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 theAtoahand threw theXinto 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.
