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Business-deal Bride

Excerpt

Chapter One

Axel Severin read through the marriage contract again. He had only one question for the man who had been his employer and mentor: Why was the name of his prospective bride not spelled out on these pages?

He didn’t ask, though. He already knew the answer.

Otto Braun had no love for his daughter. She was “the biological issue of Otto Braun.” Otto took every opportunity to dismiss Mira. It was among the many reasons Axel had agreed to this arrangement—to compensate Mira for the glaring injustice of her father’s disregard.

Axel wasn’t a particularly compassionate man, but he did know right from wrong, and the way Otto treated Mira was wrong.

“Problem?” Otto asked gruffly from behind his marble-topped desk. He was a barrel-chested man well into his sixties. He wore his customary charcoal suit with a dark blue tie. His hair and beard were white and neatly trimmed. His eyes held the gleam that warned he was at his most cagey.

“Simply doing my due diligence,” Axel replied, even as he braced like a spider perceiving vibrations in the web.

The contract stated clearly that, on the date of their marriage, Otto would allow Axel to assume full control of the global engineering firm. That meant he would no longer be plagued with Otto’s last-minute interference. Then, after a full year of marriage, Otto would sign over his shares in Vorstoben to Axel and his wife.

It was exactly what Otto had promised Axel two years ago, when Axel had told him he was leaving to start his own firm.

Stay, Otto had urged. I’ll promote you to CEO. Marry my daughter, and I’ll gift the company to the two of you.

Axel had already been chafing under a decade of Otto’s dictates. He had caught Otto’s notice when he’d been a hardworking junior engineer of twenty-two and had been climbing the corporate ladder ever since. In the beginning, earning money had been Axel’s sole aspiration. Once he had his mother squared away, however, and built enough of an investment portfolio to ensure he would never fall back into the nothing he’d come from, he’d been ready to do bigger things. To be his own boss.

What if Mira doesn’t want to marry me? Axel had asked Otto.

I’ll never leave the company to her, was Otto’s dismissive reply. I wish I had a son. Marry my daughter, and I’ll have one.

The offer was too good to pass up. Sitting behind the CEO desk for the last two years, Axel’s ability to curb Otto’s worst impulses had resulted in steady expansion and record profits. He felt very proprietary toward Vorstoben these days. He ran it well and wanted it.

He glanced at Mira. She was a polished brunette in a dark skirt suit, hair in a stylish chignon, face drawn with strain. Axel had known her as long as he’d known Otto. He considered Mira a friend to the extent that either of them was capable of a close relationship. In reality, his predominant feeling toward her was pity. She had joined the firm after finishing her business degree three years ago. Since then, she had worked tirelessly to earn her father’s good opinion—while Otto took every opportunity to erode her confidence. He was cold and critical and dismissive for no reason that Axel could discern.

She was Otto’s only child. She ought to inherit the company and everything Otto possessed, especially when she had done her best to contribute to its success. Otto had deliberately held her back, though, refusing to promote her beyond a midlevel accounting position. She yearned to be taken seriously. To be noticed.

So, in an attempt to appease Otto and have a real chance at rising in the ranks here, Mira had agreed to Axel’s proposal.

Every time they had tried to set a date for the wedding, however, Otto had pushed them off. It had become enough of a frustration that Axel had issued an ultimatum last month. Otto had to make good on his promise or he was leaving.

Finally, the contract was in his hand. No more delays. Once they signed it, they could marry. Otto would retire and, in a year, Axel and Mira would jointly take possession of Otto’s shares, giving Axel the de facto ownership he’d been promised.

Mira’s jaw was set with hurt that her father hadn’t had the decency to put her name on the document beyond her signature line at the bottom, under a statement about her being of sound mind and agreeing to the conditions set forth herein, but she scrawled her name upon it.

Axel took the pen and rasped his name with a few hard strokes of black ink. He handed the pen to Otto.

Otto signed. Otto’s assistant witnessed and left the room.

Otto handed the contract to his lawyer, Umberto, a sixty-ish man who had a weariness in his expression that Axel knew had been stamped there by decades of working with the intractable Otto. Axel often thought he would look like that himself if he didn’t step onto his own path soon.

Which he was doing today. Finally. His inner tension eased.

“Give him the other,” Otto said.

Axel’s shoulders snapped back to rigidity.

Umberto didn’t meet Axel’s gaze as he placed the signed contract into his briefcase and offered a fresh envelope.

An acidic pang of premonition entered Axel’s gut. It was a sensation from his childhood, the one he had experienced every time the class bully noticed the new kid in school. Or his mother’s drug dealer had shaken him down for money she owed. Or the landlord had turned them out because he didn’t like finding his mother unconscious in the stairwell.

