Cynthia Reese - Where Love Grows

But the peaceful stillness of the pond stirred some understanding in even her restless soul. She finally got what Rooster had meant by needing a little solitude—and sitting still while you had it instead of racing down a highway.

“I don’t see any hammock.”

“It’s over there. Underneath the willow tree near the dock. See the willow that’s arched over? My cousins and I—”

Becca’s breath caught. She didn’t hear the rest of what he said. She couldn’t, not over the thump of her heart. She stood stock-still and saw afresh the pond. The house. The dog who scarfed up table scraps.

She looked at Ryan, who stared back at her with a worried expression on his face. Ryan. The target of her investigation.

No.

Rooster.

“ARE YOU—DO YOU NEED to sit down? You look like you’re going to pass out. You’re not a diabetic, are you?”

Ryan’s words, as well as his hand on her shoulder, yanked her out of the swirling maelstrom of her thoughts.

Tell him. Tell him you know him.

No, you could be wrong. You’d sound like a nut, or a loser—a loser who has to go online to find someone to talk to and then doesn’t even know his name. Wait. Be sure.

But Becca was sure, to-her-bones sure. She smiled at him in what she hoped was a reassuring way. “Uh, headache. I guess…the sunset?”

“Migraine?” Ryan made sympathetic noises that triggered a flood of guilt within Becca.

“My camera…I forgot it. I’ll just…walk back and get it, okay? It’s in my car.”

He would have followed her, but she waved him off. “You feed the fish. I’ll get my camera…and some medicine.”

As if to make her words true, a headache blistered forth like a blacksmith’s red-hot poker. Whether it was stress or punishment for the lie, Becca couldn’t say, but she was grateful for the time alone.

At the car, she fumbled for her camera. The bag’s heft felt dear and familiar in her hand. The camera had been one of the small things she’d managed to salvage after the debacle at the magazine. Becca pushed aside resentful thoughts of libel suits and searched for some quick-dissolve pain medicine.

She sat in the driver’s seat and closed her eyes, praying that the medicine would kick in before the pain settled for a long stay. The inner debate raged on. With some force, she managed to tick off the pros and cons of telling him the truth.

The biggest reason was her gut. It had never steered her wrong before—well, save one biggie in the form of her countersuit, but in the end, even a jury of her peers had said her gut had been right.

Maybe, though, her instinct to blurt out “Are you Rooster?” came from her distaste of lying, even by omission. Deceit never felt right to Becca.

But this situation was different.

You don’t know if it’s Rooster. You have no way to verify it, except for some story about a willow tree. He can’t have been the only one who’s ever put a hammock under a willow tree.

Yeah, right. And just what did her dad say about coincidence?

Her dad. Becca’s stomach did a nauseating roll and twist the way it did whenever she’d topped a roller coaster and prepared for the final gut-wrenching loops. Her father would kill her. Becca could imagine the scathing words her dad would say to her if she trotted back to Atlanta to tell him some sorry tale about how she knew Ryan MacIntosh was innocent because he’d turned out to be her online buddy.

Knowing Dad, he’d say it was no coincidence at all. He’d swear Ryan had targeted Becca.

The possibility niggled at her. It would explain how Becca, who never managed to win a door prize or a lottery ticket or even a church bingo game, had hit the trifecta of coincidence.

But, no. She had six months of correspondence with Ryan, anonymous correspondence. She knew him—knew him how it counted. He couldn’t be scamming her. He couldn’t be mixed up in some complicated conspiracy to defraud the government and Ag-Sure.

Could he?

Okay, so she couldn’t say anything to her dad. She had to go forward with the investigation if she wanted to keep her job.

So…

Maybe there was no fraud. Maybe it was some wildly improbable, but still true, story about a vine that had somehow gotten transported from Texas to Georgia. Truth was stranger than fiction, right?

All she had to do was prove that the story was true. All she had to do was figure out how it got there. Then not even the insurance company could fault her.

If she did it quickly enough, Ryan wouldn’t have to know now. Plenty of time to help him anonymously. Plenty of time to tell him later. He’d understand about conflicts of interest.

The tremulous panic within her subsided as she settled on a course of action. Becca drew in an easier breath. She could do this.

A tapping at the window made her jump. She opened her eyes to see a concerned Ryan crouched down, peering at her.

Right. Well, checking on her tallied with the considerate Rooster she knew.

She gripped her camera bag and opened the car door. Time to get the show on the road.

“I got worried,” Ryan told her. “You looked so…”

“Thanks. I took some medicine. It happens, these headaches. I get stressed out and boom. A good night’s sleep will put me to rights. Fish fed?”

“Yeah. Um…you have some different shoes? Those aren’t exactly…”

She glanced down at her leather slip-ons. “Oh. Right. Let me change into the sneakers I brought.”

Ryan dropped onto the grass while he waited for her to swap shoes. Wilbur nosed up to him and flopped down beside him. She watched the two of them roughhouse while she tied her last sneaker. It felt odd to see Rooster in the flesh, see him do the things he’d described in what he’d supposed was an anonymous way. They’d revealed more than they’d realized about each other.

The trick, of course, was not to inadvertently reveal that she was Sunny. That would be a devil of a dilemma. After all, hadn’t she let Rooster—Ryan, she corrected herself—into her soul? Wouldn’t it be as easy for him to spot her as it had been for her?

Becca gave an extra hard yank to her shoelaces and stood up. The quicker she could stamp Closed on this case, the better. “Let’s take a gander at this vine, shall we?”

A FEW MINUTES LATER she was jouncing up and down behind Ryan on the back of a four-wheeler, with Wilbur running alongside them. Rows of cotton slid past them as they headed into the field.

She tightened her grip on Ryan to avoid being bounced off when they hit a rut—and was rewarded with the feel of rock-solid abs.

“Sorry!” he yelled over the roar of the two-cycle engine. “Didn’t see that one.”

His scent—a mix of soap and water, her favorite laundry detergent and the faintest trace of some sort of drive-a-woman-wild aftershave—tickled her senses. She inhaled again, this time deliberately. This was what she’d been missing all these months. Too bad e-mails didn’t come with a scratch-n-sniff option; she would have discarded the blanket of anonymity months ago if she’d had a hit of this.

All too soon, Becca felt the four-wheeler slow and then stop. She climbed off the machine, tried to tell herself that the unrelenting vibrations were what had made her knees weak.

Becca couldn’t convince herself of that one.

“Well. There it is. The giant Asian dodder vine. Ugly critter, isn’t it?”

It was ugly. Thick vines with no leaves strangled the cotton. To Becca, the vines looked like nothing so much as some sort of monochromatic python.

She fumbled in her camera bag for her reporter’s notebook and a pencil, old habits so ingrained that she never could get accustomed to using anything else. “Right. So how long has this been here? When did it first show up?”