“Listen, doll, we both know my faults. Sniffing out an untrue story is not one of them.”

“I’ll get back to you.” Holly shut her phone and stood still for a moment as the shock filled her. Sam, the bad guy? She grabbed her keys and headed out into the staggering heat, driving straight to the Heat facilities, where she found the pretty publicist in her office. “Sam? Can we talk?”

Sam barely looked up from her desk, where she had two laptops going and a handheld fan blowing right in her damp face. Her cell phone was ringing, as was her desk phone. “I’m sorry, the AC is out, the soaring temps are killing me, and I’m swamped. I don’t have time to—”

“Are you feeding bad press to your brother so his team looks better than the Heat?”

At that, she had Sam’s full attention. “What?”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I wouldn’t feed Jeremy anything. He’s a shark.”

Holly sank to a chair. “Okay, here’s the thing. My boss is a complete jerk, but he’s got a way of sniffing out a story. He says your bad press is an inside job.”

“Yes. Many think it’s you.”

“It’s not.”

Mouth grim, eyes worried, Sam stood up. “I know. God, I know. But it’s not me either.”

“So who?”

“I don’t know—No one else has the info I have,” Sam said.

“Then who’s accessing your computers and information, besides you?”

Sam opened her mouth and then slowly shut it again, thoughts clearly racing. “I need a moment alone,” she said tersely, reaching for her phone.

“Sam—”

“Please, Holly.”

“Yeah. Okay.” She was back in the parking lot, sweltering in the morning heat, when her cell phone buzzed with an incoming text from Pace.

I’m back. Come to the park.

It took her fifteen minutes in the morning traffic, in the damn heat wave with no AC in her car, during which time she went over and over the look on Sam’s face. It wasn’t her. Sam loved her job, loved the guys, loved everything about the Heat. She’d never have jeopardized that.

Holly parked next to Pace’s Mustang in the parking lot and got out of her car and nearly melted. The fence wasn’t locked today, and the For Sale sign had been covered by another that read, Sold.

She saw no one. With butterflies low in her belly over the thought of seeing Pace, she walked to the empty field and turned in a slow circle in the sweltering heat, coming to a stop at the abandoned building. It was a one-story structure, originally used to store equipment, with two high, long-slatted windows that she couldn’t reach to see inside.