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.”