Mateo nodded, said nothing, and swept her up—mouth, body, and heart—to claim her on his couch.
April: Day Two
Part One
Mateo drove his black Audi Q7 through winding village streets that he’d driven through a million times: over the stone bridge from which villagers poured wine into the stream to satisfy the ghostly hermetic monks who haunted the mountain caves, beneath the balcony of Restaurant Martín—the site of a million love affairs and heartbreaks—and its flower boxes weeping scarlet red geraniums, past the bodegas of Familia Pascual, San Sebastian, and El Gato con El Queso, wineries run by stubborn old fucks who refused to make anything better than cheap jug wine with Monte grapes, leaving great Tempranillo winemaking to those outside of the Monte.
“Why do they do that?” Roxanne asked as she looked out her window, the audience of one for Mateo’s tour.
Her distraction allowed him to linger over her, over her midnight hair loose down her back, her ivory peasant-top threatening to reveal a shoulder, her naked lips that pursed as she watched century-old granite buildings streak by. When she’d come out of her bedroom this morning in jeans and easy makeup and asked, “Is this okay for today?” he’d wanted to shove her back into the room and lock them both in.
Instead, he’d told her she looked “nice.” Placid words from a “friend” who was doing all he could to control his excitement about showing her his kingdom and showing her off to his people.
Mateo focused his eyes back on the cobblestone streets and his mind back on the issue of Monte del Vino Real winemaking. “Why are they stubborn old fucks? Because the lazy way of doing things has kept them rich enough,” he told her, turning into the village plaza and slowing down to look for a parking space. “They claim that the Monte has also been known for its winegrowing, not its winemaking. I’d like to improve our wine quality, but I can only tackle one million problems at a time.”
She turned to face him, that gleaming shoulder finally popping free. “Not a million and one?” she smirked. “Wimp.”
He grinned back at her, and then turned to realize he’d just passed two available parking spots. He set his jaw and began another slow circle around the plaza, past the fountain of San Vicente de Zaragoza, the Monte’s patron saint who was tortured with iron hooks and left to die on shards of broken pottery.
He wondered if that felt as bad as trying to remain calm and collegial with a woman he wanted to chain spread eagle to his bed.
She was right; things had become muddled over the last month. The contract had drawn out strict boundary lines, but in his campaign to equalize and normalize their relationship, Mateo had smudged them. Not always to his benefit. Roxanne Medina was now letting him see behind her armor and, Jesus, it was fucking killing him.
She’d been a jack-booted Amazon when he’d met her in January, a warrior who regularly kicked him in the balls. That it was the same woman who turned to him yesterday while she waved at his people, who looked to him for comfort and reassurance while nerves blazed in her eyes, tied him in fucking knots. When she’d curled onto his couch, accepted the horror of his parentage with a tilt of those luscious lips, and then offered him tenderness and insight and the soothing absolution of her body...
Do you believe me that I care about you?
Mateo needed to stop his father and finish developing the Tempranillo Vino Real and re-energize his people and prove he was worthy of his kingdom and he didn’t...hadn’t...couldn’t imagine a future where billionaire Roxanne Medina fit into that long term. Not that she’d implied that she wanted “long term.” But if they kept blindly skipping down this path, compelled by their bodies and their shared concerns and mutual intellects and just this...fascination...she was right: One of us is going to hurt.
Mateo didn’t want to hurt her. And he had no need, time, or energy for a spouse. No more than Roxanne did. The terms of the contract served them both well. He would let it do its work, let it set the appropriate limits, and count down the seconds until the contract allowed him to touch her again.
Friends, he reminded himself as he pulled into a parking space and smelled her, like rain-dewed roses, in his car and all over his skin.
Friends, his mind groaned as he saw a beauty mark on her collarbone he’d never noticed, never kissed. He’d never seen her fully naked. There still were so many firsts for them to explore.
He turned off the car and cleared his throat. “So, we’re here to meet my niñera. She’s going to be...effusive about you and me and the marriage. And I’m gonna have to play along or she’ll smack me upside the head. If I didn’t bring you to meet her, I’d never hear the end of it, but in light of our ‘friends’ conversation, you need a heads-up.”
