Prologue: The Fault Line
Julian
The ledger sat open on my desk, the columns of ink demanding a focus I no longer possessed. I should have been calculating the yield for the upcoming harvest or the projected cost of the new irrigation lines. I should have been the man my father was, a man whose mind was a fortress of soil, stone, and cold, hard facts.
Instead, I was a man fighting a losing war against my own skin.
“She’s not giving me enough, Julian. She’s dragging her feet. Literally.”
Marcello Rossi stood by the window, his silhouette sharp against the blinding afternoon light. He hadn’t come to talk about the shared water rights; he had come to complain about his daughter.
“She’s twenty, Marcello,” I said, my voice like gravel. I didn’t look up. I couldn’t risk him seeing the dark, distracted glaze in my eyes. “She’s allowed to have a bad week.”
“It’s not a week. It’s months,” Marcello snapped, turning to pace the small terracotta tiles. The rhythmic click-clack of his boots grated against my nerves. “She’s lost her hunger. And now, she’s started complaining about a twinge in her knee every time I push her. It’s an excuse, Julian. A way to avoid the work.”
I gripped my pen until my knuckles turned white, the plastic casing creaking under the pressure. I didn’t want to hear her name. I didn’t want to think about her knees, or her legs, or the way her body was failing her father’s expectations while it was busy ruining my life.
Because every time he spoke, my mind dragged me back to the village square.
I had been standing near the bakery yesterday, the scent of warm yeast and dust heavy in the air, when I saw her. She hadn’t noticed me. She’d been walking toward the fountain, and the way she moved... it was a provocation.
The cotton of that illegally thin summer dress clung to her damp skin, swaying with the heavy, rhythmic roll of her hips. She wasn’t the scrawny, knobby-kneed kid I remembered. She was a woman who knew exactly how she was built, every curve polished by the Mediterranean sun.
I had watched her for three seconds too long.
A surge of heat had flooded my blood, a primal, territorial throb that had nothing to do with the sun. Right there in the middle of the street, with the priest and the grocer ten feet away, my body had betrayed me. I’d felt the sudden, agonizing stretch of my denim as I went rock-hard just watching the sunlight catch the backs of her thighs through that translucent fabric.
“Anyway,” Marcello said, his voice dropping into a register of defeat. “Things are... tight, Julian. Lucia is losing hours at the clinic. We’re struggling to keep up with the scouting camp fees. I don’t want Isla to miss the chance to be seen because I can’t balance the books.”
He looked at me with a desperate kind of hope.
“I was wondering if you had extra work up here. Just for a couple of months. Through the harvest. If she worked for you, she could earn the rest of what we need.”
The air in the room suddenly turned to fire. The thought of her up here, under my roof, moving through my groves every single day, was a catastrophe in the making.
Even now, with her father three feet away, the mere image of her had me straining against my fly again. I could almost see her out there, imagining her lithe body weaving between the ancient, gnarled trees, her sun-streaked hair flowing in the ridge wind like raw silk. I imagined the sweat bead rolling down the valley of her spine as she reached for the high branches.
“You want her working at Terra Rossa?” I asked. My voice was dangerously level as I shifted behind the desk, hiding the shameful evidence of my arousal.
“She respects you,” Marcello said, oblivious. “Maybe your discipline will rub off on her. Put some steel back in her spine. What do you say?”
I looked down at the ledger, then out at the silver-green leaves of the olives. I should say no. I should protect the fortress I had spent ten years building. I should protect her from the predator currently wearing her father’s friend’s face.
“Send her up on Monday,” I heard myself say. The words felt like a death sentence.
“Thank you, Julian.” Marcello headed for the door, clapping me on the shoulder. “Remind her what’s at stake.”
The second the door clicked shut, I shoved my chair back with a violent scrape. I stood at the window, watching Marcello’s truck disappear down the dirt track, and let out a breath that felt like a snarl.
The ache was unbearable, a hot, pulsing throb that demanded release. I reached down, my hand closing over the rigid, suffocating length of myself through the heavy denim of my work trousers. I squeezed, a rough, desperate grip meant to punish the sensation as much as soothe it, but the friction only made my head swim.
I’m thirty-eight years old. I’ve known her father since I was a boy. I remember her at six, crying over a scraped elbow and reaching for my hand.
To feel this raw, animal hunger, to be standing in my father’s study, gripping myself like a feral beast just thinking about the scent of her skin, it was a goddamn sickness.
I closed my eyes, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, listening to the frantic thud of my heart. The interior of my mind, that cold, orderly place, was ashes.
I was a man starving in the middle of his own harvest, and I had just invited the famine to live in my house.
