“And delicate.” She threw his word back at him with ample mockery. “My life is also delicate and complicated. I have an ailing father who would be gutted to hear I have a rich birth father who wants to take his place. The person who was helping me with his care is pregnant with her second baby, so she moved closer to her own parents. That means my brother will go to California the next time he gets leave, rather than coming here. My sister-in-law was living with us, so we’ve lost her income, too. That leaves me covering the mortgage that Dad took out to cover his medical bills. My dancing keeps us sheltered and fed, so I can’t go chasing waterfalls. Windfalls? Either way…” She rolled a dismissing shoulder. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Prove you’re his daughter, and your financial problems will be gone.” He emphasized that with a cutting swipe of his hand through the air, still amazed himself with how many obstacles could be removed with the application of cash. “What would you do if you had unlimited funds? Move your father closer to your brother? Hire him a rotation of private nurses to offer care twenty-four-seven? I can start arranging that tonight.”
“All you need is a vial of my blood?” she guessed with an acidic smile.
“I will pay you for a vial of your blood. How much do you want for it?” He had her now, and he would reel her in.
The last vestiges of sex kitten disappeared. She stood tall, arms folded, eyes narrowed with shrewdness, mouth firmed in deliberation. “I’ve been down this road, you know. I let a man snow me with false promises of a big payout, and now I’m dancing here instead of Broadway.”
“Is that what you stand to lose if you leave with me tonight? This rewarding career of yours?” He sent a derisive look around the room. “I’m confident you can find similar employment if it turns out I’m wrong about you.”
“You mean ifI’mwrong aboutyou.” Her smile was a pained stretch of her lips.
“Take the test and find out.”
“Twenty thousand dollars. Up front,” she demanded.
He snorted. She’d already fleeced him for a room that couldn’t be worth more than five hundred dollars for an hour, but he would have added a zero to her extortion figure if it meant he could claim Vorstoben. “Your money will be waiting with a nurse at my hotel. Let’s go.”
“Now?” she asked with alarm.
“Now.”
CHAPTER FOUR
ICAN WAIT.Can you?
Joy hurried to the changing room, even more shaken than ever by her reaction to Axel Severin. Men wanted her all the time. She never wanted them. Not like this, but when he’d loomed over her in the Champagne Room, she’d been struck by an overwhelming urge to kiss him.
That would have been disturbing if he had been any stranger, but he was here on her birth father’s behalf. She was beginning to believe that much, at least—that he was on a legitimate quest to find the offspring of Lorena Fontaine.
After losing Wendy, the mother who’d raised her, to a congenital heart problem, then learning the mother who’d birthed her was dead, Joy had shrunk inward. She’d tried to convince herself she didn’t care where she came from. Her birth family didn’t matter because her adoptive family loved her unconditionally. They had welcomed her home with open arms, hadn’t they, after she’d made such a fool of herself over Todd?
Her disappointment over not being able to meet her birth mother had contributed to her falling for Todd’s BS, though. She saw it clearly now that she had distance from it. She had been sad and adrift and had clung to the one close connection she’d had at the time. She had been so afraid to lose Todd, she’d put him above her own autonomy and aspirations, never seeing how one-sided and flimsy their relationship really was.
Now Axel was offering a new connection, one that he held just beyond her reach while saying,I’m confident you’re the woman I’m looking for.
Her skin tightened as she remembered the specific timbre of his voice. She was still breathless and fluttery, still feeling accosted by his tightly contained energy and the sexual charisma that pierced her belly with yearning.
After removing her makeup, she quickly looked Axel up online, but only wound up with more questions than answers.
The first email about her birth father had come through the adoption agency. She’d been asked to reply to a lawyer called Umberto. She had still been deciding whether to respond and how to tell her father, Paul, about it when she’d received a private message from Axel through one of her social accounts.
She had blocked it, certain it was a bot. But receiving that message had made the one from the agency seem suspicious. When the couriered letter arrived two days later, she’d lied to her father and said it was about her student loans, but she’d been baffled and alarmed at the persistence of the scammers.
Axel wasn’t a conman, though. Not according to the internet. Either he’d gone to great lengths to create this online persona or he was the CEO of a big infrastructure conglomerate in Germany.
If he was a CEO, what was he doing here, on her birth father’s behalf?
She flicked through some photos of Axel. One showed him at a podium for a trade conference, another showed him arriving at a charity gala with his fiancée.
Fiancée!?
The sound of screeching brakes arrived in her ears, causing a sick lurch in her stomach.
Wow. Mira Braun was beautiful in an ultrasophisticated way. Even so, she didn’t look particularly fulfilled wearing something that Joy presumed was a designer gown. Her sparkly earrings were probably real diamonds, and Axel wore a tuxedo, but they both wore similar, aloof expressions.
The photograph struck her as staged. Like the kind actors took with their costars when they secretly despised each other but had to do a press tour and act as though they were in love.