Roxanne’s smile had grown as he’d stammered. “We’re meeting your nanny?”
“Yep.”
“Will she show me naked bath-time pictures of you?”
“Almost certainly.”
Roxanne kept that soft amused smile as she slipped on her cross-body bag, and Mateo resisted the urge to wrap his hand around her neck and lick her lips, tickle them at the corner until she opened to him. Before last night’s conversation, he would have.
Blind, stupid, stumbling...
Mateo got out of the car and waited for Roxanne in front of it, rather than opening her door for her and touching her as she got out. He motioned toward the door of the sandwich shop, a glass door within centuries-old stone and masonry, and followed her to it, focusedly not watching her heavenly, heart-shaped ass in tight jeans.
The murmur inside the community gathering spot—the place where the people of the Monte shared a café or croissant or world-class bocadillo—swelled as he and Roxanne stepped inside.
“She’s been waiting for you, Príncipe,” the good-looking kid behind the counter called in Spanish, his hands busy sliding slices of jamón into a just-cut baguette and wrapping the bocadillo in white butcher paper. Wiping his hands on his apron, he leaned over the counter to grasp Mateo’s hand.
“Gracias, Javi,” Mateo said. “Could you wrap up a couple of those with...”
Javi, the grandson of Mateo’s niñera, grinned big. “Tortilla y tomate. Of course. Would your wife like anything else?”
Roxanne answered in Spanish. “No. Tortilla y tomate sounds perfect. Thank you, Javi.” The twenty-two-year-old kid, big and burly with floppy black hair, looked a little awestruck with his eyes on Roxanne. Mateo got it; he felt a little awestruck as he watched his native-born language emerge from those lush, bare lips in her throaty voice. Yes, right. She spoke fluent Spanish. Last night’s dinner party had all been in English, his parents’ standard protocol of rejecting their culture and country in favor of appearing more continental.
“Por supuesto, Alteza,” Javi replied, and Roxanne looked a little startled at hearing herself called “highness.” Mateo smiled as he led her through the swinging door to the back, nodding at a couple of growers as they went.
He kept his hands to himself as he passed through the cramped quarters of ovens and prep tables and the large mixing machine for the fresh-made baguettes. She didn’t need a hand on the curve of her waist to get where she was going. He knocked on a door in the far wall.
“Ven,” his niñera called.
He opened it to see the tiny lady, sitting erect in her office chair, looking at him with a placid welcome as they stepped into the room. She was trim, her skin a weathered shade of brown and still tight around her cheekbones, her hair cut, permed and dyed black once a month, making it appear a soft helmet around her head. He came around the desk to stand next to her chair, Roxanne beside him.
Titi’s face was his first memory, the one adult who’d been a constant, daily presence in his life until he’d stepped away from her hug, lip trembling, to walk with a six-year-old’s determination into boarding school. She’d been the one to soothe him during the summers home, to rub
his back as he cried angry, powerless tears into his pillow, humiliated and horrified by the base, spineless, selfish creatures his parents were. She’d been the one to urge him to do better, to be better, and to punish him with reasonable consequences when he failed. She’d been his shelter, but when he didn’t live up to her expectations of him, expectations he should have for himself, she’d also been the storm.
He leaned down to kiss Titi’s violet-scented cheek and she let him, tilting up her face. “I see you’ve finally decided to let me meet your wife,” she said, coolly.
Oh no. Titi was in a mood.
“It’s my fault,” Roxanne jumped in with her flawless Spanish. “I’ve kept him very busy.”
Mateo stepped back. “Roxanne Medina,” he said formally. “Please let me introduce Señora Loretta Hernandez, maker of the finest bocadillo in Spain.”
“Medina,” his Titi said, all of her steel keeping her back straight in the chair. “Not Esperanza? I understand in America it is common for a wife to take her husband’s last name.”
It was a tradition they did not follow in Spain. Mateo sighed at her. “Titi, come on...”
