She’d wanted to be needed. And now she was.
Her kingdom needed her to spend thirty days faking a romance with a man who ripped out her heart.
She mentally embraced the cold and the dark of her cellar, the heart of her dreams and her kingdom’s hopes, and let it suffocate her panic. Let it make her numb.
She lifted her chin. “Vale,” she said. “Tell him to be here the first of September.” She gathered herself and focused the power of her royal gaze on Namrita. “But he is going to sign off on some rules before he steps a foot into my kingdom.”
Knowing when to cede ground, Namrita nodded.
When Sofia went back upstairs to the sunlit winery, to the clatter and dust of the workmen wrapping up construction before the launch in two weeks, she would throw herself into unraveling this mess. In an hour, she promised Carmen Louisa. Just one more hour, and then she’d be up.
She wanted to be alone in the dark and the cool. She wanted to surround herself with her wines, the only children she’d ever have.
Protected by her mountain’s rock walls and surrounded by the only thing that would ever truly need her, she would shore up her defenses and renew her most important vow: to never fall in love again.
September 1
Aish Salinger sat in the back seat of a black Mercedes sedan that crawled down a narrow cobblestone street in the Monte del Vino Real. The cheering villagers and fans packing the lane made it impossible to go any faster. He couldn’t even see the famous mountains Sofia had talked about because of the bodies pressed against the car.
He squeezed his forearm and gripped his jaw against telling the driver to move his ass. It wasn’t the driver’s fault Aish was late.
“She’s gonna be so pissed,” he muttered to the darkly tinted window. All he could see through his Ray-Bans were a press of bellies, bodies, and smooshed faces.
“She’s not going to fall to her knees and ask you to marry her,” his manager said in his Brooklyn-tinged accent.
Aish turned on him and glowered. Devonte Mason, their manager since Young Son’s first album, was built like a linebacker and Aish, at six-foot-four, found few back seats comfortable. With his elbows up in Aish’s space as he worked his phone, Devonte was too close, too calm, while Aish was a nervous fucking wreck.
He went to run his fingers through his hair when he remembered, at the tacky feel of gel and product, how long the stylist had worked on it. Fuck. He was a year out of practice with this shit.
“Really wish you hadn’t brought so many people, man,” he grumbled, wiping his hand on his jeans and thinking about the entourage of stylists, makeup people, and wardrobe crew they’d left in the village.
“And I wish you’d gone outside in the last six months,” Devonte said, his thumbs still flying over the screen. “You look like shit; you need that many people to clean you up.”
Would Sofia think he looked like shit?
It was the entourage Aish had been trying to escape yesterday when he rented a car after landing in Madrid instead of piling into the private plane with everyone. Google Maps had insisted it was only going to be “4 h 46 min” from Madrid to the Monte, giving him a chance to get his bearings and clear his head before arriving in Sofia’s kingdom.
But after making a pit stop and grabbing a coffee in a village, he’d felt awful, like he had food poisoning although he’d barely eaten, like he was still suffering from the aftereffects of that evil vegetable gin. He’d had to pull over on the winding mountain roads—and over, and over—until he’d startled awake this morning with goats bleating at the rented Porsche. So instead of arriving yesterday, attempting a night of sleep, and then meeting with Sofia and her people this morning, he’d screeched into the Monte an hour ago, unwashed, nauseous and bleary eyed.
Now Aish was late and apparently looked like shit for Sofia’s big day.
He aimed his frustration at the one person who didn’t deserve it. “I don’t need your crap right now,” he muttered. “Lie to me and tell me I’m pretty.”
Devonte snorted and finally put his phone down. He narrowed his eyes at Aish. “You’re a perfect meat of a man,” he said, his voice going Barry White deep.
Aish rolled his eyes and looked out the widow again. “Fuck you.”
Devonte tsked through his teeth. “You don’t pay me to blow hot air up your ass. You pay me to tell you the truth.”
In the last year, Devonte had been the grim reaper of truth telling. He’d been the one who’d banged on Aish’s hotel suite door in Memphis and peeled him out from under a pile of naked bodies to show him John’s suicide note. It was Devonte who’d driven them down to the park by the Mississippi River in a panic, who’d first seen the pile of clothes. Over the next months, it was Devonte who told him, in the closed-curtain dimness of Aish’s living room, about the growing plagiarism allegations and the rumors that Aish was responsible for John’s death and that John—six months after he left a note—was legally declared dead although a body had never been found.
That shitshow in the desert was the first time Aish had left his house since John’s casketless funeral. Devonte had ordered him to the festival as a last-ditch effort to drum up some positive publicity before the label, worried about a threatening rain of lawsuits, terminated his contract. Aish had promised for months to deliver Young Son’s fourth album, an album that he hoped would wipe away the rumors and allegations, renew Aish’s career and John’s reputation, and firmly plant Young Son among the rock ’n’ roll stars.
Problem was, down in his basement studio, Aish had barely been
