Chapter One

      “Girl, this is not good.”

      Ariana Lamonte made a face as she looked out the windows of her car. She hadn’t seen another vehicle for more than an hour. Grassland whipped in the wind all the way to the horizon in every direction. The same wind rocked her little car where she was parked on the dirt shoulder, and sent the thick clouds overhead racing across the sky. “Not good at all,” she repeated to herself.

      She fished her cell phone up from the passenger side floor by the charging cord tethering it to her dashboard. Using the GPS on the phone always drained the battery quickly, so she’d at least been prepared on that score when she’d set out from Austin that morning. But she sure wished she’d been better prepared with the address she was seeking. There was a dot blinking on her phone screen, right atop a barely discernible line that indicated the laughable excuse for a road on which she sat.

      But that was it. No town. No other roads.

      Nothing. Nada.

      For the third time, she checked her notes and verified the address she’d put into her GPS app. Everything matched.

      Which meant she ought to be sitting in the middle of a place called Paseo, Texas.

      Instead, she was sitting in the middle of...

      “Grass,” she muttered, looking out the windows again. “Nothing but grass and more grass.” And she’d wasted nearly an entire day getting there.

      The wind howled and her car rocked again. She studied her phone for a moment. The GPS dot blinked back at her, but there wasn’t a strong enough cell signal to even make a phone call or send a text message. Not that she particularly wanted to advertise to anyone that she wasn’t really home in her apartment where she was supposed to be working on an assignment for the magazine.

      Instead, she’d set out on yet another wild goose chasing down facts for the real life story behind Robinson Tech’s founder,