His new best friend was kind of an asshole. But his old best friend had been kind of an asshole, too.
At the disloyal thought, Aish tried to straighten. “Don’t talk about her like that,” he grumbled. When had his neck turned to jelly? His best friend had turned into quadruplets.
“Sorry, man, no offense,” Buck or Steve said, raising his eight palms into the air. “What’s she doing now?”
Buck or Steve was a good guy. And there were so many of him. It’d been a long time since Aish had talked to anyone but his manager. It’d been a long time since he’d talked about her. “She’s opening a winery.”
“For real? Classy for such a dirty girl.”
“Yeah. Yeah, she’s real classy. Royally classy.” He huffed at his own joke. Could that be a song?
Buck or Steve laughed dirty. “I bet you’d help her open her winery real good.”
“That’d be nice,” Aish said dreamily. “Soaking in the Spanish air, getting my head on straight...”
“Wait a fucking second.” His new best friend’s sharp voice forced Aish to focus, forced him to see that he was just one man, one man with eyes that weren’t as blurry and red rimmed as they’d seemed when they’d first started drinking. “A rich slut into wine? In Spain? You’re not talking about that princess, are you? What’s her name?” He snapped his fingers and the sound was percussive over the thump of the headliner’s beats. Then he pointed a dirty fingernail at Aish.
“Princess Sofia! That’s who ‘In You’ is about.”
“Shhhhhhh,” Aish said, trying to concentrate as he looked around the tent again. But when he steadied his head, the tent kept swirling. He closed his eyes. “Dude, keep your voice down.”
“Princess Sofia. She’s starting a winery? I thought she was in rehab.” Aish tried to open his eyes. But the gorge was rising in his throat. And the man’s words were crowding his ears. “Motherfucking Princess Sofia. Wasn’t she caught fucking an entire boy band? Her winery’s gonna be a 24-7 orgy. You think you can get me in there, too? Damn, I’d like a go at her.”
Aish was going to kill his new best friend. He was going to shove his hand down Buck or Steve’s throat, rip out his tonsils, and dangle them in front of his eyes as the first body part he’d lose if he ever touched her or thought about her or told another living soul.
But a familiar sensation welled up in Aish.
And instead of violence, the video from the camera hidden in a fern would show rock star Aish Salinger lurching out of view. The mic hidden in Buck or Steve’s poncho would pick up—over the thump of techno-surf—Aish Salinger heaving in a corner.
The viral video might have actually carried a virus. Because when the woman they were discussing saw the video the next day, a woman with a kingdom on the line and nothing going her way, a woman who’d blocked that catastrophic first love from her thoughts, she had to run for the bathroom, too.
Mid-August
Princesa Sofia Maria Isabel de Esperanza y Santos stood in the arctic cool and ancient dark of her wine cellar, a hub for the endless tunnels that ran beneath her repurposed monastery, and tugged out the thick bung from a barrel. She purposefully placed the bung next to the hole—she’d lost them to pockets and distraction in years past—and stuck the wine thief into the barrel. The Tempranillo that slowly filled the glass tube sparkled like a ruby in the dim light of the LED lantern. She pulled the thief out when it had been filled to a precise amount, immediately plugged the barrel, and emptied the wine into her glass.
She gave the wine four hard swirls, the exact number she’d given wine from the other barrels she’d sampled, and studied it in the lantern light for imperfections. No off coloring. No unexpected lees or residue. The wine slid silkily down the inside of the bowl, just as she wanted it to.
She leaned her nose and upper lip into the bowl and inhaled, mouth open. Dark plum, cherry, tobacco, the rich, decadent aromas had been subdued by the year in American oak barrels. Screw the Consejo Regulador del Monte, the regulatory board that demanded the wines age in French oak to get their stamp of approval. These grapes from a sunny northern corner of the Monte del Vino Real cried for a different technique to display their best flavors.
Sofia was princess of the Monte del Vino Real, the small winegrowing principality nestled high among the Picos de Europa in Northern Spain, and legend had it that the juice from the grapes flowed through her family’s veins. Since it was her lifeblood, no one knew better than her what the grapes of the Monte del Vino Real needed to become great wines. No one cared more. No one had trained harder or convinced more people or had more at stake. It was up to her, the first winemaker in a five-hundred-year legacy of royal winegrowers, to convince the world that the Monte del Vino Real was capable of creating some of the most sophisticated, palate-tempting, tourism-building, and revenue-generating wines on the planet.
With a careful and restrained breath, Princesa Sofia put the glass to her lips and upended it, chugging the wine down like una cerveza light. She drank until the glass was dry. Just as she had from the other wine barrels she’d sampled.
She rubbed her sleeve across her lips and burped.
Overhead lights flared on as the cellar door at the top of the stairs crashed open. “¿Dónde demonios estás? ¡Sal ahora mismo!” yelled her winery manager.
Only the constant state of horror, shock, and fury she’d been living in for the last forty-eight hours kept Sofia from reacting to the crash, the blinding lights, and her employee telling her to “Get your ass up here.”
And the wine.