Roxanne merely folded her hands in front of her. “I’m sorry, señora,” she said. “There are so many buildings I’d have to rename.”
Mateo watched his Titi for her reaction to Roxanne’s outrageous statement. She narrowed her soft brown eyes at her, just a flicker, before she nodded. “Es así.”
Mateo bit back his smile. Titi loved her little fiefdom here at the sandwich shop, the place she opened after Mateo and Sofia outgrew their need for a nanny. She could certainly respect a woman who had skyscrapers named after her. He grabbed a couple of folded chairs from the neat jumble of Titi’s office—she hoarded recipes and family photos and the printed weekly announcements from mass in precise stacks—and opened them to the side of her desk. He refused to sit in front of it like schoolchildren sent to the principal’s office.
“What do you think of our little village?” Titi asked, not yet unbending, as Roxanne sat.
Roxanne smiled. “It’s beautiful. Like a fairy tale. Everyone has been kinder than I expected them to be.”
Mateo shot her a look as Titi said, “Oh?”
“I implied some not very nice things about the Monte in the beginning.”
Mateo stared at her. Roxanne could be so twisty—her devious plans had devious plans—and yet she could be so nakedly honest that it knocked him silly. He had learned since birth that to lie, hide, deter, and inveigle were the most important habits a person in power could have. He’d never known honesty like hers.
He realized he was staring. When he turned, he found Titi’s eyes on him, not Roxanne. “And what do you think of our Mateo?” his niñera asked.
“Titi—” Mateo murmured, refusing to squirm in his seat.
“As a person who had a hand in making him, you should be very proud.” Roxanne’s voice seemed quiet in the tiny office. She leaned back in her seat and raised a hand to lightly pinch her lip before dropping it back into her lap. “He’s a wonderful friend and lover. I’m lucky to be married to him.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
Mateo looked at Roxanne as his heart thundered. Was this... What was this? Mateo thought he was going to be the one playacting for his Titi. But Roxanne didn’t look like she was playacting. Not with her steady eyes, her calm hands, and relaxed body. Roxanne Medina, a woman who made him laugh louder and think faster and come harder than he thought was possible, just said she was lucky to be married to him. And god, god, god, the id of him—that little, ninety-six-pound, soaking-wet princeling with daddy issues—wanted it to be true.
“FRIENDS!” his brain bellowed. “FRIENDS!”
His Titi’s long, slow chuckle interrupted his runaway brain. “Vale,” she said, pushing up from her seat. If it was possible, she’d gotten even tinier since Mateo had seen her last. “Vale,” she said, smiling and still chuckling as she took Roxanne’s face into her soft, wrinkled hands, and kissed both cheeks. She straightened, squeezing Roxanne’s shoulder, and leaned to pat Mateo’s face, giving him her beautiful rosy-cheeked smile, that smile that could silent crying babies and stun grown men and make the forlorn feel that everything was going to be okay. “Mi hijito,” she said. And Mateo smiled at her and used every one of his deterring and inveigling powers to hide that he was lying. That his marriage wasn’t real. That it was all pretend.
As Titi settled back into her seat and chatted with them about the next night’s banquet and events around the Monte with all her warmth and heart restored, Mateo worked hard not to dwell on how easy it had been to convince her.
April: Day Two
Part Two
They said goodbye to Titi with hugs and kisses and a promise to come to her home after Sunday mass for lunch. Mateo escorted Roxanne through the market in the middle of the plaza, introducing her to whoever crossed their path, on the way to the centuries-old church at the other end. Father Paulo, a young priest who said he preferred the Monte’s quiet to his hometown of Madrid, nevertheless chatted excitedly with Roxanne in a pew about current events in the big city. As Roxanne had the man laughing uproariously at one moment and then saying a quick prayer over them for the success of their marriage the next, Mateo was once again startled by how much of a chameleon she was.
He’d once thought of it as her manipulation. Now he believed that all of her faces—the lush siren, the brilliant businesswoman, the empathetic friend, the quiet worshipper—were all truly Roxanne.
