All Chapters of TEMPTING THE DEFENDER : Chapter 31 - Chapter 34

The air was still as Alessandro stepped off the porch. He was dressed in his rugged hunting jacket, a pair of worn boots, and his old canvas satchel. To Caro, who was watching from the kitchen window while stirring a pot of porridge for Leo, he looked like any other Tuscan farmer heading out to cull the boars that had been rooting through the vineyards."I’ll be back by midday," he called out, his voice a perfect mask of casual calm. "I saw fresh tracks in the north ravine. I don't want them getting close to the vegetable garden.""Be careful," Caro replied, her eyes lingering on him a second too long. "The mist is thick today. Don't lose your footing on the ridge.""I know these hills, cara," he said, and for a moment, he let himself look at her. He memorized the way the morning light caught the stray curls around her face. He held that image in his mind like a talisman, then turned and walked into the grey.As soon as he cleared the sightline of the house, Alessandro’s posture shift

The harvest was only weeks away, and the air in the valley had turned thick and heavy, charged with the electric stillness that precedes a late-summer downpour. All day, Alessandro and Caro had worked side-by-side, moving through the rows of the vegetable garden to gather the last of the tomatoes before the clouds broke. There was a frantic, primal energy to the day—the kind that comes when the earth is about to be drenched. By evening, the first fat drops of rain began to pelt the terracotta roof. Leo was fast asleep, exhausted from "helping" in the fields, and Beatrice lay in her cherry-wood cradle, lulled into a deep slumber by the rhythmic drumming of the storm against the shutters. The house was dark, lit only by the occasional flash of lightning that illuminated the kitchen in stark, silver bursts. Alessandro stood by the back door, his chest bare, watching the deluge. He was covered in the dust of the day, his muscles aching with a satisfying fatigue. Caro approached him fr