She spoke through gritted teeth. “We’re keeping an eye on the temperature and putting together a contingency plan. Now, back to our crusher-destemmer...”
“What contingency plan?”
Goddammit, Sofia. He felt the urgency, the frustration, in his spine, his clenched fists, his molars. Goddammit, Sofia, let these people help you. They want to help.
Let me help you.
He could see her anger, equal to his, as she glared back.
But Namrita, who’d been on the phone, moved quickly to Sofia’s side and murmured close to her ear. Sofia’s mouth dropped open with dismay. Then her narrow shoulders slumped and she nodded.
Namrita spoke into her phone.
The black-iron gate that barred the entrance to the winery slowly opened. A gleaming red Mercedes-Maybach rolled in and purred up to where the interns were gathered. When the car stopped, Juan Carlos Pascual, that slime bag who was head of the Consejo, slid out. He strolled around the back of the car—the picture of power in a morning-grey double-breasted suit with a fuchsia tie and pocket square—and opened the door.
A feminine leg that ended in a white-glitter heel stepped out onto the cobblestones.
Juan Carlos helped Queen Valentina out of the car. Aish looked at Sofia.
She was still as a statue.
Queen Valentina and her husband had once regularly made the list of the world’s worst royals for their gross extravagance, showy extramarital affairs, ugly fights, and snobby lack of interest in their own people. They’d gone quiet after their son took control of the kingdom several years ago.
Privately, Aish knew that Queen Valentina had made her affection something impossible for Sofia to gain. In the spaces between Sofia’s stories about the fights, parties, and ever-changing hair colors of her teen wild-child days, Aish had heard a girl who’d decided that if she couldn’t get her mother’s attention through pleasing her, she’d get it through pissing her off.
As she’d told him her stories, whispered them to him, he’d run his nails up and down her tattoo and squeezed her tight.
Now her mother had brought Sofia’s enemy into her camp.
Juan Carlos and the queen stopped just short of Sofia, forcing her to move to them. They exchanged stiff air kisses. The queen looked into the air as if she were tolerating her daughter’s affections.
Her smile for the interns, however, was full and slick lipped.
Sofia introduced them tonelessly while Juan Carlos and the queen nodded with matching smirks. Aish could imagine what temper tantrums they’d threatened if Sofia hadn’t let them in. Without any warning, already exhausted, and on the day that the world’s tabloids called her a drunk cock tease, Sofia had to deal with the head of the regulatory board that had been doing all it could to badmouth her.
This was no fucking coincidence.
But Aish saw none of his building head of steam in Sofia. She was good at aiming anger at him. But toward her mother and this asshole actively trying to make her winery fail—nothing. She was the star that had winked out.
The queen pressed a manicured hand against her diamond necklace. That was a lot of carats before noon. “Forgive me for not returning sooner. The king and I have been waiting for an invitation.” Her accent was affected, semi-British. She sounded like American celebrities when they’d spent too much time in the Hamptons. “But a princess who shirks her duties as hostess does not mean I can shirk mine. Please, at long last—” she swept her hand away from herself “—let me welcome you to our kingdom, the Monte del Vino Real.”
Her hand waved over the winery built by her daughter.
“We have a rich tradition of working together as a village, a community, and a kingdom, despite what you may have heard from my daughter. When a person puts her own selfish glory in front of the kingdom’s needs, she breaks us into pieces.” Sofia slid her hands into her front pockets and looked down at her boots. “I would like you to hear from a winemaker whose family has been setting the standard for Monte del Vino Real wines for centuries. Juan Carlos?”
The winemaker stepped forward. “Mil gracias, mi reina,” he oozed. He swept a hand toward Queen Valentina. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”
As she was put on display to bring credit to this sleazeball, Aish felt a surprising tug of pity for her. Smiling widely, she looked like the unhappiest person he’d ever met.
“I’m disappointed the press is not here,” Juan Carlos said as he looked around. The press portion was scheduled for the post-hangover second half of the day. “Pero vale. Perhaps one of you will share my words with them.”
That motherfucker.
“Our kingdom has been growing grapes and making wine for a thousand years,” Juan Carlos said, the rings on his fingers catching the sunlight. “The Consejo Regulador del Monte was given the noble duty of ensuring only the highest quality wines went to Reina Isabel. We chose the barrels that the conquistadores carried to the New World to bargain with the indios.”
Bargain. Aish felt the group twitch. Dude. Read a textbook.
“Now, every century or so, we have a prince who thinks he can reinvent the wheel, that he knows better than hundreds of years of communal experience. Call it youth. Call it naivete. Some call it...delusion.” He spoke behind his hand. “Those are the Esperanza strains we don’t talk about. But each time, the people relied on the Consejo to bring him back to sanity. Why waste our fruit, the sweat from our growers’ brows, on an experiment? That is why, por ejemplo, my family’s bodega is called Familia Pascual. Porque la familia es lo más importante. The family, the community, the kingdom is what we value. There is only one bodega in all the Monte that is named after only one person.”
That one person was still looking at her boots.
Enough.
“El
