“You insisted I marry her.” He lifted her hand and turned it, flashing the ring he’d given her on the plane before twisting the other way to reveal the plain band on his own finger.
“You were supposed to come to me first,” Otto snarled at Joy.
Axel felt the jolt of shock travel through her. Her features contorted with injury.
“Don’t take this out on her.” Axel stepped forward, reflexively angling to shield her while drawing their linked hands behind his back so his bulk was between them. “This is the deal you struck.” Axel had no compromise in him. “I’ve held up my side. Now honor yours.”
“Like hell.” Otto shifted so he had a line of sight on Joy. “He’s taking advantage of you. He married you because he thinks he can get my money. My company. I was saving it for you.”
This was why Axel had wanted her vow to him before she met Otto. The old man was already trying to manipulate the situation to favor himself. That infuriated Axel, but it didn’t surprise him.
“She’s seen the contract,” he told Otto. “She knows exactly what you expected from your biological daughter.”
“I wouldn’t have forced you to marry him. Is that what he told you? That you had to marry him? If he bullied you, this can be annulled,” Otto said.
Over my dead body, was Axel’s very primitive and disturbing thought.
“Come. Let’s talk.” Otto waved at the sofa, cannily trying to read Joy, trying to find the inroad to turn her against Axel.
She looked to the sofa, confused. Tempted. “Why did you want to meet me?” Whatever optimism had been in her face had faded into a frown of anxious wariness.
“You’re my daughter. Why wouldn’t I want to meet you?”
“But why did you set up that contract before you had?” she asked. Her nails were cutting into Axel’s hand again.
“That was business,” Otto dismissed with a patronizing wave that said,Don’t trouble your pretty little head.
“He’s known about you for three years,” Axel reminded her with brutal honesty. “He didn’t reach out until I threatened to leave. He wants to use you to keep me in line. She’s no longer available for that.” Axel turned spitefully toward Otto. “She’s already my wife.”
Otto muttered a word in German that was very foul.
Joy didn’t need a translator to know what he had called her. Her breath cut in as though he’d struck her.
“Watch your mouth,” Axel warned in a lethal tone.
She looked to Axel with eyes full of disillusionment. Blame.How could you bring me here for this?Tears gathered in her eyes, and she flexed her fingers, trying to extricate them.
He held on, unable to regret bringing her here even though she might never forgive him for it. “You’re already bleeding cash reserves,” he reminded Otto. “Step away from the company, and Mira will have no reason to continue her attacks on it.”
“It’s my company,” Otto insisted with a rabid shake of his jowls. “I decide what happens here.”
“You signed a contract. Honor it.”
“You questioned the validity of that contract yourself,” Otto threw at him. “We’ll see what the courts say.”
“Lawyers it is, then,” Axel said darkly. “But make no mistake. I will get this company if I have to join forces with Mira and take it, brick by brick.”
* * *
Joy didn’t pay attention to where Axel took her.
She was aware of feeling cold until the weight of his suit jacket was draped over her shoulders. She heard him say something in biting words she couldn’t understand. Her vision was blurred, and there was a scorch in her throat that stretched into her chest, making even her shoulders ache with the effort to hold back her tears.
In those first seconds of meeting Otto, her hopes had been sky-high. Surely Axel was wrong about him. Surely her birth father—who had asked her to come meet him—would be glad to see her. Surely, he was eager to know everything about her, the way she wanted to know everything about him.
Seeing him had given her a disconcerting sense of recognition, one that disarmed her because she thought she ought to feel a sense of belonging from that vague familiarity.
But as she had looked for an answering interest in his expression, her soft, jumbled emotions had collided with instinctual dislike.
