“I...” She was stunned. Shocked. Whiplashed. Everything she ever wanted was being laid out for her on a platter. All she had to do was reach for it.
He squeezed her hands like he could get their bones to meld. “I fucked up, Sofia, and I’m so, so sorry. I’m such a fucking idiot for letting her put a chink in your trust.” He reared up and pulled her forward, nestled as close as he could get to her without being inside her, cradled her face in his hands and trapped her eyes. The catcalling was a distant, uninteresting buzz.
“Nothing like that’ll ever happen again. You can trust me, Sofia, you know you can. I’ll never let down my estrella. I need your light. Say you’ll come to LA with me. Be with me. Stay with me. I need you.”
“Why doesn’t he love me?” her mother had cried.
Aish loved her, proved it by defying his best friend and this manager, and Sofia could put aside the idea that her mother’s tragic story was a blueprint for her own. He was going to fuck up. So was she.
But that didn’t mean she had to reject the dream he was offering her.
Trembling, speechless, she nodded and placed her hands on his glass-cutting cheekbones, pressed her lips to his, and accepted Aish Salinger and the promise of his constant love.
September 26
Sofia was surprised and impressed by the amount of sex they were able to squeeze in amid the million and one tasks of crush. When she’d spent half the day side-eyeing Aish as he performed punch-down, his muscles flexing as he used the metal, flat-headed tool to break up the cap of skins and seeds that formed at the top of fermenting juice, she’d eventually had to grab him and shove him behind a tank, strip off just enough grape-streaked clothes to access the needy parts, and plant hands over his eyes and mouth as she rode him hard. When they’d been hauling barrels out of the cooperage, she’d suddenly found herself in a dark corner, one small window letting a thin beam of light into the stone-walled room, bent over a barrel as Aish tasted then took her from behind. She’d felt pummeled by the scent of toasted wood and ocean-soaked man.
And at night, whenever nights happened for them, sometimes at 2 a.m. and sometimes just before dawn and sometimes seconds after the sun slipped away, they’d be in her bed, the countdown clock to the end of the month their excuse for attacking each other again and again, even when it wasn’t attack, even when being with Aish was slow and delicate and enormous. She traced him like she was blind, smoothing over the planes and outline of him to record in her mind’s eye something more perfect than what he could ever be in the light.
Something more permanent.
He murmured and kissed and held and gripped her and tried so, so hard to stay in her bed until the bright light of morning. Even if she fell asleep against him—sweaty, euphoric, once just passing out on top of him while he was still inside her—some preservative sense always had her waking up and kicking him out before morning fully arrived. His gorgeous body was a ghost of sleek muscles and indecipherable tattoo ink as he grumbled and gathered his clothes.
Her decision to allow them to have at each other was paying off in more than mind-blowing orgasms. #Aishia was a sensation. Happy, flirty pictures of the two of them painted every available corner of the Internet. The servers of a popular fanfiction site had crashed after they’d received a torrent of stories focused on Aish and Sofia happily-ever-afters. An American cable network had announced an unauthorized biopic about their long road to love.
More importantly, Bodega Sofia’s hospedería was now booked for a year after their spring launch.
In a matter of a few days, days when Sofia’s morality or talents or goals hadn’t changed, fickle world opinion aligned on her side and dragged the wine world along with it. Namrita was busy organizing late fall private tours, hospedería stays, and Sofia interviews for some of the world’s top wine writers and producers. A Burgundian winemaker Sofia had known for years, who’d been too busy to take her call a couple of months ago, told Wine Spectator that Bodega Sofia was a textbook example of how to lead with innovation while honoring tradition. Letting bygones be bygones, Sofia had sent him a quick email promising him a case of their first official vintage.
All this because she’d decided to let Aish bone her whenever their little rabbit hearts desired.
She’d muttered that once, her forehead resting on the sleek skin of his pelvis, the epic blow job she’d been giving interrupted by the urgent and repeated ring of her phone and the five-minute conversation she had to have with a New York Times reporter before they went to press. Aish collapsed laughing to the seat of the Bodega Sofia truck, parked in the large, dark garage where they’d hid, and Sofia found him so irresistible that she blew him until he begged.
He never once brought up the fact that he’d been right about the potential of #Aishia if they worked together. She never once mentioned how intolerable the thought of #Aishia had been.
People didn’t “know” they were fucking. Namrita had coached during the worst of times to stay coyly mum about the specifics of their relationship, and she doubled down on that advice now. But they weren’t doing much to hide their fascination with each other. Why should they? They were two consenting adults. Even now, as Sofia stood in the ancient courtyard of El Castillo, their family’s six-hundred-year-old castle designed by Moorish architects as a gift from Queen Isabella, Sofia knew their behavior was drawing the
