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“If you’re referring to the libel suit…and the bankruptcy, why don’t you just spit it out, Dad?”
Her father shot a look around. “If I want a prayer’s chance of saving Ag-Sure as a client, they don’t need to hear even a whisper about you getting sued for libel. But yes, that was what I was talking about. You go into business, start up that—that magazine against my best advice, you get mired in a counter-lawsuit you had no business even filing…”
Becca swallowed. The way he said those things, she might even believe she was a complete flake.
“I won that lawsuit, Dad. And that magazine had a name—Atlanta Insider. Couldn’t you just once call it by its name and not hiss and spit? It was a going business until I had one bad break. It will be again. One day. Just because the judgment is being appealed doesn’t mean I won’t eventually get my money.”
Her father blew out a long breath and looked off into the distance. “Let’s focus on the problem, okay? Right now one of our biggest clients is going south. I just wanted you to do your job. You’re here. You earn a paycheck. You know what to do. I’ve trained you.” He ran a hand through his clipped cut. “You just…lose focus. Even with your own business, half the time you were cutting deals to nonprofits—”
“It was my business, Dad. I got to choose how I billed my time.”
“Right. Well, this is my business, and I say you’ve screwed up for the last time.”
Becca sucked in a breath. “Are you firing me?” The memory of her long series of fruitless job interviews with magazines and newspapers rushed back to her.
“It’d be the smart thing to do. I’d fire any other employee who screwed up like you did.”
“I did not screw—”
“Dammit, take responsibility for this!”
Some men in suits filed out of the courtroom, and Becca saw her father’s eyes track them. She lowered her voice and said, “Dad, you have to believe me…”
“Go home. I’m going to try to save this account. You just…” He gave her a withering look. “Just go home.”
She watched him go after the suits, then she gripped the fast-food bag a little tighter in her hand and bolted for the stairs.
“AW, HONEY, DON’T FRET. You win some, you lose some.”
Gert, the office manager who’d run her father’s life for so many years that she was like part of the family, patted Becca’s arm.
“But, Gert, Dad was right. I did screw up. Those farmers were guilty—all of them—and they got off. I should have seen that delayed-planting defense coming. I’ll bet that county-extension agent was in on it from the get-go. Had to be. I checked as soon as I got loose from that courtroom, and the rest of the reported rainfall in that area was nowhere near as much.”
“Which bothers you more? That they got off…or that your dad was mad at you?”
“You have to ask?” Becca sighed and gazed off into the distance.
“I thought so. Listen, I don’t have to tell you that your dad is a type A personality who doesn’t like to lose. He gets mad. He blows off steam. He gets over it. By tomorrow, he’ll be coming in here like nothing’s wrong.”
“Yeah, right. You forget one little thing, Gert.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You get to go home. I happen to live with the man.”
Not for the first time did Becca grieve over the loss of her own space. Just two years before she’d had her little house, her business, a future separate from her father’s. Then, bit by bit, she’d lost it all.
First came the libel suit, stemming from a puff-piece-turned exposé on a prominent Atlanta businessman’s not-so-squeaky-clean business practices. Then, just to come on with a strong offense, Becca had countersued with defamation charges. Later, when she’d won the libel suit and a half-million-dollar judgment from the countersuit, she’d counted on the money to help bail her out of bankruptcy.
Only, it hadn’t come. Neither had any job offers from the multitude of weekly and daily papers and magazines she’d applied to. Even if Becca had prevailed, just the fact that she’d been sued was enough to make an editor or publisher wary.
“Your father loves you.”
“Yeah, but that box isn’t on an employee performance review, and you know it.”
Gert didn’t contradict her, but then that was to be expected. They both knew Becca’s father only too well.
Becca slid from the corner of Gert’s desktop and made a beeline for her computer. The one thing that could make her feel better might await her in her in-box.
There it was: an e-mail from Rooster.
You nail that big presentation?