He couldn’t tell what her face was saying now behind her mirrored aviator sunglasses as Mateo shook out a blanket and spread it under the massive oak tree in the middle of the test vineyard for his Tempranillo Vino Real. The day had turned blue and warm, but there was cool here in the shade. On his knees, he pulled the two bocadillos and a bottle of wine out of his knapsack and tossed them onto the blanket.
“What?” he asked, pushing up his sunglasses to look at her.
She pointed at him and did a swirl with her finger. “In what way is this not romantic?” she asked blandly.
“I...” He looked down and around, at the blanket, the wine, the shade under the mammoth tree limbs, the way his newly mature vines islanded them in this cool and, indeed, romantic spot. He’d envisioned showing her this place, one of his favorite hideaways in the Monte, before the “friends” talk and hadn’t thought to recalibrate his plans. He looked back at her and smiled helplessly. “I promise to stay on this side of the blanket?” Her lenses reflected back the dark of the tree. “You’ve got to eat. We’ll only talk about...non-sexy things.”
Her lips—sexy, sexy lips free of paint and gloss—curved and gave a sexy huff of a laugh. She stepped into the shade and pushed her sunglasses onto her head, pulling back her thick, sexy fall of hair, giving him the begrudging humor in her sexy eyes.
He tossed her bocadillo to the opposite corner of the blanket. “Here is your sandwich, buddy. Don’t hold back on the burping and farting.”
She rolled her eyes at him as she settled cross-legged on the blanket, throwing her sunglasses to the side. She pulled her hair over her shoulder, revealing a tiny love bite he’d sucked just under her jaw.
Mateo put the wine bottle in his lap, using it as camouflage, and handed her a thick glass tumbler half-full of wine.
They unwrapped their sandwiches and ate, washed them down with good red wine. Mateo stretched out his legs, staying on his half of the blanket, and Roxanne wound her hair into a knot, getting it off her neck. The only sounds besides the crunch of the baguettes were birds chittering far off in the vineyard.
“This wine is amazing,” Roxanne said, her elbows resting on her knees as she gripped the tumbler in both hands, her nose in the glass.
“Yeah?” Mateo said, warmth flooding his belly that had nothing to do with the delicious bocadillo he’d just bolted down. “It’s made from
Monte grapes. I’m glad you think your investment is worth it.”
She pierced him with her eyes. “Even if I hated Monte del Vino Real wines,” she said, her voice throaty and muffled by the glass, “I’d still think the investment was worth it.”
Mateo sat up and crushed his empty sandwich wrapper into a ball, needing something to do with his hands.
“It has Tempranillo grapes from one of our newer vineyards,” he said, tossing the wrapper to the side and picking up his own glass. “The family, the Machados, are on the east side of the Monte, so they get a lot of the morning sun. From them, you get the hot grapes. You know, high alcohol.” He watched her lean back on one hand, swirl her glass with the other while she kept her full attention on him. “Their abuela was the one who suggested that the winemaker add Grenacha grapes to the blend—she said grandmothers need a siesta wine that they can drink and still do the dishes after.” He grinned. “Though Abuela Machado could drink her weight in wine and still outthink me.”
She sat up, reaching for him, and Mateo nearly choked on a gulp of wine before he realized she was reaching for the bottle at his hip.
“That says the vineyard was established in 1850?” she said, motioning with her glass.
“Sí.”
“And that’s a new vineyard?”
“We began growing grapes in 880. We were rebels, hiding in the mountains from the Moors and their laws against alcohol.”
Roxanne set the bottle down. “Rebels? It sounds like you were drunks.”
Mateo quirked a brow. “It’s called liquid courage and it’s a tried-and-true method for rebellion.” Roxanne slumped over onto her elbow, rested her head on her hand as she stretched out her legs.
“Anyway, in 1482, Queen Isabella ‘discovered’...” He drew quotes in the air with his fingers. “...a document that she’d forged a day earlier. The document said our ancestors had been blessed in the third century by San Vicente de Zaragoza, the patron saint of wine. This allowed her to give our alcalde a crown and to have first pick of the finest wines in her kingdom.”
Lush Money (Filthy Rich) Page 16