NFS Heat (Steam version) will not link to EA Account

The game will launch and boot the EA App and prompt me to sign in. I do so, using the EA account I'm posting from, and perform the 2-step verification as prompted. It then prompts me to "Link your EA Account to Steam." After looking to see that it's listing the proper EA account (this one) and the proper Steam account (which has the copy of NFS Heat purchased) I click link accounts and am shown this message: "Something went wrong... To continue linking your EA Account to Steam, head back to Steam and start over." Repeating the process over several days has listed zero results. The only possible solution I can think of is to check if my Steam account is already linked to another EA account, but I'm unsure how to go about that. I'm about to refund this game if I can't get it to work. Very frustrating.