Where Love Grows

“Ma’am?”

“Fire. Hate the stuff. Lost everything we had to a fire when I was a kid. An old cookstove messed up—ain’t nothing sadder than to stand outside in the middle of the night and see every stick of furniture, every scrap you own, everything you worked for…gone. Makes me the pack rat I am, I guess.

“Go on out there, will you? Make sure he banks that fire. I know he will, mind you, but just humor a silly old woman.”

Becca crossed the backyard to the bonfire—and stopped in her tracks.

Ryan had stripped off his T-shirt and laid it aside. The fire lit the planes of his chest, highlighting well-developed pecs and a firm, flat abdomen.

His skin was damp from his exertion and the heat of the flames licking over the dodder vine at his feet. Ryan seemed intense, focused, apparently unfazed by the smoke and the crackle of sparks that shot up from the wood into the dark night sky.

The sight made Becca’s belly flutter. She tried to quench the butterflies with a good dose of common sense.

First she’d mooned over his scent and now she was ogling him? Her dad would yank her off this case so fast…She knew better than to get involved with the target of an investigation.

But you’re already involved.

“Mee-Maw said to be sure to bank the fire.”

Ryan jumped. “Damn. You scared me. I figured you’d gone by now.”

“No. You know, I should have gotten pictures of the vine before you burned the plants.”

“Yeah, well, chalk that up to my thinking it was more important to get a harvest than an insurance settlement.”

Or was it to cover something up? She silenced her dad’s whisper in her head, but it was there for a reason. While she’d always prided herself on being objective and open-minded, she had enough of her father in her to avoid being led down many a primrose path.

“Ryan…” Becca fought the urge to touch him. It was so hard to act as though she’d only just met him. “Before I close out this investigation, I’m going to need detailed time lines, to establish where this vine first popped up, how it spread. Your claim forms are pretty scant on details like that.”

“You see how it spreads!” He scowled and gave the fire a jab with his rake, sending off an explosion of sparks. “It’s like damn toadstools—one day it’s not there, the next, it’s strangling half a garden. Fill out all the blanks and check all the boxes you want to on your forms, but it all comes down to the same thing—I don’t know how it got here. I can speculate, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m fighting something here—we’re all fighting something—that could wreck agriculture in this part of the state.”

“Whoa. A bit of hyperbole, isn’t it?”

“No. Another farmer who has this stuff in his fields says it’s resistant to the one herbicide that ought to kill it.”

“I thought you said if you kill the host plant—”

“If you starve it out, sure. But in his case, the vine just found something else to latch on to. Look—I know insurance companies don’t want to pay out claims. Hell, they’ve got shareholders, and I know whose tune those insurance execs are marching to. But rather than send us someone to investigate us—” this he made sound like the basest of insults “—why not send us someone to solve the problem?”

“And who might that be? What experts have you called in?”

Again, Ryan gave her a look that screamed his discomfiture.

“Well? Surely you—”

“I’ve put in calls to every expert that might have the faintest clue of how to get rid of this vine. They all say the same thing—drag a firebreak around the affected acreage, throw in a match and watch what little profit you have left go up in smoke. Believe me, I’ve been tempted. And tonight…tonight I’m past temptation.”

“No! You can’t do that. It could be evidence—”

“See? You do think I’m running a scam.”

“Evidence can prove you either guilty or innocent, Ryan. But if you destroy it, you destroy any chance of me helping you.”

“You? Helping me? Why would a hired gun from Ag-Sure want to help me?”

Frustrated, she ground her teeth. “I am not a hired gun. The outcome of this case—at least from my point of view—is not a foregone conclusion, okay? But you’re being so damned paranoid that you’re sure as hell acting guilty.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m just frustrated, okay?”

“Okay. But believe me. I’m here to help. Surely you can’t have tapped out all the experts on this sort of problem.”

The flicker of hope in his face died, and the corners of his mouth twisted. “You might as well know since you’ll find out sooner or later—if you don’t already know.”

“What?”

The bonfire crackled as the flames fed on the pine resin. Bits of ash rained down on Becca and Ryan, but she waited. She tried to read anything but misery in Ryan’s expression.

She couldn’t.

“One of my last projects with the ag chemical company I worked for was on a farm in Texas with this same dodder vine. I didn’t have a clue what to do to help them, and neither did anybody else. And I damn sure,” he bit out, “don’t know how to get rid of it here. I was there, on-site, equipped with means and opportunity to bring the vine east. So, you still think this case has no foregone conclusion?”

Sunny_76@yoohoomail.com: Have you ever wondered about me? I mean, what I look like, who I am? If you’ve ever passed me on the street?

Rooster@yoohoomail.com: I know pretty much everybody on the streets I’ve been on, but I’ve wondered, yeah.

Sunny_76@yoohoomail.com: What would you say if you met me, but you weren’t sure it was me? If we did meet up?

Rooster@yoohoomail.com: I probably wouldn’t say anything—what if it wasn’t you? She’d think I was nuts.

Sunny_76@yoohoomail.com: So do you think one day we ever will meet?

Rooster@yoohoomail.com: Maybe…but part of me doesn’t want to spoil the way things are.

CHAPTER SIX

RYAN’S PATH WAS BLOCKED by a four-foot-ten-inch pixie with the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.

“Charlotte, I swear. I don’t know where J.T. is,” Ryan told the diner waitress. “I haven’t heard from him in months—since Gramps’s funeral. You just need to…”

Ryan tried to swallow the anger he felt whenever he thought of the disappearing J. T. Griggs. The man had taken advantage of at least two women—Charlotte and Mee-Maw—left them high and dry, and still they defended him.

“You just need to forget J.T.”

Charlotte Hooks shifted her weight from one rubber-soled foot to the other, the carafe of hot coffee sloshing dangerously in her hand. “I can’t. He was a good man. I—I just don’t understand it, Ryan. J.T. just wouldn’t vanish this long without telling me where he was going. He wouldn’t leave Mee-Maw in a crunch, leaving right after Mr. Mac’s funeral. He had respect for Mr. Mac, and you know that. He flat worshipped the ground that man walked on.”

“Maybe he went back to Texas?”

Her brows drew together in an even darker frown. “They have phones in Texas, last I heard. If he’s that tight for money, he could at least send me a postcard. Besides, J.T. swore he wasn’t ever going back there. Wasn’t anything there for him, he said.”