LITMIR.BIZ

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with.”

      Becca followed Ryan out the kitchen door. A big brown dog loped up the back steps. He sat down on his haunches, pawed the rough floorboards of the porch and whined.

      “Here you go, boy.” Ryan dumped the scraps into a stainless steel bowl. Wilbur thumped his thick tail hopefully. “Okay, eat.”

      “Wow. You’ve got him trained. My old dog would be all over me.”

      “What sort of dog?”

      “A collie. We lost her to cancer last year.”

      “We? You’re married?”

      Was that disappointment she detected in Ryan’s tone? Becca shook her head. “No. I live with my dad. Kind of weird, I know. But it’s just been me and him forever—my mom died when I was young. It’s his firm that I work for—so we just, um, decided it was simpler to live together. Makes it simpler.”

      Becca hoped she hid her shame at having returned home.

      “Hey, you’re talking to a grown man who still lives with his grandmother.” Ryan shrugged. “I did the single-bachelor deal and the roommate deal and the live-in deal…and, you know, Mee-Maw beats ’em all when it comes to cooking and sharing a roof. Besides, this way, I get to keep an eye on her. It’s been hard on her since she lost Gramps.”

      Again that feeling of kinship sprang up. They had so many things in common that, in other circumstances, they might well have hit it off from the start.

      Becca covered her conflicted emotions by scratching Wilbur behind the ear. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ryan look away from her face to do a discreet check of the rest of her. Her mouth went dry as he surveyed her with unabashed interest.

      “Ahem, well. Where’s that nickel tour you promised?”

      “Right. Let me put this up.”

      She stayed outside while he washed the final dish. Back outside, he rubbed his hands together—working man’s hands, she noted, but with nails neatly trimmed and clean.

      “So…where to?”

      “Let me see this vine everybody’s complaining about.”

      “Sure. But can we take a detour so I can feed the fish in the pond?”

      “No problem. As long as I can get out of here by dark.”

      She fell in step beside him, crossing the backyard to the pond that lay in a pool of golden sunset. “Oh, my. This is gorgeous.”

      “Yeah. It is. The rest of the world can keep its beachfront condos—this is my favorite place on earth. Me, my hammock and Wilbur at my feet.”

      Becca thought about Rooster and his hammock and his similar sentiments. Must be a man thing.

      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.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      “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

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