Chapter Three
THE BOUNCER STARTED to lead Axel out of the changing room, but Joy hung back to flick through a rack of costumes.
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
“Changing.” Her chin came up so she could look down her nose at him. “What would you like? Schoolgirl? Librarian? Bondage? Cheetah?”
“That.” He nodded at her robe, trying not to think of the lush curves barely contained by her provocative black bra and butt-floss bottoms. The way she had stared at him while writhing had caused exactly the reaction intended, which was irritating in the extreme.
He needed cold clarity, not dull-witted lust. Not a hot weight throbbing behind his fly, urging him to rearrange his priorities.
How was he supposed to erase from his mind that image of amber-honey limbs moving with superb grace, though? Or platinum-streaked hair falling around her shoulders and across her cheek, begging his fingers to brush it from her eyes and tuck it behind her ear? A mutinous, pouted mouth that—
Stop.
What the hell was she even doing here? His research had told him she was studying to be a nurse, not working as an exotic dancer.
The woman he was contractually obligated to marry was a stripper.
Axel strove to be a modern man who didn’t judge other’s choices.
He’d been in the position of having few choices himself.
He knew you had to make the best of what little you had.
God knew, there’d been a time when he would have thought being able to afford a private room in an adult-entertainment establishment was the height of luxury—not that he had ever thrown his money away in places like this.
He curled his lip as he entered the round room with its cushioned bench and pole in the middle. A funk of sour beer and sweat permeated the air.
He had scratched tooth and nail to get out of traps like this and resented the hell out of Otto—and this woman—for dragging him back into this world, even for a minute. If he wasn’t so furious at Otto, so determined to win this hand and the pot, he would have walked out and never looked back.
Even as he thought that, however, his gaze snagged on a muscled calf and a narrow foot in a black stiletto. The turn of her ankle kicked fresh lust into his groin.
“I’ll be back with the champagne,” the bouncer said.
“Don’t bother.” Axel had had champagne. They didn’t serve it here.
The bouncer left, enclosing them in silence.
“I don’t have my phone for the music.” Joy adjusted the knob on the wall near the door, filling the room with the relentless rhythm playing in the front of the club.
She was trying to seize the upper hand. He recognized the tactic because he did it himself with a shake of his head. She lowered the volume to silence again.
“Are they recording us?” He glanced at the dark bubble protecting a camera lens above the closed door.
“They watch to be sure there’s no touching. Martini could lose his license.”
Which probably didn’t stop the behavior from being tolerated if the dancer was willing and the customer was known to be discreet.
How would she react if he touched her?
He yanked his mind from going down that path.
“Why do you work here?” he asked in a voice that sat like grit in his throat.
“A deep need to express myself through the art of exotic movement.” She set the inside of one spiked heel against the base of the pole, picked up her inner leg, and grasped the pole as she leaned out, taking a slow spin around it.
Her long hair fell in a curtain that brushed his sleeve as she went by. She batted purple lashes at him and offered a buttery smile.
“You need the money,” he surmised.
She touched her nose.
“For?”
She straightened to set her back against the pole. “Are you going to sit? Lap dance is extra.”
“No.” He could afford as many bespoke trousers as he needed, but he didn’t throw them away by sitting in… He didn’t care to identify what those stains were.
This was a ridiculous room. There was no space to move without bumping into her.
Nowhere to escape the enticing image of cheap, shiny polyester lying against the swells of firm, high breasts.
He couldn’t avoid the glimpse of her black bra, or the firm length of her tanned thighs encircled by those tantalizing garters.
He wanted to tangle his fingers in them. Close his teeth on them.
“I was under the impression you were in a nursing program.”
“I am. Part-time. Why? Is my birth father offended by my career choice?”
“He doesn’t know.” Axel hadn’t known about it until he had landed and went to a bungalow in the suburbs to find her.
A matronly woman had answered the door, clutching her cardigan against the March wind as she studied him through round-rimmed glasses. She’s at work. Is there a problem?
Axel had said it was a legal matter. Concerned, the woman had helpfully told him where to find her.
Even at that, Axel had assumed Joy was serving drinks, not dancing in a place called Martini’s Cabaret. Not until he’d walked in and had his eyes nearly pulled from his skull by the raw sexuality she exuded.