That sensation of being powerless—helpless—was suffocating. Axel had grown out of being a victim, though. He was too self-sufficient. Too smart. Wasn’t he?

His hand turned cold as he took the envelope and broke the seal. He glanced at Mira. She bit her lip, watchful, expression mirroring his sense of dread.

Axel held the pages so she could read with him.

The first was a paternity report from twenty years ago. It stated Mira was not Otto’s daughter.

Mira’s shocked gasp cut through the thick silence. She grasped at her throat as though the noise had caused a physical tear there. She shot a glare of stunned hurt at Otto. “This is why you’ve always been such a bastard to me?” she asked on a gust of disbelief. Then she turned on Axel to accuse, “You knew?”

“No.” He felt concussed by this. He was dazed, unable to work out what it meant beyond a realization that Otto had tricked him. If Mira wasn’t Otto’s daughter, the contract they’d signed meant nothing. This entire engagement had been a ploy to keep him here so he wouldn’t strike out on his own.

A ball of fury began to condense in his gut.

“Read the rest,” Otto commanded.

Axel turned to the next page. It was a notarized letter to Otto from a woman named Lorena Fontaine, dated three years ago.

As I face the end of my life, I find myself regretting that I never told you I gave birth to your child…

“Oh my God.” Mira recoiled.

Mira’s mother had been expecting Mira at the time, the letter continued. Lorena knew Otto wouldn’t leave his wife. She provided the name of the agency in America where Otto’s daughter had been relinquished for adoption.

“How could you do this?” Mira’s fingertips lined up against her quivering bottom lip.

Marry my daughter…

Axel was far more practiced at stuffing his reactions deep into a cavern within himself. While Mira was exchanging heated words with Otto, asking about who might have fathered her, Axel was slipping into survival mode. His agile mind quickly filtered through his choices.

He could walk out. This bait-and-switch of Otto’s was unforgivable. He’d kept Axel here under false pretenses, setting Axel back on his goal to form his own company. It would be thriving by now if not for this subterfuge. It would serve Otto right if Axel left Vorstoben in the lurch. The conglomerate would falter under the older man’s erratic command. Axel could pick over its bones soon enough.

Or he could remain here as CEO under Otto. It was not an attractive option, but Otto would die eventually and the board would likely keep Axel on. At some future date, Axel would gain full control of the company, if not the ownership of it. If he wanted to be patient a little longer.

He didn’t.

“Umberto believes he’s found her.” Otto’s deep voice cut into Axel’s churning thoughts. “I have instructed him to reach out and request she take a paternity test. Once we have a positive result, he’ll ask her to come meet me. If she’s willing to marry you, then I will make her my heir and honor that contract.” Otto nodded at the briefcase, looking smug.

Or I could do that, Axel mentally acknowledged, even as he saw how Otto was trying to keep him on a string while bringing a third puppet into this farce. Otto wanted to hold his biological daughter like a carrot before Axel and keep him dancing.

“You bastard.” Mira was trembling with fury. “Why did you even keep me around? Why did you stay married to Mama after you learned that?” She flung a hand at the pages Axel still held. “Why have you let us believe for two years that you wanted him to marry me?”

“To keep me here,” Axel said through his teeth, so filled with disgust he could hardly contain it.

“I didn’t care for the scandal. Until I learned I had a real daughter—” Otto’s lip curled disdainfully “—I had to carry on with the charade that you were mine.”

“Liar,” Mira choked. “You wanted access to Mama’s money. You knew she would have taken all her assets and more besides if you divorced her. I will take them,” she warned, sending a vindictive look between Otto and Axel. “That will sting, won’t it?”

It would. Vorstoben had leveraged against properties that belonged to Mira through her mother. She had allowed those arrangements because she had been desperate for Otto’s good favor.

It was yet another nefarious motive for this false engagement Otto had engineered.

Axel had believed himself inoculated against being taken advantage of. He wasn’t naive, but he hadn’t seen that Otto was deceiving him this entire time. It made him livid, but he didn’t allow any of that volatile emotion to bleed into his tone or expression.

“Is that contract worth the paper it’s printed on?” he asked Umberto. “After such blatant misrepresentation?”

Umberto’s wince claimed he was only following orders.

“I am the majority shareholder. I can dispense those shares as I see fit,” Otto asserted, telling Mira, “There’s a settlement offer in there if you keep this out of the press. But I can bequeath Vorstoben to my biological daughter if I want to. If you marry her,” he added, turning the cunning gleam in his eye onto Axel.

He really thought he had Axel over a barrel.

