Girl Gone Wild

by Joanne Rock

  “Just to give you a heads-up, Hugh, I’m getting ready to take her down. I need you to cease and desist the cell phone or laptop or whatever you’ve got working back there.”

  The pilot’s voice halted just in time for him to hear Giselle’s again.

  “—and if you had talked to me first—”

  Shit.

  “Giselle, I apologize, but we’re getting ready to land now and the pilot asked me to cut the phone connection. I missed some of what you said just now, but I promise I’ll call you at the club tonight and we’ll figure out a way around this.”

  She huffed out a frustrated sigh and, after a clipped goodbye, hung up the phone. Stowing his gear in an overnight bag, Hugh wondered what information Giselle might have about Flynn. Could she know something that might have bearing on his story?

  Peering out the narrow window that overlooked the misty Atlantic, Hugh wished he’d had more time to ask. But right now, his main mission was to unearth one of Florida’s most wanted men so he could write a story that would at least maintain journalistic integrity. How could his editor complain as long as he tied Flynn back to Club Paradise?

  The sooner he turned in his piece, the faster he’d be able to enter the Pleasure Parthenon without worrying about conflict of interest. Which meant he’d be sliding between the sheets and into Giselle’s open arms in no time.

  STAKING OUT THE FAR CORNER of the club’s new Dominatrix Domain suite, Giselle hugged her arms around her shoulders more tightly and wished she didn’t have to hold this emergency meeting of the Club Paradise ownership. She’d worried over her phone call from Hugh for an hour before hauling herself through the shower and getting dressed. Now, as the clock neared 6:00 p.m., she realized she had no choice but to spill what she knew—limited though it might be. Her co-owners had a right to arm themselves for the fallout if Flynn came back into their lives.

  Why couldn’t she have been attracted to someone with a more simple job, like another chef or a gardener or even a politician like the cutie-pie Jackson Taggart her co-owner Summer Farnsworth had snagged last fall?

  As if they shared a psychic connection—a phenomenon that Summer happened to be studying at the moment—her friend strolled in through the propped open door to the unfinished suite.

  “So what do you think?” Summer started without prelude, unfurling her arms to encompass the interior of the Dominatrix Domain. As the ambience coordinator for the club, she supervised the design and decor of all the theme rooms. “Do you love it?”

  Giselle pried her thoughts out of her own worries long enough to take in the black leather furniture highlighted with bright purple pillows and clear crystal accents. Soft gray carpet and light blue walls gave the room a mystical-magical air that softened the still-life arrangement of studded leather collars gracing the coffee table.

  “It’s nice. Loaded with attitude yet not scary-type dominatrix-y. I love all the purple.” She hoped she put enough enthusiasm in her voice, but she could see by Summer’s concerned expression that she wasn’t faking very well.

  “Is everything okay? You sound distracted.” She squinted, studying Giselle carefully. “And your aura isn’t as bright as usual.”

  She was saved from responding by Brianne Wolcott’s appearance. Endlessly leggy and more confident than Giselle would ever dream of being, Brianne had left a lucrative career in the film industry to buy into Club Paradise.

  “I’m in for the meeting, ladies, but as soon as we’re through, Aidan is taking me to the Keys for a long weekend.” Brianne dug into a shopping bag slung over one arm and produced a length of chocolate-colored leather. “I even bought leather shorts so I can be a real Harley girl.” The club’s resident security expert winked with lightheartedness wrought from genuine happiness.

  Giselle sure felt like crap that she was about to wreak Hurricane Flynn on both her and Summer.

  And their fourth partner…

  “I’m here.” Lainie Reynolds, CEO and the big guns behind Club Paradise, breezed into the room with her designer sunglasses propped in her perfectly combed hair. “Sorry I’m late, but I was coercing accounting into making the rest of Summer’s funds available so she can finish the Dominatrix Domain. It looks magnificent.”

  Was it Giselle’s fanciful imagination, or did cynical Lainie seem to be in a particularly good mood today? Why did Giselle have to deliver this bomb just when things were practically civil between them? She couldn’t even remember the last time Lainie had tilted her haughty nose in the air when she walked by.