That was all, just that in the subject line. So like Rooster, straight to the point. She’d met him on an online farming community a few months before, and the two of them had hit it off.
“Uh-huh, I heard that sigh. It’s that online fella again, isn’t it?”
Gert’s all-knowing smirk couldn’t take away from Becca’s pleasure.
“If you must know, yes.”
“Sometimes I wonder. Why don’t you go out with a real flesh-and-blood guy?”
“Like I have time.”
“You would if you didn’t stay on the Internet all the time, wasting your life away mooning over some guy who could be a psychopath, for all you know. He could be right here in Atlanta, right across the street with a telescope, casing the joint.”
“Uh, Gert, I think you need to lay off the crime dramas. To put your overactive imagination at rest, Rooster and I agreed a long time ago not to mess things up by trading any identifying info. No real names, no locations, not even the names of pets. Simpler that way.”
“If you say so. Me? I think you’re just afraid of disappointing some other guy besides your dad.”
Gert’s comment hit close to home. Becca fretted at the pang she felt from it.
A part of Becca had been excited to work for her dad. Finally she’d had the chance to earn his approval and help him out with his investigative firm, to show him she could use her journalist skills on this job.
Today had left her feeling the eternal screwup, still haunted by her past bad decisions.
But before she could say anything, the office door opened, letting in a sweltering wave of Georgia heat—and her father.
Her dad’s face was a perfect mirror of the weather.
He approached her desk and slapped down a file folder.
“Your last chance.”
“What?”
“I’m a fair man. The suits at Ag-Sure have given us one more shot at getting things right, so I’m passing on the favor.”
“They want us to reopen the case?”
“No. That ship has sailed. This is another one. It took me a lot of talking to convince them that we wouldn’t make a hash out of this one, too. It’s here in Georgia, about halfway between Macon and Savannah, so you get your butt down I-75 and nail these guys. Fast.”
Gee, Dad. Most fathers would have just said, “I’m sorry for losing my temper.” In her heart, though, Becca knew how hard this was for her dad, how scary it was for him to let her take on a case that could well determine their future with Ag-Sure.
She met Gert’s gaze across the room and took in the office manager’s almost imperceptible nod. Yep, this was as good an apology as she was going to get.
She flipped open the file, scanned it. “Asian dodder vine? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Never been east of the Mississippi, according to the insurance company. But there’s a group of farmers claiming it’s overtaking their cotton like kudzu.”
“But, Dad, how can you fake kudzu?”
“That’s your job to figure it out. Get busy. You’ve got a day to research, and then you’d better be packed and headed south. The insurance company wants to see results…If you don’t, they’ll have our heads on a platter.”
Sunny_76@yoohoomail.com: I’m leaving on a business trip that I have to take, don’t know if I’ll have Internet access, so I may go radio silent for a few days.
Rooster@yoohoomail.com: I thought you just finished up that big project for work? Figured you could take a break.
Sunny_76@yoohoomail.com: I did finish it up, but it sort of imploded on me. I screwed up. So this trip is a penance of sorts.
Rooster@yoohoomail.com: Your job’s not on the line, is it? Because if you’re short on rent money there in the big city, you can always head down here, grab a hoe and remember what it’s like down on the farm.
Sunny_76@yoohoomail.com: I miss being on a farm…well, my grandparents’ farm, at least. Sometimes I wish I could go back.
CHAPTER TWO
“WHOA, LADIES! Easy! No call for fighting!”
But Ryan MacIntosh’s exhortation fell on the deaf ears of a pair of six-year-olds bent on destruction. He pulled back just quick enough to escape a female fist flying for the other’s face.
He made a grab for the fist, saw that the nails were done in a metallic purple nail polish with a constellation of stars. He closed his fingers around the wrist and shoved—as gently as he could—the two girls apart.
Stepping between them, his chest heaving, Ryan struggled for some earthly clue as to what to do next. “Enough!”
“But she started it!”
“She did! She was holding!”
