LITMIR.BIZ

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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?”

      Some of Ryan’s earlier disgust came back. “Don’t you guys even bother to read the insurance claim forms? Or are you hoping I’ll trip myself up so you can stamp Denied on my claim and then go on your merry little way?”

      Ouch. His tone had hurt. She was about to snap back with something like “Hey, easy, buddy, I’m on your side,” but she stopped herself.

      Don’t assume that Ryan is going to treat you like he knows you. To him, you’re the bad guy, remember?

      Becca struggled for professionalism. “Yes, I have those forms—I’ve read them, I assure you. But I think it’s best if you just think of me as a glorified insurance adjuster. I’m here to help, okay? The computer’s flagged this and other similar claims for a variety of reasons. It’s in your best interest to help me so that this case is resolved quickly. Then Ag-Sure’s happy, you get your money and you’re happy, too. After all, if everything’s on the up-and-up, you’ve got nothing to hide, right?”

      The color heightened in Ryan’s face, and he glanced away. Damn. She wished he hadn’t done that. It set all her alarm bells clanging.

      Maybe he was still just mad.

      “Right, Ryan?”

      His nod lacked a certain ringing conviction of innocence. It troubled her that he didn’t enthusiastically say “Of course I’ve got nothing to hide.” But she ignored her worries and focused on doing her job.

      Because doing her job would be what saved both of them.

      “So, then, how you can help is to tell me, to the best of your knowledge, the time line, how this vine came to be.”

      “I don’t know how this ‘came to be,’” Ryan growled at her. “All I know—all I can tell you—is that one morning, I got up to come plow my cotton and I saw this. Do you realize that I can’t even plow it? Not this section, anyway. The vines are too thick. They wrap around the implements and the discs, and I spend half a day getting them unwrapped. Forget harvesting this in any sort of mechanized way—even the good plants that aren’t affected—the vines are too close and mess up the harvester.”

      But Becca had already started counting off rows…and she realized something. The knots of snakelike vines were in a pattern. Several rows would be untouched, and then one lone row or two would be taken over by the dodder. Then it would repeat—within the distance of the common width of plows.

      She looked from the field to Ryan. No. It couldn’t be. But another count of the rows confirmed that the pattern was too consistent to be natural.

      There’s got to be an explanation for this.

      But that desperate thought vied with another.

      Face it. He’s hiding something—and not very well.

      Becca disguised her suspicion by taking pictures. She stepped back, steadied her pen on her pad and pressed on. “I have to admit, I know zip about this plant except what I could find online. And what the insurance company provided for me.”

      “Right, of course. I’m sure they were most helpful.”

      “It’s your chance, Ryan. Tell me.”

      Becca willed him to come clean with whatever was so obviously on his mind. She could see something warring within him, knew instantly that he was experiencing the same inner debate she’d had earlier.

      He’d tell Sunny.

      For an instant, it was on the tip of her tongue to tell him the truth. Just blurt it out and see if he’d take her into his confidence. But then, maybe it was best that Ryan didn’t know who she was. The insurance company would yank her and her dad off the case for sure, and then what sort of investigator would Ryan get?

      No. Better to do it the way she’d planned.

      He’d come to a decision, she could see that.

      “From my research—and my experience, unfortunately—this stuff grows at, like, six inches a day. It has no roots, no leaves—doesn’t need ’em. It just attaches itself to a handy plant and sucks it dry. Then it spreads to the next plant. And the next. I have no clue how it got here. A bit of a vine could have dropped here, could have been blown in by the wind from some of these other farms. It could have been trucked in. It just happened to drop in a spot, sniffed out a plant it liked and boom—suddenly I’m out of business. Bad luck. Bad timing.”

      “So herbicides won’t work?”

      “Sure. Kill the host plant and you kill the dodder vine. You don’t make anything on cotton even when the rains come when they’re supposed to and the weeds are the everyday garden variety. I swear to God, though, this is the scariest thing to hit cotton since the boll weevil.”

      Becca’s headache came back full force. She realized that darkness had crept up on them when Wilbur

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