Aish looked at her for a long moment and then gave a huff of a laugh. What the fuck else was he supposed to do? He slid his hands into his jeans pockets and walked toward her balcony doors, stood at the glass and stared out into the dark night.
The rumor had begun as seeds on Reddit boards and fan pages and the comment section of articles—easy-to-dismiss whispers that Aish had maligned, bullied, and shoved John into killing himself. They’d had no impact in the first sad months after John’s death. But when two bands announced that they had irrefutable proof that Young Son had stolen songs, the seeds took root. The thinking was that Aish had harassed his best friend into taking the fall for the plagiarism. People posted daily, expecting an announcement from Aish placing the blame at John’s feet.
While he would never do such a thing, hiding for a year had allowed the rumors to fester and grow.
It was up to Aish to make sure John Hamilton didn’t go down in history as a song-stealing, suicidal victim of his best friend’s jealousy.
And Sofia was wrong. He had hurt his best friend.
He wondered what proof she had against them. “All this shit we’ve been doing to each other, Sofia. Do we have to keep it up?” His words rang hollowly against the glass.
He could see her in the reflection. She studied his back, dipped briefly down to his ass before she looked away.
“No.” Her brow furrowed as if she was surprised by her response. “As long as you stick to your promise not to push me.”
He turned, hands still in his pockets, and leaned back against the glass. “I’m done with that,” he said. “But we’ve got to start working together. We’ve both got a lot of baggage that we need #Aishia to distract people from.”
She was quiet. Then she gave one decisive nod, her hair, now dry and showing all of its splendor of browns and golds, falling into her face.
What he wouldn’t give to push it back for her.
“Pero...pretend only,” she clarified, tucking her hair behind her ear. “What happened in the cellar isn’t going to happen again.”
“You really think I want that to happen again?”
He felt guilty when her eyes flickered with shame. She’d sincerely apologized. And he’d sincerely accepted it.
He pulled his hands out of his jeans and spread his arms. “Let’s hug on it.”
He’d gladly play the fool for her to watch her spine straighten, to watch her chin go up in that royal way that always flicked his Bic.
“Get out, Aish.”
He left her room with the first smile—small, begrudging, but real—that she’d given him in ten years.
September 16
Early the next morning, Sofia and Carmen Louisa sweated at Sofia’s desk while they studied the leaf water potential readings taken the previous night from the Bodega Sofia irrigated vineyards. Several vineyards were dry farmed; they relied entirely on rainwater. But those with irrigation had turned on the misting systems, hoping a light amount of water would keep the not-quite-ripe grapes from dehydrating or raisining. Too much water, and the grapes could bloat. The readings, which measured the water content in the vines’ leaves, told them they were getting close to the point when even irrigating would no longer be an option.
As Sofia wiped the sweat from her forehead in her winery—her supposedly temperature-controlled winery—she feared this heat wave would last beyond that point.
“And the temperature never went below twenty-four degrees last night,” Carmen Louisa said, crushing her wavy hair at her neck. “If we don’t get a break from the heat soon...” She flopped both hands down in her lap.
Sofia had never seen her so hopeless.
Years ago, when her brother was all but hiding in the United States, Carmen Louisa had been the principal grower who’d helped Sofia keep up the people’s flagging faith that he would one day return. Carmen Louisa had led the charge to pull out underperforming Tempranillo vines for Mateo’s new and improved breed, the Tempranillo Vino Real.
Sofia wondered if the faith the grower had always maintained for her prince was flagging for her princess.
“Weather reports predict cooling temperatures in two or three days...” Sofia said lamely.
Carmen Louisa didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Two or three days might be more time than they had. If the grape vines were stressed beyond a certain point, they would abort the fruit just to stay alive.
Sofia had drawn the eyes of the world to the Monte during a potentially disastrous growing season.
“Excellent!” Both Sofia and Carmen Louisa startled as a voice boomed in her office. “You both are here.”
Juan Carlos strolled into Sofia’s glassed-in office, a white hat set jauntily on his silver hair, a pale pink shirt unbuttoned dangerously low. His fingers and wrists were heavy with gold.
The black iron gate bearing her name might as well be invisible for how well it kept him out.
Juan Carlos saw the water readings on her desk. “Worried, señoritas?”
Pijo. Sofia gathered up the notes and tapped them into a neat pile as she held his eyes. “What do you want?”
“To free you from worry.” He flared his bejeweled fingers. “The Consejo will buy your growers’ fruit.”
Sofia stared stonily. “Our fruit isn’t for sale.”
Juan Carlos offered a price per kilo as if Sofia hadn’t spoken. The amount was twice what her winery would purchase the grapes for, which was discounted because the growers would receive a share of the winery’s profits, and significantly more than what any other buyer would pay.
The price was Juan Carlos’s bribe to lure her growers to finally abandon Sofia.
“That offer is only good until the sun goes down.” He looked straight at Carmen Louisa. “Wait much longer and you will have no fruit to sell.”
“My fruit isn’t even ripe.” Carmen Louisa scowled.
Juan Carlos shrugged. “You mix the raisined fruit with the under-ripe fruit,
