Girl Gone Wild. Joanne Rock

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 Lainie, 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?”