Chapter Six
AXEL REFUSED TO check his watch.
Aside from how it would affect his battle with Otto, being left at the altar was not something that would bother him too much.
The only guest was his bride’s father, who wasn’t here yet because he was coming with Joy.
The ceremony was being held in a quiet, hundred-year-old mansion on the lakeshore.
An equally small brunch would be wasted, but most of what Axel had spent on bribing Joy to agree to this marriage could be stopped or recouped.
Axel had never aspired to marry anyway, not until Otto had made it a vehicle to getting something he wanted.
Agreeing to marry Mira had been an easy choice.
A safe one. Until the last time he’d seen her, Mira had always been even-keeled and cooperative.
Axel had liked that about her. She had never riled more emotion out of him than sympathy or a snort of amusement at one of her facetious comments.
Marrying Joy would not be that inert.
Which bothered him. He had been shoved around by life enough that he no longer allowed it. Coming here to marry Otto’s “real” daughter was him grabbing the wheel on his future, refusing to be driven by anyone’s will but his own.
Yet here he was, tying himself to a woman who was already igniting more reaction in him than he’d allowed himself to feel in years.
It was sexual, of course. He couldn’t get the vision of her undulating, nearly naked body out of his head. He had had to take himself in hand more than once over the last day and a half just to be able to think.
But she was scrappy, too, not giving ground easily. It was annoying to come up against. He’d risen to a level where few people pushed back on him, but he couldn’t help but respect her for it. She would need that feistiness, given what he was asking of her.
He was asking a lot, he had realized, once he met her father and saw how severely Paul was impacted by his condition.
“I told him we’ve been dating a while,” Joy had confided yesterday when he had arrived to take her to the courthouse for their license.
“I said I hadn’t mentioned you because I wasn’t sure how serious we were, but that you asked me to come live with you in Europe.
I said I would only go with you if you married me first, so you proposed.
I didn’t mention Otto.” She grimaced at the lies and omissions.
“I didn’t want to fully stop his heart.”
They had detoured through a jewelry shop on their way back to the house. Joy had looked at modest solitaires, but Axel had picked out a three-stone engagement ring with channel-set baguettes down the shank. The band was a matching design.
Then he played the part of a doting bridegroom when she introduced him to Paul. That had given him the excuse to hold her hand and touch her waist, and he’d found it entirely too gratifying to see goose bumps rise on her arm when he did.
Her reaction made it easy to convince her father that they were smitten and had to be together, but Axel didn’t like how much he felt it within himself. Each minute he spent with her planted another seed of want in him. Another fantasy of having her in his bed every night.
After a childhood of wanting things he couldn’t have, he’d hardened himself against needing much. He liked his creature comforts—who didn’t?—and he was willing to work hard to afford them, but aside from food, water and shelter, he didn’t need anything.
He didn’t need this marriage, he insisted to himself. Especially to a woman who provoked such prickly discord in him. Such want. He’d be better off if she didn’t show up.
In a failure of willpower, he dragged his brooding gaze off the black marble of the fireplace and looked over his shoulder.
Heskel hurried up to him from his position by the door.
He lowered his voice as though there was an audience of guests when there was only the pianist and the officiant, both of whom had given up trying to make small talk with Axel and were speaking to each other in hushed tones on the other side of the room.
“I just had a text from the driver,” Heskel said. “There was a delay leaving the house. Her brother called. Explanations had to be made. They’ll be here shortly.”
Axel nodded, and Heskel went back to his position.
Axel ignored the pound of his relieved pulse in his ears. He told himself he was only pleased he would get what he’d been striving for most of his life: true self-reliance.
Too much of his life had been lived in circumstances he couldn’t control, answering to people with more power than he had.
Why do you work for someone like that?
Axel’s sarcastic reply about working his own pole had been all too true. He had grasped what was available in order to pull himself up.
His parents had been children themselves, ill-equipped to raise him.
There’d been drugs and arguing and petty crimes even before his father had been killed in a bar fight.
