Chapter Five
SHE BARKED OUT a laugh. Because he had to be joking. How could he not be?
“With a sturdy prenup,” he said as though he hadn’t blurted out something so absurd she had already dismissed it. “After a year, we’ll quietly divorce and go back to our separate lives.”
“This conversation has officially jumped the shark.” She walked across to pick up her bag and jacket again.
“You promised to listen.”
She removed the credit card from her jean pocket and left it on the coffee table.
He picked up a manila envelope from the end table and dropped it next to the credit card. It landed with a slap.
She froze. “What is that?” she asked suspiciously.
“The letter from your birth mother to your father.” He sat back. “And a list of assets you’re in line to inherit along with a copy of the contract that proves you will inherit the lion’s share of your birth father’s fortune if you marry me. You’ll be very wealthy, Joy.”
“I don’t care for this judgy attitude of yours.” She waggled her finger at him. “Acting like I’m driven solely by money.”
“I don’t judge you for that.” His brow quirked as though he was affronted by the accusation. “Everyone is driven by money to some extent. I’m here because I want the piece of your fortune that was promised to me. Sit down.” He nodded at the sofa. “Let me explain.”
She told her feet to take her to the door, but the envelope and its secrets called to her.
She inched back to stand on the far side of the coffee table from him, arms folded, staring down at the envelope as though it contained a viper that would slither out and sink its fangs into her.
But she was too fascinated by its sway to look away.
“Your father is Otto Braun.”
“The father of your fiancée.” She lifted her surprised gaze to his.
“Ex,” he corrected. “And he’s not her father. But you’ve got the gist of it.” He leaned forward to set down his glass and opened the envelope. He shook out its contents across the tabletop. Catching at the corner of a photo, he drew it away from the rest, pushing it toward her.
She picked up the photo and studied the man who was well-kempt with a longish face and a neatly trimmed white beard. He carried some middle-age weight and his features were lined by age. He was handsome, but there was a certain hardness to his expression.
Was this really where she had come from? She slowly sank onto the sofa, feeling porous and suddenly needing to absorb everything Axel could tell her.
He reached forward again and pushed a photograph of a woman toward her. “Lorena Fontaine. French. She moved to New York when she became pregnant and returned to Europe a few years later.”
Joy picked up the dated photo of a woman taken when Lorena was close to Joy’s twenty-four.
She was elegant in a timeless way, wearing a dress with chiffon sleeves and holding a cigarette in two fingers.
Her lips were tilted in a half smile around a whistling exhale of smoke, as though she was amused by whoever was taking her photo.
Joy recognized enough of herself in the woman’s features to feel knocked off her equilibrium. Her body reacted as though she’d been pushed or struck or grabbed. Her blood was singing with adrenaline, urging her to run. Or fight.
“This is her letter to your father. They rekindled their affair about five years after your birth. His wife was still alive then.” He found a photocopy of a handwritten letter and offered it to her.
A notarized translation into English was stapled behind it.
“Lorena says she knew he wouldn’t forgive her for giving you up, but when she was diagnosed with lung cancer, she decided to tell him about you.
I don’t see any reason she would lie about him being your father.
Not if she was waiting until after her death to inform him. What did she have to gain?”
He fell silent while Joy scanned the translation. There wasn’t much more to it than what he had just said. Lorena mentioned the name of the adoption agency and hoped that Otto would provide your daughter the lifestyle she ought to have had.
Joy had always felt like she was her birth mother’s dirty little secret. Learning that Lorena had waited until after her death to tell her father reinforced that impression, sending a deep pang into her heart.
“Does she have any family? Do they know about me?” she asked, trying to keep the husk from her voice.
“I couldn’t say. Her parents are gone, but her brother is still alive. I have no idea if that’s something she would have shared with him.”
“Especially if she wasn’t even telling her baby’s father.” Joy frowned, trying to understand. Trying not to be stung by her complete erasure from her blood relatives’ lives.
“Given the timing of their second affair, my suspicion is that Otto had recently learned his wife had also had an affair. The child he believed was his daughter was not.”
“Mira.” She lowered Lorena’s photo into her lap.
