She looked at her blank screen again and winced. “And if it’s biased?”

“I’ll un-bias it. Send it.”

“Tommy—”

“Look, we’ve done this. Send it or quit.”

She gave one brief thought to doing just that. But two things stopped her. One, her fear of being poor again, and two, quitting in shitty economic times because of a guy she’d spent one hour with had to be the definition of stupid female, and she hated stupid females.

“What’ll it be, doll?”

Dammit. “Give me a few hours. I’ll write your damn article.”

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

There’s no crying in baseball!

—Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own

For the first time in recent memory, Pace slept like the living dead. When he woke up, he stretched and felt another first: no aches, no pains. In fact, he felt damn good. He eyed the empty vitamin pack by his bed. If Tucker’s stuff had done this, then it was worth its weight in gold.

He got up, showered, and checked his e-mail. Samantha had sent him the link to American Online Living and Holly’s first baseball series article on her blog. She’d profiled their close-knit team, highlighting the friendship of Ty, Joe, and Henry. They were a threesome now, but she wrote about how they’d once been a fivesome, before Jim and Slam had been traded. The guys had put a positive spin on the situation for her, and Pace found the article nonjudg mental and thoughtful, but also a little on edge.

She was on the hunt for secrets, and he knew it. The Heat hadn’t had any bad press lately, and that was always a good thing, but none of them were angels and it wouldn’t take much digging to find dirt.

Holly sat at the private gate at the airport waiting for the Heat’s plane to be ready for boarding. Tommy was so excited about this Philly trip that he’d called three times since she’d gotten to the airport, and she knew if he could have somehow switched positions with her, he would have.

“Find any secrets yet?” he demanded to know.

“Nope.”

“You losing your touch?”

“I told you I didn’t want this assignment.”

“It’s a great assignment. Oh, and if the Heat go all the way this year, I want a signed ball.”

“If I dig out any secrets, no one’s going to want to sign a ball for either of us.”

“Yeah.” Tommy sighed. “But since you tend to sell advertising space like crazy, I’ll have to live with a fat bank account instead. So . . . which one are you sleeping with?”

“What? None of them!”

“You said you had a crush.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m sleeping with him.”

“Maybe you should. Get the inside scoop. Yeah, do it!”

Holly hung up on him and boarded.