“And John?”
Aish turned to look at the vines again. “John’s dead,” he said, shutting down the conversation. Devonte had been the one person who’d been cleaning up his mess all year, the one person beside his parents he’d let into his house. He didn’t want to punch him. “John didn’t do anything wrong.”
Aish had wanted to prove it by recording a fourth album that cleaned the muck off Young Son and made John’s legacy gleam. Young Son was a duo, with studio musicians filling in for the other instruments, and all songs were credited as Hamilton/Salinger, with no preference given to who actually wrote them. Aish didn’t plan on changing that for the fourth album, fuck everyone who demanded to know who wrote what when.
Rumors of plagiarism had always circled them like flies. He’d ignored them, drowned them out with the songs in his head and the roars of the fans in his ear. He had relied on Devonte and the label to manage the rumors while he and John made them millions, focused on writing and recording and performing the perfect harmonies that helped define their sound, their voices so similar because of the years spent at each other’s sides.
But when John’s death caused Young Son to go quiet after a decade of ceaseless chart topping, the plagiarism rumors gained volume. Now, several performers—bar bands and street musicians and the kinds of people who’d fling CDs at them as they raced on to their tour bus—were claiming that chunks of their original songs had appeared on Young Son’s albums. The media was pointing at Aish as the person to blame. And the fourth album, the best way to resurrect his career and John’s reputation, was an empty file on his studio computer.
“You know her,” Devonte said. “You think the Princess really has something she can use against you?”
Aish closed his eye to block out this place that was drenched with her. “I thought I knew her. But I don’t. Not now.”
What had he thought when he’d arrived yesterday? He thought she’d heard his songs. He thought she’d seen his tattoos. He thought she knew. She’d made it clear that she didn’t know, hadn’t seen or heard, that although Young Son had hit the number one spot in thirty-eight countries, she’d kept herself in the dark and hadn’t cared whether Aish was alive or dead.
He’d hoped that because everyone else had effortlessly loved him that Sofia had held on to a little love, too. That with the distance of a decade and the understanding that he’d been young and stupid—because who isn’t at twenty-one—she’d forgiven him although he’d never picked up the phone to beg her for it.
He’d believed that after a good talk and a better grovel she would set aside her rules and open her arms and let him rest. Let him get a decent night’s sleep for the first time in a year.
Instead, shame had him tossing and turning in his high-thread-count sheets. For a decade, he realized, he’d clung to the childish idea that Sofia wanted him back.
In reality, she hated him. She hated him and hated that he’d intruded on her life. And if he didn’t stick to the rules keeping her away from him—away from a woman he had an addict’s need to touch—she would use whatever proof she had to destroy him.
His depression over the last year had nothing on the oppressive weight holding him down now.
“Let’s go back,” he said to Devonte.
“What?”
He reached out to tap the driver’s shoulder. “I wanna go back to the—”
Devonte grabbed his hand and shoved it back at him. “No. You gotta show up.”
“I can’t,” Aish said, shaking his head, his shoulders bending. “She fucking hates me and I can’t—”
Devonte pushed him back against the seat, jolting the breath out of Aish. “Yeah, she fucking hates you. And you’re gonna take it because she fucking needs you. If you abandon her, you’ll ruin her. The cameras will leave, the interns will go home, and everyone’s gonna laugh at her for being rejected by a rock star who sleeps with anything with a pulse.
“And you. This’ll be it. The label’s not giving you another chance.”
His last chance to resurrect Young Son. His last chance to rescue his best friend’s reputation. But Sofia...
“I don’t know if I can stand it, man. She looks at me like I’m shit she stepped in. I shouldn’t be here. And I don’t know how’re we supposed to look romantic with her scripts and her rules and...”
Devonte took off his sunglasses. “You let me handle that. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
He’d been good at putting one foot in front of the other—writing his music, singing his songs, smiling his trademark dimpled smile—while he let his parents or Devonte or John clear his way.
Would Devonte still be as loyal to Aish if he knew the truth about John’s death?
Aish shied away from that hammering thought as the Jeep crested a rise and he saw a Mercedes bus parked on the side of the road. Beyond it, the interns were gathered at the edge of a vineyard. The cameras in the press area swung on Aish as the Jeep parked.
Devonte had arranged for their own transportation so Aish could have time to read over the scripts. When they got this morning’s packet, however, they realized an extra ten minutes was not going to be enough time to memorize the choreography Sofia demanded.
Glad he was still wearing his sunglasses, Aish followed Devonte up the gravel road.
Calling the nineteen adults gathered near the vine row “interns” was ridiculous—Aish had been surprised last night when he recognized some of the heavy hitters Sofia had convinced to come to her “internship.” His uncle didn’t have any kids, so it had been Aish that Justin Masamune had explained winemaking to at a young age and Aish who’d gone along to the occasional wine conference between tours and Aish who helped out at Laguna Ridge Winery when he had the time or wasn’t barricaded in his house.
As he joined the group, he nodded at a former-actor-turned-winemaker he’d partied with and an elegant French woman who was the wine director for an international hotel chain. The large, black eyes of the cameras tracked his every move. Sofia’s eyes barely touched him.
