The interns laughed, breaking up the tension. But Sofia shot him a dark look. Like he was the one being a dick.
Juan Carlos gave him a patronizing smile. “Señor Salinger, you have the leisure time to make jokes, but these good people do not.” He looked around. “You’ve been lured from your lives to prop up a charade. I encourage you to end it and go home. If not for your sake, then for the sake of our villagers. Let’s end this media circus and allow them to get back to work. Then they can focus on their real futures and not the fantasies of a princess who imagines herself the hero.”
This fucking guy. “You can’t come in here and say shit like that.”
“Aish,” Sofia reprimanded quietly.
Her mother’s eyes narrowed at him. “I am the queen and it is my duty to defend our home and our people. I brought Juan Carlos to make you and the others see the truth.”
Aish scoffed. “The truth? You’re only in your home and with your people because your son cut the purse strings. You and the king defended the Monte so well you almost bankrupted it.”
“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
