. Her mother had been bleeding and Sofia rushed in to grab a towel and press it to her. The queen started slurring between moans and tears, telling her about how she’d been the timid teenager of a wealthy grocery store chain owner, how she’d felt so blessed to be selected for a young king when all she could offer him was a share of her family’s fortune. The king had made her weep in both good and bad ways on her virginal marriage bed, and then left that bed to have sex with her cousin, who he’d stowed away on their honeymoon yacht. After that initial humiliation, he heaped them upon her by never trying to hide his affairs. She discovered she was only a conduit for heirs and money, and, horrifyingly, she loved him anyway. The king was a compulsion she couldn’t shake. So she’d turned herself into what the king admired: a perfectly carved woman who used herself as a tool to garner men, money, and influence. She made herself into him.
And he still didn’t love her, she’d wept before she’d passed out among the silk and chiffon, her cuts no longer bleeding.
“You’re perceptive as always, Sofia,” her mother said now. Plastic surgery had removed the faint scarring along her forearm. “It’s one reason I find your presence unpleasant.”
Sofia had stopped flinching years ago.
“But there’s another reason,” her mother continued airily. “I hate that you never need anything. You are smart, beautiful, composed, kind, accomplished...all on your own.” Only her mother could make the compliments drip with insult. “You certainly don’t need me. As you grew, in that first flush of womanhood when the average girl is consumed with crushes, you made it clear you didn’t need a man. And I hate you for that.” As she spoke, her words became sharper. “How dare you have more than me when you come from me? How dare you position yourself as better than me when I have worked so hard and sacrificed everything to be the woman I am?”
The queen’s fingernails were clenched into the wood.
Then, like a sieve, the queen let her fury fall away. She relaxed, leaned back in the chair, and raked her nails down her long, shining hair. “But now, I see you with this American rock star and maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Maybe you do need. Maybe you will prove to be as weak and stupid as I am. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but, Sofia, I might enjoy watching it happen to you. You’re falling in love with a man who’s going to destroy you.”
Sofia felt the punch of her words like a witch’s curse. There was martyr’s blood and pagan rituals mixed into the stones of this castle and those who respected that did not make predictions lightly.
Her mother meant every word.
Only three decades of training allowed Sofia to pull off the world’s best performance now. “Will that be all, Mother?”
But the pleased smile on her mother’s face showed that she wasn’t fooled. “For now, hija.”
Sofia turned on her heel and focused on taking measured steps out of the room. Back in the hall, away from her mother’s gaze, she faced again her childhood bedroom door, all of her enthusiasm for entering it drained away.
Her mother had ruined it for her.
Just as her mother had ruined perfumes and pretty, girly dresses for her. Because later, years later, Sofia finally paired her childhood memories with adolescent understanding to realize that those cuts on the inside of her mother’s forearm and at her hip, where she said she had a birthmark that the king used to kiss, had not been an accident. Sofia probably had that empty decanter to thank for the cuts not being deeper.
Her mother had loved her useless husband so much that she’d been willing to take herself away from a little girl who had actually desperately needed her.
September 26
Part Two
Aish fingered the fluttery silk that fell from the gilded wood top of the canopy bed, thinking how much this pink princess bedroom must have chapped young Sofia’s hide. She was nowhere to be seen among the claw-foot Louis XV furniture, pink silk, and crystal chandeliers. A beady-eyed ballerina doll stared back at him from a mound of pillows on the bed when he knew for a fact that Sofia preferred chemistry sets and was only a so-so dancer.
The only thing in the room that even hinted at her was the wooden box on the floor near her dresser, the size of a couple of shoeboxes, carved and inlaid with ivory. It was a haphazard spot for something that looked old and precious.
He’d believed he’d made her omnipresent in Young Son’s first album, with his guitar tuned to the microtones she’d introduced him to, with lyrics full of stars and cinnamon and tempting skin. He’d sung about the rub of soil against her body and the green of the vines she’d been surrounded by.
But as he sat on the edge of her bed and surveyed this silk and lace room, as he thought about the woman he’d gotten to work alongside and laugh with and make love to and admire over the last several days, he realized for the first time that those songs no better reflected her than this room did. His songs were what he wanted her to be; just like this room was what the queen wanted her to be. And he’d shown up in her kingdom still wanting that girl he’d set in the amber of his lyrics: smart, hardworking, pushing him to do better, yes. But also unquestioningly adoring. And loving. She’d loved him without reserve because he told her she could, that she could trust him.
And then, when push came to shove, when the manager said they could have the tour spot but only on the condition that Aish broke up with his girlfriend because “leashed dicks don’t fill seats,” when Aish had to choose between Sofia and all the things he wanted for himself, he’d chosen himself. Yeah, John had harassed and hounded him, had shoved the girl into his lap when Sofia had come into the bar, because Aish had already waited a week and the manager was threatening to walk. But it was Aish, stone-cold sober, who’d broken up with her.
He’d never worked as hard at anything as getting famous. Never had to. Surfing, the state-tournament-winning three-point shot, sex, it all came easy. But each song, each performance, each multiplatinum-earning album, had to
be fucking perfect. Because he’d given her up for them. He needed to be more famous than famous because of what he’d sacrificed to have it.
When he’d stood at the edge of the stage, battered by the screams of thousands, arm around John, he believed he’d earned it. When he’d fired the manager the instant he had some leverage and hired Devonte instead, he thought he’d been making amends.
When he sang into the camera for every video and showed off his tattoos during every televised performance, while never once trying to contact her, he assured himself that he was doing everything he could to win her back.
And then he’d stepped into her kingdom thinking she was the one who needed to change.
He knuckled the pang growing painful in the middle of his chest.
He needed her here with him, right now. He needed to lock the door and keep her away from him.
He would tell her that he was writing again. He’d already scheduled studio time for when he got back. He would tell her that he had her to thank for the newly flowing lyrics and melodies.
He would tell her that he’d been wrong.
Fuck.
After a lifetime of believing he’d been pretty near perfect, he was wrong, and he’d tell her. He was actually the selfish, self-involved man-child she’d accused him of being. He was wrong for showing up here with his preconceived notions of her and he was wrong—and, let’s face it, a coward—to go ten years without telling her he thought of her daily.
He was wrong to have believed that anything—his music, his career, John—was more important than her.
He startled to standing when the bedroom door opened and although all the things he had to tell her were on the tip of his cowardly tongue, he stopped short. Saw the look on her face—anger, distress, even a little fear—as she aimed herself at him in a rustle of silk then pressed her face against his crisp, white shirt. Her arms burrowed under his suit jacket and clung to him like he was a tree keeping her grounded during a storm.
Hate Crush (Filthy Rich) Page 24