  While her partners raved about Summer’s design job in the revamped resort that had progressed from a shaky start to a thriving enterprise in the last six months, Giselle settled a hand over her belly to ease a case of manic butterflies.

  “I have bad news,” she blurted, deciding any more waiting would kill her.

  All heads turned toward her.

  “That’s why I called the meeting.” She sank deeper into one of the sleek leather chairs that populated the sitting area, clutching the satiny purple throw pillow to her chest. As if purple satin would ward off Lainie’s upcoming fury.

  Thankfully, her co-owners sat, Brianne settling herself in the chair opposite Giselle while Summer simply dropped onto the arm of the seat. Lainie plunked her briefcase on the glass-topped coffee table and took over the couch as if setting up her personal command central from which to lambaste her enemies.

  Swallowing hard, Giselle reminded herself this wasn’t her fault. Okay, sleeping with Lainie’s ex-husband had been somewhat her fault, but resurrecting the two-timing bastard from the West Indies was not.

  That blame she could lay squarely at a certain journalist’s feet.

  “So?” Lainie nudged her, leaning forward slightly as impatience creased her forehead.

  “I met a reporter from the Herald in the kitchen last night—this morning actually, at about five. I thought he was a food critic at first.” She decided to skip the part about serving him erotic pastries. No need to emphasize the fact that she’d practically thrown herself at the man. “But apparently he’s been assigned to do a story on the resort.”

  Lainie smiled as she withdrew some papers from her briefcase. “Sounds like fantastic news to me. And I just happen to have a list of potential story ideas for the media here.”

  “Too late. He’s already got an idea.” She gripped one of the little crystal pendants decorating the four corners of the satin pillow until it bit into her hand. “Hugh wants to do an article on Robert.”

  Summer gasped, but Giselle kept her eyes trained on Lainie, who merely blinked before offering up a solution.

  “Then we’ll simply have to convince him otherwise.” She waved the sheaf of papers in her hand more emphatically, her sleek blond hair never moving out of place. “That’s why I’ve got a list of readymade story ideas, so we can steer the media away from the club’s unsavory past.”

  Brianne scooched forward in her seat. “You said his name is Hugh? Is it Hugh Duncan by any chance?”

  “You know him?” Hope perked to life inside her. Maybe Brianne could intervene. Stop this train wreck in the making.

  “I’ve never met him, but my mother keeps in touch with him. One of her million husbands was this guy’s uncle, I think.” Brianne rolled her eyes, writing off the matter with a shrug. “I don’t know how close she is to Hugh, but apparently he’s some big, Pulitzer-winning journalist or something.”

  All eyes turned to Giselle. Questioning. Hopeful. As if she could somehow encourage Hugh to write a Pulitzer-winning story on the resort. This was so not good.

  “There’s more.” Giselle braced herself for the worst. “I also happen to know this journalist is already on his way to the Cayman Islands to interview Robert or possibly find enough information to goad him out of hiding.”

  For all of a nanosecond, Lainie paled. A rare hint of the emotion that might lurk behind her thorny, don’t-mess-with-me exterior.

  Brianne moved to the couch to sit beside Lai
nie, whether to insert herself into Giselle’s line of vision or to simply offer a bit of unspoken support to their CEO, she couldn’t be sure.

  “What on earth would ever prompt him to think he could entice a wanted man to come back to the scene of his crime?” Brianne shook her head, her auburn hair swinging around her shoulders with the movement. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe he’ll play upon Robert’s weakness,” Summer offered, kneeling down beside the coffee table. To act as a buffer between Lainie and Giselle when the fur started to fly? God, she hoped so. “Perhaps this writer thinks Robert could be tripped up by his own arrogance. Flynn certainly fits the profile.”

  No argument there. The superslick South Beach business mogul had thought nothing of courting Giselle when she’d first started as a chef at Club Paradise back when it had been a couples’ haven. Robert had been married to a prominent Miami attorney who was as gorgeous as she was smart, yet he lavished Giselle with romantic trinkets, spending such long stretches of time with her it had never occurred to her he could possibly have a wife or a home outside the club.