Axel had had no say when he was taken away and given back to his mother.
The foster system might have ensured he had clean clothes and vouchers for food, but he’d been disparaged for being a drain on the system. For being poor.
At twelve, desperate for money that didn’t involve following his parents into unsavory means, he’d lied about his age and got his first job pushing a broom at a building site.
His coworkers, grown men, had laughed at him, calling him a weed and a bookworm because he never laughed and scribbled through his homework while eating a jelly sandwich in two bites like a feral dog.
But he’d been able to keep his landlord from evicting them from the squalid room they occupied and that had been something.
Learn a trade, a bricklayer had advised him when he was fourteen and showing competence at anything he was taught.
He’d been strong in math and already understood drawings and building principles.
He applied to a trade school at sixteen, thinking to become an electrician, but the career counselor at school had encouraged him to aim higher.
So he’d studied engineering. Between his university classes and his night watchman job, he interned at Vorstoben, specializing in industrial projects. They hired him full-time the day he graduated with honors.
Axel hadn’t rested on his laurels. He continued his education, taking a master’s degree in business management, drawing the attention of his superiors. Eventually, the big man himself had noticed him.
Otto’s mentorship had meant something to him. No one else had backed him in the same way. He had been loyal to Otto. That was what made Otto’s bait-and-switch betrayal so galling.
That was what made Axel so determined to get what he had been promised.
Voices murmured at the entryway. Heskel nodded at the pianist to take her seat and for the officiant to stand before Axel, then he opened the pair of doors wide.
Gentle notes began to fill the room.
Axel’s bride entered, and all his ire and grim memories evaporated.
Nothing about her appearance was extravagant.
Her makeup was far more understated than the night he’d met her.
Her gown was a creamy satin that draped in a slim column down her graceful form.
Her sleeves fell in folds off her shoulders, leaving her upper chest bare but for a silver locket that looked like an heirloom.
Her hair fell in big curls held back from her face with a band of white flowers.
Her bouquet was only three peach-colored roses with a sprig of greenery.
She was undeniably beautiful, but her true beauty was in the way she looked at her father.
The expression on her face wrapped a fist around Axel’s lungs and squeezed.
That’s love, he thought as she walked slowly, very slowly, alongside her father’s struggling, lopsided gait.
Axel had never seen such a blatant display of that particular emotion.
He wouldn’t have known how to recognize it, if he hadn’t had the context of knowing how much that man meant to her.
Guilt pinched his conscience. He had extorted her cooperation by leaning heavily on her love for her father, thinking nothing of taking her away from the warm fold of her family and dropping her into a war zone.
Otto would never look at her the way Paul did, with pride and tender affection.
Joy glanced at Axel, sending another punch into his chest because her expression shone with poignant gratitude. I want my father to walk me down the aisle.
Of all the things he’d bribed her with, this was the one that meant the most to her? A strange lump formed in his throat, one he reflexively cleared, pushing away sentiment.
This marriage was a means to an end for both of them. That was all.
Joy and Paul arrived before him. She stooped so her father could kiss her cheek, then watched him shuffle to his seat before she faced Axel again.
Now there was somberness in her pouted mouth and trepidation in her eyes. The petals on her bouquet trembled.
All Axel could think was that he wanted to touch her. Seize her.
A prickle of alarm went through him. He never allowed himself to feel anything deeply, but this was intense and carnal and sharp. Chaotic. He wanted to claim her as badly—maybe more—than the things their marriage would gain him.
Which should have been a red flag.
It was.
But he ignored it.
“You look beautiful,” he told her, then ordered the officiant, “Begin.”
* * *
“Thank you for being here today,” the officiant began.
Run, the adrenaline in Joy’s veins kept urging.
Call it off, her brother had insisted, not buying for a second that she’d been having a secret affair with a foreign tycoon. What the hell is really going on?
She didn’t know. It had all happened so fast. The twenty-four hours she might have used for second thoughts had been eaten up by lawyer visits and interviewing nursing staff and shopping for a dress.