She motioned at her mountains and continued to talk. “So it’s these mountains that allowed those ninth-century peasants to believe they could grow grapes here in the Monte del Vino Real. We’re thirty kilometers from the ocean, but the Picos de Europa create a barrier and a bowl of warmth that give the grapes enough sun to ripen.”
Aish caught the winemaker stifling a yawn behind his hand. He glanced around. It had been a late night for some of them—Aish had made a limp appearance at the launch party then escaped to his room—but they all looked a little sleepy.
He returned to watch Sofia and nodded like he’d caught every word.
“Now, as an Esperanza, with the vino that runs through my veins, I believe the quality of the wine begins and ends here. In the vineyard.”
She looked chic as hell in overalls and a long-sleeve T-shirt, her neck wrapped in a turquoise scarf and sunglasses holding back her short hair. She stood in front of a waist-high vine, its thick, gnarled arms hanging with almost-black clusters. For the first time in his life, Aish was seeing the Tempranillo fruit that Sofia used to talk about with the excitement usually saved for a lover.
Right now, though, she sounded as exciting as someone reading a textbook.
“As a winemaker, my duty is to ensure that the calidad of the water, the soil, the sun—the terroir—shines in the glass. So if I must get out of the way, ferment the juice in stainless steel and barely age it, I will. If it needs a year of American oak and a year in the bottle, that’s what I will give it. But I let the grape tell me; I don’t try to boss it around.”
What she said was interesting and smart, the same philosophy of minimal winemaker intervention that he’d learned from his uncle. But she was so...muted. She wasn’t smiling, those river-ripple eyes of hers didn’t flash the way he knew they could. She was working so hard t
o bury the good-time girl that she was mimicking everyone’s most boring aunt.
Devonte nudged him.
“What?” Aish whispered.
Devonte leaned toward him. “She said, ‘Boss it around.’”
Boss it? Oh yeah. “Boss it around” was the cue from his script.
Devonte had promised to talk to Namrita about how stupid—he was going to use unconvincing—these scripts were. Sofia was trying to plan to the second how she and Aish delivered five minutes of #Aishia time for the press and public. Today, Aish was supposed to praise the fruit, laugh at Sofia’s lame joke, then allow her to punch his bicep. His right bicep, as was highlighted in the script.
Everything in Aish shrank away from faking it with her.
Feeling like his balls were in ice water, he called out, “So these are Tempranillo grapes?”
Her wide eyes blinked at him like she hadn’t known he was there. “Yes, the world-famous Monte del Vino Real Tempranillo grapes.” He moved toward her as the script dictated, trying to judge the three feet of space it demanded. “Temprano means early, and these ripen earlier than other grapes, therefore, Tempranillo.”
Impossibly, her voice grew more robotic the closer he got.
He stood with the bush between them, facing their audience. “These vines look really old.”
“Yes, they are.” They sounded like pro athletes in an insurance commercial. “They are the oldest in the Monte. They were planted by Carmen Louisa’s great-great-great-great...”
She looked to the side where Carmen Louisa stood in the rows with other locals. The woman who’d glared daggers at him yesterday shouted out, “¡Dos ‘greats’ más!”
The interns gave an actual real laugh.
“As you can see, the yield on these vines are incredibly low,” Sofia continued. “But the quality is high. These are the grapes I choose when I need to add a bit more sabor to a blend. When I need it to pack a Monte punch.”
A memory had Aish rubbing his bicep. “You don’t need any help with your Monte punch,” he said, winging it. “I still have ten-year-old bruises.”
It was supposed to be Sofia who joked and Aish who responded, but the opportunity was there and she seemed to recognize it, so she laughed at the bad joke along with their audience and then leaned over to lightly tap his right bicep, her fist touching his skin in his short-sleeve T-shirt.
“As long as you behave, I won’t have to remind you,” she said with a swagger. It was convincing, drawing a laugh from a cameraman, and reminded him of the girl he knew. But she was looking over his shoulder, not directly at him.
She couldn’t even stand to look at him.
“One question, though,” he said.
The script hadn’t called for another question from him. The joke and touch was to be their #Aishia time for the day.
“The Monte’s regulatory board has got pretty strict rules about how you’re supposed to make wine,” he said. “You’re supposed to use a certain blend of grapes, age them only in French oak, and age them in barrel and bottle for a specific length of time.”
He took off his sunglasses and used the opportunity to really look at her. He let his eyes soak in her strong chin, those wide soft lips, that perky nose, and her big dark eyes aimed over his shoulder. He let himself stare, even if she wouldn’t. “Why are you so intent on breaking them?”
“The old rules no longer allow for wines that meet modern needs.” She seethed behind her set smile. “We have better-developed palates, world competition, and climate change affecting the grapes. Let’s just say that the Consejo Regulador del Monte and I have agreed to disagree.”
“But it’s more than that,” Manon Boucher, the French hotel executive, spoke up. Others murmured behind her. “They won’t give you their stamp. Without that stamp, you can’t export your wine. If you can’t export it, I can’t buy it.”
The round eye of the camera recorded it all.