  Not until the gorgeous, intelligent wife showed up at the Club with a rock on her finger the size of an iceberg did Giselle realize she’d been appallingly naive. And she’d had more to worry about than a broken heart. She had a scorned woman ready to do her bodily harm. Or worse—to snuff out her fledgling career as a chef.

  Giselle might have never worked at the resort again except that, before Lainie could fire her, they’d learned Robert had fled the country along with all of Lainie’s money. The only thing left of value for her was a part ownership in a hotel robbed of all its liquid assets.

  Somehow in the devastation of realizing she was flat busted, Lainie had overlooked the injury done to her heart in an effort to retool the resort into a brand-new enterprise. Giselle had worked her tail off to stay off of Lainie’s radar after that, and when she’d come up with enough cash to buy into the controlling partnership of the revamped resort, Lainie had grudgingly given her a place in the four-way partnership.

  “We all know he’s an arrogant bastard,” Lainie supplied, seeming to shake off her initial shock. “And if this reporter is successful in drawing him out, the scandal that closed down Club Paradise a year ago will be all over the papers again. That may or may not hurt business at this point.”

  The exotic South Beach property had weathered its share of negative publicity when Summer’s past had been splashed all over the headlines last fall. But this story had the potential to be much bigger. Especially with a reporter like Hugh behind it.

  “What I would like to ask,” Lainie continued, her gaze narrowing as she stared across the coffee table at Giselle, “is how you happen to know this journalist’s whereabouts today. And if you realized he was going to the Caymans at 5:00 a.m., why wait until 6:00 in the evening to tell us?”

  She shouldn’t be surprised Lainie the lawyer didn’t miss a trick. She might not be actively practicing now that she ran Club Paradise, but that didn’t make her wits any less sharp.

  But Giselle wasn’t the naive woman she had been a year ago, and she’d be damned if she would be intimidated. “I had no idea Hugh was so serious about the story until he called me from an airplane this afternoon.”

  Lainie’s smile was thin. Brittle. “I see. So you’ve initiated a relationship with yet another man determined to pull the rug out from under me. Is that just coincidence, Giselle, or should I start taking it personally?”

  “I’m not having a relationship with him.” At least she didn’t think so. She couldn’t very well get involved with the man who wanted to bring her worst nightmare back to town. She’d never told Lainie that Robert had asked her to run away with him to the West Indies, that he’d wanted her to be with him forever. Somehow she thought if Lainie knew Giselle’s affair with Robert hadn’t been just a fling, her CEO would be all the more hurt. Angry.

  And although Lainie didn’t have complete control over their partnership, if Summer and Brianne discovered Giselle had been partially privy to Robert’s plan to leave Florida, but had been too blinded by love to realize the implications of his departure, maybe they’d all gladly vote her out of the group.

  No matter what, she refused to lose her place in Club Paradise. The resort had become her key to independence, her lifeline away from a family that wanted to keep her safe from anything and everything.

  Lainie shrugged, jamming her papers back into her briefcase with more force than necessary, her movements stiff and angry. “Why give up on the man now? You and this journalist obviously got to know one another very well this morning. Why not at least use your connection with him to see if you can convince him to back off? You must know there’s a lot at stake here for all of us. If the police were extraditing Robert to make him stand trial, I’d be the first to applaud the effort. But if this reporter friend of yours is going to turn that two-timing cheat into some sort of media star with the inside scoop on how he got away with his crimes, the scandal could put Club Paradise out of business for good.”

  Giselle waited, hoping maybe Summer would jump to her defense with an impassioned plea that Giselle shouldn’t be asked to cozy up to a reporter for the cold, hard purpose of swaying Hugh not to write his story. But Summer merely bit her lip, looking very worried as she clutched her check for the Dominatrix Domain in one hand.

  She’d never get to complete her design project if Robert’s resurrection brought about a wave of negative publicity. Sure, the occasional hints of scandal helped their nightclub business, but it also had a direct, dismal impact on their hotel bookings. And as their operating budget grew bigger, they needed the hotel to remain profitable now more than ever.