Ryan squelched back his own temper, not an easy thing to do with the August sun beating down on his red hair. He set his jaw and gazed at the upturned faces of the two soccer players.
“Both of you. On the bench.”
When they would have argued with him, he shook his head and pointed toward their respective benches. “Go on and you might get a shot at playing again before the game ends.”
As the girls trudged off the field, Ryan could feel parental wrath lasering in his direction. A fight had to break out on the one game that the referee didn’t show up for.
The other coach shrugged his shoulders and called for a time-out. Ryan indicated for his crew to get a drink. He didn’t have to say it twice. They gathered around the Thermos like cows around a salt lick.
Cows would be easier, he thought. A chuckle brought him back from a momentary image of cows in shin guards, kicking a soccer ball up and down the field.
The chuckle came from Jack MacIntosh, his cousin—and the reason Ryan was here rather than on his John Deere, plowing his sadly neglected back forty.
“What?” he asked.
Jack laughed again. He adjusted the casted leg he had stretched out on a folding chaise lounge. “You nearly got clocked by a six-year-old. Doesn’t say much for your reaction time.”
“Hey. It was supposed to be you out there, remember? I could have left your sorry—” Ryan did a quick edit, mindful of the small fry around him “—rump in a sling after you broke your leg.”
“Begging your pardon, cuz, but you forget that I broke this leg hooking up your satellite antenna.”
True enough. Despite Ryan’s griping he enjoyed coaching soccer. This was Jack’s cup of tea usually, what with Jack’s daughter, Emily, involved in whatever the rec department offered. But since Jack was laid up with a bum leg, Ryan had discovered just what a great feeling it was to coach the kids.
He caught the glowering looks scorching between the two girls involved in the fight and sighed, amending his last thought. He liked coaching soccer—not preventing hand-to-hand combat.
He’d done enough of that earlier in the day dealing with Murphy.
Crooked SOB. Murphy’s words came back to him.
“Some investigator type’s supposed to be coming down here to sign off on these claims, Ryan. Now, don’t muck it up. Just say what you gotta say, keep your mouth shut and we’ll have a check cut before you know it.”
Right. Slugging Murphy probably hadn’t been the smartest thing to do, but the guy just would not take no for an answer. He wanted Ryan neck-deep in his scam, for insurance purposes if nothing else. It didn’t matter that Ryan was as good as an accessory for knowing about the plan, even if he kept his mouth shut.
If I could only be sure Gramps hadn’t been involved.
The Blue Devils coach hollered, “Hey, MacIntosh! You ready to finish up this game?”
Returning to the present, Ryan swigged down a healthy gulp of the orange atrocity he’d gotten from the Thermos. As he headed back for the game, he saw a woman pushing her way through the gate.
Even if she hadn’t been a knockout, he would have noticed her. It was the way she dressed—a lightweight blazer paired with jeans that clung to well-proportioned legs. Who wore a blazer to a kids soccer game in south Georgia?
As he hollered for Emily to throw the ball in, Ryan stole another glance in the new arrival’s direction. Honey-brown hair that would go golden in the summer sun, a little smile playing on her lips, more than a dab of confidence in her walk. This was a woman who knew what she wanted—and where to find it.
Ronnie Frasier’s girl took off on a long drive the wrong way. Ryan hollered for her to stop, but his soccer player never heard him. Instead, the ball went into their own net with frustrating ease.
He stood, moved his cap from his head and used his forearm to wipe away the perspiration that had beaded there. Honestly, this was harder work than getting the harvest in.
If there is any harvest this year.
Ryan pushed the thought from his mind. He glanced over at Jack, saw his cousin talking to the new arrival.
Saw Jack pointing in his direction.
Ryan’s stomach sank. Had to be that private investigator the insurance company had said they were sending.
Just his luck.
But then, he’d had a crop of bad luck for the past six months. If Ryan had believed in karma, he’d be convinced he’d been a scuzzball of the first order in a previous life.