“Yes. Until I learned that, I couldn’t understand Otto’s ambivalence toward her.
” Axel was doing a good job of seeming completely impassive, but a muscle ticked in his cheek.
“I don’t imagine Otto was in a mood to hear he had a biological daughter he couldn’t claim.
I’m guessing that’s why Lorena didn’t tell him and wound up breaking things off again. ”
“But now he knows and wants to meet me?” She was having trouble controlling her expression, feeling her mouth wobbling toward a smile even as her chin crinkled anxiously.
“I’ll be frank with you, Joy.” He leaned forward, and his hard voice gave her inner child a pinch on the arm, then twisted it. “Otto wants to use you to keep me at Vorstoben.”
She frowned. “Isn’t that what you want?”
“Not exactly.” He picked up his drink and sat back.
“I want to quit working for him and work for myself. I told him two years ago that I was leaving to open my own firm. I wasn’t intending to compete directly with him.
Vorstoben takes on complex, billion-dollar projects.
Factories and resorts. I’ve always seen a need for highly skilled, bespoke services.
Projects that are challenging in a different way.
When I told him I was leaving, Otto promoted me to CEO.
He said he would retire once I married his daughter and gift us the company after a year of marriage.
He let me believe all this time that his daughter was Mira. ”
“Oh.” Until Axel said that, his proposal had been a joke.
Now the determination she read in him was rolling over her like a cool, frothy tide.
It should have frozen her to the bone, but it rocked her while sand shifted beneath her feet.
Nothing was solid. She was being tossed around and tugged out to sea.
Tugged by a god who would not take no for an answer.
That’s been called off. You’re the woman I’m looking for.
Her heart began to thud as though he was pursuing her through the dark city streets.
“I agreed to his offer.” He was still holding her gaze, filling her ears with the smooth timbre of his voice.
“I poured myself into Vorstoben, believing it would be mine as soon as Mira and I married. He wouldn’t let us set a date.
Wouldn’t finalize the terms.” He took a gulp of scotch and bared his teeth at the burn.
“A month ago, I said I wouldn’t wait any longer.
He offered me this.” He took up a slim envelope from the pile and unfolded what looked like a contract of several pages.
“It promises that if I marry his biological daughter, he’ll honor the terms he set two years ago.
That was when Mira and I both learned she isn’t his daughter. And that you are.”
“That’s how he told her?” She didn’t know Mira, but she felt the other woman’s shock on a visceral level, and the unmooring sensation it must have caused her. “That’s horrible. Why do you even work for someone who acts like that?”
“Call it a deep need to express myself through executive movement,” he said with heavy sarcasm.
“He gave me opportunities and valuable experience when I needed it. That inspired a certain loyalty in me, but you’re right.
He’s not nice. On the other hand, he’s made it clear he won’t leave the company to Mira, so I’m not trying to steal it from her. I only want what he promised me.”
“I don’t understand how you think he could use me, though?”
“He’ll offer you his fortune if you marry me,” he said simply and pointed at the contract. “He knows damned well that you would feel this hesitancy you’re showing. Who would marry a stranger? It’s a ridiculous ask.”
“Thank you.” These were the first sensible words he’d said all night.
“He would use your reservation to string me along, but I’ve reached the end of my forbearance.
According to this contract…” he gave the pages a ruffle “…upon marrying me, Otto’s biological daughter stands to inherit all of this.
” He filtered through the papers again and showed her a list of properties.
The value tallied up to a hefty nine figures.
The largest asset was Vorstoben, making up more than half.
Joy almost swallowed her tongue.
“I imagine Lorena felt some guilt at denying you the fortune you were entitled to inherit, once she realized Otto was balking at leaving it to Mira.”
“But that’s adoption.” Joy shot to her feet and paced away in agitation.
“You can drive yourself crazy thinking about the life you might have had if you had been raised by your birth mother. I’m really happy with the upbringing I had, though.
” Wendy hadn’t been able to get pregnant again after having David.
She had longed for a daughter, and Joy had arrived days after David started school.
Joy had had her full, doting attention. “Mom and I were super close. That’s why I waited until she was gone to even contact the agency.
I’ve never had fantasies that anyone would come along and rescue me. ”