“You’ve finally given me something I wanted. Freedom,” Mira bit out, no longer the meek, biddable daughter Otto had conditioned her into. “Prepare to be made sorry, old man.”

“Mira,” Axel said as she headed to the door.

“No, Axel.” She flung around to face him. “Do whatever you have to. Marry his real daughter if you want to. I don’t blame you for trying to get what he promised, but take a lesson from this backstabbing. He’ll find another way to undercut you. He always does.” Her eyes were glistening as she shot Otto a final look, but they weren’t tears of hurt or sadness. It was the glow of vengeance.

A similar flame had been lit inside Axel, an incendiary refusal to lose again. He would get what had been promised to him.

He folded the envelope Umberto had given him and tucked it inside his suit jacket. If Umberto could find this secret baby of Otto’s, so could he.

Chapter Two

Joy Youngston was midway through a stag spin on the pole when she glimpsed him entering the club.

Her grip almost slipped. She wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as though she recognized him. She only clocked him as not someone she’d seen before. Someone she would remember because he brought such an aura of wealth and sophistication in with him. Power. Not only was he not a regular to this club, he didn’t belong on this side of the city. Not in that suit. It must have been made for him because it moved as though it was part of him, accentuating the line of his wide shoulders and the length of his legs.

She mindlessly continued her routine, swinging around and kicking out her legs in a provocative eye-opener, then hooking the pole behind her knee so she could catch the spiked heel of her shoe and lean back in a rainbow.

As she held the position, she watched his upside-down image walk unhesitatingly toward her. His movements were as fluid as an athlete’s, his bearing tall and commanding. There was a watchfulness to him. Not fearful. Aware. He recognized the dangers in a club like this, especially to a man who looked like he carried abundant cash and a nice watch, but he was blade-sharp and ready to respond to any sort of trouble.

She contorted into a back arch, then grasped the pole and brought her legs down, one–two, before sinking into splits against the stage.

Other men watched the titillating movement of her breasts or tried to catch a wardrobe malfunction in her string bikini. This one kept his attention on her face.

She couldn’t help staring back. He had a square, clean-shaven jaw and straight, dark eyebrows to match his straight, closely shorn dark hair. He was more compelling than conventionally attractive. Roughly hewn and uncompromising. Beautiful in the way of wrathful storms.

Disapproving?

A savage pain hit her breastbone. Go to hell, she thought darkly, trying to retreat into her bubble of self-containment, but he had pierced her shell from the second he walked in. She couldn’t look through him the way she usually could. Couldn’t look away, either. He was too magnetic, pulling her gaze against her will.

Anxious electricity zipped in opposing currents under her skin, setting all of her buzzing. She tried to hide his effect on her as she swung her front leg around to meet the back and pushed against the stage, first a cobra, then she hinged her knees and lifted her butt high while her chest pressed low to the floor in a speedbump.

His piercing gaze didn’t slide to the undulation of her body. He didn’t look at her thighs with the garters she wore around the tops of them, or the tulle skirt that was more of a ruffle since it started at her tailbone and ended above her mostly bare cheeks. He didn’t acknowledge the girls on the other two poles at all.

Joy did these moves for hours every night. It was pure muscle memory and didn’t usually cause her pulse to pick up or her breath to labor.

Tonight, her bones felt like melted crayons. Her limbs twitched with conflicting signals. She grew breathless and hot. Wired.

Because the way he stared into her soul thrust alarm into her belly.

And spiraled erotic shivers into her blood.

His lips moved. He didn’t try to compete with the music, but she read her name as he shaped it. Not her stage name. Her legal name, Joy Youngston. He jerked his head in a signal to leave the pole and talk to him.

Her heart dipped in shock. She had the sudden fear she was about to be arrested. Exotic dancing was strictly regulated in Illinois, but she had her paperwork in order. She abided by all the rules—no touching chief among them.

Still on her hands and knees, she held his gaze as she slid her toe back along the floor, extending one leg. She reached up and back to find the pole, readying to mount it again, letting him know she didn’t take orders from strangers.

He drew a money clip from his jacket pocket and pulled a hundred-dollar bill from it.

She stayed exactly as she was. The position opened the front of her body for his perusal. Still his gaze stayed locked with hers in a battle of wills that felt dangerous and exciting and terrifying.

He jerked his head again, but she wasn’t giving up her spot on the stage for anything less than what she normally took home from a six-hour shift.

She lifted her chin, urging more from the clip.

He thumbed a second and a third bill, then held them out to her.