He loathed feeling anything but completely in control of himself and his surroundings, but he hadn’t been able to look away from her.
She’d been mesmerizing. Bold in the way she met his gaze.
His mind was still imprinted with the image of lithe, muscled limbs, the shimmy of her generously endowed chest and the flex of her firm, rounded buttocks.
Every time he met her hazel gaze, his sexual awareness of her ratcheted up another notch. Looking into her eyes tempted him to look at her mouth with her lush upper lip, and her long throat that he wanted to trace down to—
No.
“If you need money, you should have replied to my messages.”
“Why would I do that when I can make you pay me to speak to you?” she mocked.
“I get twenty percent off the fee for this room. Are you sure you don’t want me to…
?” In a move of supple power, she brought her knee up, then caught her arm under her calf to finish drawing her leg up, up, up until she was holding herself in the splits against the pole, hugging her raised leg and artfully dropping her other hand to grasp the pole exactly where his gaze most wanted to zero in.
She rolled her shoulder, and the robe slipped off her shoulder. A seductive smile drew itself across her lips.
A fresh zing of lust struck below his belt, one that dulled his brain and dimmed his vision.
Before he realized what he was doing, he grasped the cool brass of the pole next to the ankle she held aloft.
He leaned near enough that his nose was a millimeter from hers, close enough to feel the electricity between them.
Her breath hitched, and her lashes quivered, but she didn’t move.
“No touching,” she reminded, lips parted enticingly. Her gaze traveled over his face, scraping like sensual nails against his control, until her stare landed on his mouth.
He was nearly pulled off his feet but held himself with steely discipline. “You want me to want you,” he noted in a rasp. “You think that gives you power over me. I do want you.”
Her startled gaze came back to his. Wariness entered her gaze, but a glow of wild excitement blossomed beneath it. That flare of reaction dug talons deeper into his libido, trying to drag it out to play.
“But I can wait until we’ve conducted our business,” he continued, never breaking eye contact. “Can you?”
He let the beast in him steal one thorough look, all the way down to where the hem of her robe had ridden up to expose the tops of her thighs. To the narrow band of black that revealed she waxed to a Brazilian. Or less.
He was fully hard, if she cared to notice. The thud of his heart was a hammering pulse behind his fly.
In an abrupt move, she bent her upper leg around the pole, forcing him to take a step back or catch a spiked heel in the face.
She seeming to defy gravity as she kicked her bottom leg out straight and spun in a slow circle, forcing him back another step, flashing him the frill that fluttered against the tops of her ass cheeks as she went by.
After three spins, she ended with both feet coming to rest on the floor.
“What I want,” she said as she lifted her chin and set her shoulders back, “is for you to touch me so you’ll get kicked out.”
Lie. She was meeting his gaze, but her color was high. Her nipples were pebbled hard enough to show against the twin layers of bra cups and robe. It wasn’t cold in here. Not at all. He was sweltering in his tie and jacket.
Damn it. This sexual pull between them was not something he’d factored into this arrangement, and he didn’t have time to recalibrate.
The stubborn street dog in him was fighting to take what was his.
He was determined to beat Otto at his own game and quickly, especially now that Mira had partnered with a man who had his own ax to grind.
If Axel didn’t take over Vorstoben soon, it might not be there at all.
He had wasted precious time trying to reach Joy through social media, then a couriered letter.
She had ignored both. After asking Umberto if she’d responded to his messages, and hearing Umberto confirm she hadn’t, Axel had invented an appointment in London and carried on here to Chicago to confront her in person.
“I don’t have time for games,” Axel stated. “I need you to take this seriously.”
She stiffened at his commanding tone, but unsnaked her arm from around the pole, shifting so she grasped it behind her back.
“Would you take it seriously if you received messages like these?” she challenged.
“My birth father wants to meet me, and I stand to inherit hundreds of millions of euros? Along with a company I have no idea how to run? And all I have to do is submit to a DNA test and show up in Germany? Then I will meet him and learn his name? Please,” she dismissed the idea with scorn.
“Would you like my bank details up front, so you can start pouring those millions into my account?”