“Currently, the Consejo has expressed some reservations about my intention to forge a new way.” He wondered if anyone else could tell she was barely clinging to her smile. “I believe that in time, they will see the wisdom of my plan.”
She said so many words while saying nothing. These were nineteen knowledgeable wine folk with valid concerns. Sofia couldn’t gloss over their skepticism with idyllic storytelling.
Aish pushed her. “So you think you know better than people older than you, who’ve been making wine longer than you, who are drawing on generations of winemaking experience?”
“Yes,” she flared. Now he had her full attention. “Tradition has bred complacency and laziness. The entire world has changed but the Monte is stuck in amber. By letting the grapes lead, not the rules, I will create wines that people crave to drink.” Her eyes promised him fire and brimstone. “The Consejo can keep their stamps when my wines are streaming out of here in the suitcases of people desperate to get their hands on it.” She snapped her fingers in the air.
“¡Eso!” yelled one of the locals as her people hooted and clapped, breaking the tension and causing the group to laugh. The journalists got every word. Sofia dropped her glare from Aish, and he felt like a cloud had moved over the sun.
In her natural state, Sofia was Spanish to her core, full of bravado and hyperbole. Playing the restrained instructor wasn’t her gig. And as an expert in reading a crowd, Aish knew the act wasn’t going to change her interns from skeptics to believers. Only her passion would do that.
But if he kept pissing her off to prompt it out of her, no one was going to buy #Aishia. So he stepped close to her, fuck the three feet of space, and reached for her arm. It was warm through her sleeve, strong although he could wrap his entire hand around it, and he stroked down until he lightly gripped her hand. Folded his big fingers through her delicate ones.
“Sofia. Of course, you know better than a bunch of old guys,” he murmured to her bent head, intimate but loud enough that the others could hear. “But I had to give you crap about it.” The sun had warmed her hair and he wanted to bury his nose in its cinnamon-sweet scent.
When she punched him in the right arm this time, there was nothing light about it. “Just you wait, Mr. Salinger,” she said, her grin manic as she looked up at him. “Revenge will be sweet.”
She dropped his hand and moved away from him, looking again to the interns. “Today, we’re going to perform a green harvest. We will clip some of the underperforming clusters so the remaining clusters receive more of the vines’ energy and nutrients. Each of you will be working with one of our vineyard crew...”
Her people paired with an intern and she handed them gloves and hand clippers. Carmen Louisa appeared at Aish’s side. “You’re with me, señor.” She didn’t look happy about it.
Aish wasn’t happy about the Timberlands, tight jeans, and skintight white T-shirt he wore, clothes he’d let the stylist put on him without thinking about spending hours bending over in a vineyard.
Devonte joined him as they followed her to a row. “All you had to do was stick to the script, man,” he whispered.
“I know but...they’re not buying what she’s selling. You see that, right?”
Devonte pointed a finger at Aish. “Whatever steam’s building in your head, stop. We’ve got a plan; we’re gonna stick with it.”
He flipped around and walked toward the Jeep, where he was going to sit in the shade and work his phone. Aish adjusted his balls in his ridiculous jeans and wished he could join him.
As he slipped on the gloves, a frisson went up his spine. He looked up and saw Sofia watching him from another row. Even from here, he could see that little troubled line she used to get between her eyebrows. Her quick brain was working on a problem she hadn’t figured out.
That she was cogitating him gave him his first spark of hope since he’d stepped into Spain.
Aish began clipping off the grape cl
usters with too much shatter—fruit that didn’t fertilize—or that had a predominance of unripe fruit. Carmen Louisa watched him for a minute, gave a huff, and then left him alone.
Aish distracted himself from the growing burn on his pale arms and the discomfort in his too tight jeans with the spark growing in his chest.
He could help her. He’d come here to help her. Yeah, he’d ignored a couple of her rules and, yeah, she might make him pay. But he knew how to make a crowd love you—he’d been practicing it all his life—and he could put that knowledge to use helping her, even if she was too goddamn stubborn to realize she needed the help.
September 7
Sitting at her desk in the winery’s glassed-in office, Sofia watched the popular entertainment news channel on mute, her stomach in knots since Namrita had run in twenty minutes ago with a reporter on the phone. The reporter had waited until the last second to call; Sofia had given the hijo de puta a firm “No comment.”
Namrita and Carmen Louisa watched from behind her. The grower squeezed Sofia’s shoulder when Disgruntled Interns Threaten to Abandon Party-Princess’s Winery appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Sofia turned up the volume.
“...felt like they’d received a golden ticket when they were invited to front-row seats with free wine to watch this generation’s hottest love story unfold,” said the smarmy American reporter in his overtight suit. “But after five days of backbreaking labor, average wine, and the relationship between the down-on-his-luck rock star and the petulant princess showing as much passion as roadkill, some interns are complaining that this party in the mountains feels more like purgatory. There’s talk privately among the group about going home.”
Namrita hadn’t heard any such talk until the reporter called. She’d been monitoring the interns’ social media accounts and most had seemed okay with the work and complimentary of the wine.
Hate Crush (Filthy Rich) Page 6