She took the money and tucked the notes under the strings at her hip, then rolled to take a low grasp on the pole with both hands. In a blatantly sexual move, she planted her feet and slowly lifted her hips, straightening her legs so she was bent forward, facing him. She held the pose with her shoes spaced wide while she exaggerated the dip in her lower back, affording him a good view of her breasts as they swayed inside the tiny cups of her black bra.

It was a little treat for his generosity and a show of insolence on her part. She would cooperate, but in her own time.

Slowly, she climbed her hands up the pole until she was standing straight. She pointed to the batwing doors that wore an Employees Only sign.

“Wait there,” she mouthed before she walked backstage into the dressing room. Her knees were weak, and her pulse knocked around her rib cage like a pinball.

“What’s wrong?” The girl on break was touching up her toenail polish.

“I have to meet someone.” Joy pulled on a cheap blue bathrobe with yellow ducks, having learned that anything nicer than this grew legs and walked away. “You can take my spot.”

“Yeah? Thanks. I need the money.” The young woman hopped to her feet.

Don’t we all, Joy thought as she filled a clean glass from the water cooler and gulped it down.

Was that guy from the government? The military? Her brother was serving overseas. Her sister-in-law was pregnant in California. She would be informed if anything had happened to David. What about their father? Paul Youngston was on medication for Parkinson’s, and Joy had made sure he had taken it before she left home this afternoon. Their neighbor, a retired nurse, came by in the evenings to check on him and help him into bed. If there was a problem, she knew to reach Joy here at the club or when to call an ambulance.

“Joy Youngston?” The voice was like black coffee, dark and bitter.

She spun around to face him. “You’re not supposed to be back here.”

The lights were brighter in the changing room, glaring an unflattering yellow. She could see his suit was navy, not charcoal, and held a fine pinstripe. His tie was silver blue, like his eyes. He would be able to see her makeup was applied heavily with thick eyeliner and lips that were artfully painted to appear plumper than they really were.

“Who are you?” She lifted her brows in the haughty way she’d learned to face down all forms of male attention, whether shy or friendly or aggressive.

His stare was…impossible to read. Not lecherous, but sexual energy crackled on the air. She normally felt she had the upper hand when she knew she was desired, but she realized she had never been attracted to the men who came onto her.

This stranger had reversed that on her. She found him compelling but also intimidating. He was delving into her gaze as though looking for something. As though deciding something. It set her back on her spiked heels.

Want me. She hated that deep yearning, but she had come to accept it was written into her DNA. Or had been stamped there with the seal on her adoption certificate.

“Axel Severin.” He had a slight accent, one that rounded the A to ah and threw the X into the back of his throat. “You’ve been ignoring my messages.”

Her heart swerved. She belted her robe more tightly.

“This is about my birth father?” Her ears rang with alarm. She had started receiving weird messages from Germany a week ago. “It’s a nice variation on the foreign prince scam, but…” She managed to sound pithy as she cocked a negligent hip and shrugged, even though she was unsettled that this had escalated into a confrontation at her workplace. “Dancing on a pole does not make me stupid. Kindly take me off your list of potential marks and never contact me again. Willis!”

She hoped the bouncer had noticed him come back here and stationed himself nearby in case there was trouble.

Willis poked his head in.

“Can you show him the exit, please?”

Willis gave Axel an up-down glance and set his jaw, expecting resistance. Axel was close to Willis’s six-five, but Willis was built like a bulldozer and removed angry drunks on the regular.

Axel was neither angry nor drunk. He was also formidable enough to halt Willis with a casually raised hand. “You can spare me ten minutes for a conversation,” he said to Joy.

The messages had been unsettling her for days. She might have taken them more seriously if she’d actually been looking for her birth father—or if these messages hadn’t withheld her birth father’s name because “a great deal of money” was involved.

“If it seems too good to be true, it is.” She’d learned that when her college boyfriend had talked her into using her own college fund to pay his tuition, claiming he would support her once he completed his degree and was established as an orthodontist.

“I didn’t say there weren’t strings,” Axel said with a derisive twist of his lips. “Let me tell you what they are.”

She blamed herself for this. She was fairly open about the fact that she was adopted. She had even let a friend interview her about it for a lifestyle blog when she’d still been living with Todd. She had specifically mentioned how frustrated she was that she didn’t have any information on her birth father. It would be very easy for someone to read that post and decide she was a ripe target for a scam like this.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “A lawyer or something?”

“Or something.”

Okay, Captain Cryptic.

“Look, my time isn’t free.” She inspected the miniature kiss prints on her black nail polish. “If you want to talk to me, we can go into the Champagne Room. It’s a thousand dollars for twenty minutes.” It was actually two hundred for thirty, but she was trying to scare him off.

He offered Willis a black credit card. “Give us an hour.”