  “Damn it, Giselle.” Lainie rose to her feet and stared down her nose at the woman she’d never forgiven. “You owe me.”

  Bull’s-eye. Lainie couldn’t have found a better way to ensure compliance. And to her credit, she’d never played the guilt card in all the time that they’d known each other.

  “Hugh said he’d call me tonight,” Giselle finally managed, heartsick that her week of freedom had turned into a nightmare in the course of twelve hours. She’d been singing Sinatra and contemplating a steamy encounter with a sexy man earlier today.

  Now she couldn’t afford to get involved with the most intriguing man she’d ever met because she wasn’t the kind of woman who could start a relationship under false pretenses. She expected mutual respect, caring, maybe even a little tenderness in a relationship. Her sole objective with sexy, enigmatic Hugh Duncan had to be to wrest information from him and try to convince him not to write his story.

  And to top it all off, her tenuous bonds with her business partners were stretched to the limit.

  Huffing out a sigh, she nodded slowly. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  5

  HE HAD TO FIND HER.

  Hugh moved through one corridor after another in the Mediterranean maze of buildings that made up the sprawling Club Paradise resort in pursuit of the woman who’d invaded his thoughts all day. His watch—set permanently on the Eastern Time zone no matter where in the world he happened to be—said it was shortly after midnight. Less than twenty-four hours since he’d last seen Giselle, yet it seemed longer considering he’d been all too aware of each minute spent without her. How could a woman he’d only just met so thoroughly preoccupy him?

  Probably had something to do with envisioning her naked when he’d talked to her that afternoon. The image of Giselle’s long tan legs bared beneath her sheets, the memory of her husky voice urging him to come over while she touched her beautiful body…

  Damn, but it was enough to make any man a little crazy. He focused on his search to ward off heady lust already pumping through his veins.

  Her three restaurants on the hotel premises were all closed. Even the one that still hosted a few lingering patrons wasn’t seating new guests and assured him Giselle hadn’t been there in the last two hours.

 
Which left her where?

  He plowed through the employees-only doors toward the central kitchen, hoping maybe she’d be in the same place he’d found her last night. No song emanated from within. No happy strains of Sinatra greeted his ears.

  Tension rippled through him, a strange flare-up of a sixth sense that always kicked into gear when he walked into potentially dangerous situations. Foolish to think he could get into any trouble in the middle of an exotic South Beach resort. And even more foolish to think a seductive chef who had a way with frosting could be anything but a welcome distraction to a man who rarely allowed himself to play.

  Ignoring the mental warning signs, Hugh charged through the last set of doors, edged past a few kitchen staffers wielding mops and finally spotted her.

  This time, the dark-haired siren wasn’t cooking, she was sitting at the same table he’d eaten at yesterday, bent over a sheet of paper while she tapped the eraser end of her pencil against her chin.

  “Thinking big thoughts?” He spoke before planning his approach, an action totally out of character for a man who made his living from always choosing the right words.

  But damn it, he wanted to see her, needed to see her dark eyes light up from within the way they had yesterday when they’d met.

  Too bad any momentary flash of that brightness was quickly hidden as she looked at him now. She hurried to close her notebook, concealing whatever she’d been working on.

  The tension that had been crawling up his spine earlier now tingled over the back of his neck. Alerting. Warning.

  “Hugh.” She placed her pencil on the table and aligned it precisely with the spine of the notebook. “I wasn’t expecting you back tonight. Didn’t you say you were going to call?”

  Yellow caution lights flashing in his brain shuffled to bright red halt-in-your-moronic-tracks lights, yet still Hugh moved closer.

  “I didn’t want to call. I needed to see you in person.” Too much honesty. He knew it, but he couldn’t stop himself from admitting the bald facts. He’d hauled ass out of the Caymans as fast as humanly possible to get back here tonight. He’d also had to promise the pilot on the Herald’s private jet that he would try to find an assignment in the Alps so the guy could write off his dream vacation as a business expense. He’d be hard-pressed to come up with heavy-hitting international news in the Alps these days, but damn it, it couldn’t be any worse than writing something on a South Beach resort, and even that was turning out to be an interesting project.