The Dare Collection October 2018. Nicola Marsh
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eyebrow at her over his shoulder.
She’d pulled herself up in the bed. Now she sat there with the sheet wrapped around her, hugging her own knees.
He would have thought she looked like a child had he not had an instantaneous response to those lush lips of hers that he had felt against his skin, but wasn’t allowed to taste.
“I beg your pardon, Professor. What limitations do you imagine I possess?”
Margot’s face changed as she gazed back at him, as if she had no idea what her mouth did to him. Her expression was equal parts wistfulness and something a lot more like resignation. “Everybody talks big, Thor. It’s part of the game. And I understand it—the urge, anyway.”
He found himself perilously close to a scowl and smoothed out his expression, faintly appalled at himself. “You are talking in circles. And I still don’t know what you’re on about.”
“In the heat of the moment I guess it makes everyone feel better to imagine they can go all night long,” Margot replied, and even let out a sad little laugh. If Thor was the sort of man who allowed his emotions to get involved with sex, the sound might have pierced him clean through. It was a happy thing indeed that he was not. “This is great as is, really.”
“Great?” he echoed.
“Really.”
For a moment he assumed she was needling him. Throwing down one of her challenges, because that was who she was—or who she thought she had to be, anyway. But the more he stared at her, there in the center of his bed, the more he was forced to face the disquieting notion that she was being completely sincere.
And it had been a long time since Thor had found himself anything even approaching tongue-tied. After all, he’d made his way in the world on the back of his much-vaunted charm. His ability to talk anyone into anything. It was how he’d managed to build his own little empire at a time when Iceland’s economics were shaky at best in the wake of the country’s financial collapse.
He didn’t really want to think about why it was that this purple-haired American was making him feel like a stranger to himself.
There was that hollow thing in his chest again that he didn’t recognize—and more, wanted nothing to do with.
And he had the distinct impression that talking about it would make it a whole lot worse.
Instead, he reached over and took hold of Margot’s arm. Then he pulled her toward him across the mattress, until she butted up against him. And the oddness inside him eased a little, because he liked the feel of her skin against his. Maybe too much.
“You could have asked me to come over to the side of the bed,” she pointed out, though he could hear the breathlessness in her voice as well as he imagined she could, there in the stillness of the room. “You certainly didn’t have to resort to caveman tactics.”
“If I was a caveman, I wouldn’t have been so gentle.”
Margot laughed. Then looked startled, as if she hadn’t meant to do that. And it was a different sounding laugh than the one before, as if she’d actually found him funny rather than finding the entire situation disappointing.
But what it meant to Thor was that he had one more item to add to a growing list of things he absolutely shouldn’t have been feeling. He made people laugh all the time. It was part of his job, in fact. There was absolutely no reason why this particular laughter should wind its way through him as if he was terribly thirsty and the sound was water.
Why was she getting to him this way?
Thor was doing his own head in.
“Up,” he clipped out at her, and when she didn’t move fast enough to suit him, he scooped her up in his arms instead.
He stalked across the length of his bedroom while Margot clung to him, her arms going around his neck with an ease that suggested she wasn’t as upset by his presumption as her expression suggested.
“Before you complain, a caveman would drag you by your hair, I believe. He would not carry you like this.”
She sniffed, but she didn’t let go of him. “I think you can agree that there is an inherent gender disparity in—”
“If you would like to pick me up, high against your chest, and then cart me across a room, Margot,” he said silkily, “you are welcome to do so at any time.”
Her face was so close to his like this, and he found his gaze drawn back to her lips. That mouth of hers that fascinated him far more than was likely healthy.
Thor had never thought too much about kissing. It was a part of things, yes. It was always on the menu. But he’d never been alive with the need to put his mouth on someone else’s. He’d never found himself daydreaming about how another person might taste. He’d never thought the fact that he was forbidden to kiss a woman might very well kill him.
Until now.
“The world would be a very different place if I could do that,” Margot said quietly, and he had the impression she’d spent longer than the last few seconds thinking about what it would be like to have a man’s strength. “History would have taken a very different path.”
“Perhaps.” Thor walked them both into his bathroom, which featured a walk-in shower with a variety of showerheads, perfect for a very large man and any situation he might find himself in. He had endeavored not to think too closely about why his birth father, a known libertine of the first order, might have required such a space. “But would you truly wish to live in that world?”
“Yes.”
“You seem so sure.”
“I’ve been pretty sure about equality and how I want it since I could spell it. And I taught myself how to read, and spell, really young.”
“Equality is a worthy goal, certainly. But that comes from inside. That is how we think. How we raise our children and what we demand of our leaders and fellow citizens, yes? It is in many ways an intellectual exercise. What we do with these bodies, that will never be the same no matter what we think—that is something else.”
He set her down just inside the glass doors of the shower and smiled when the frown he expected to see on her face was right there, as anticipated. But the floors in the bathroom were heated the same way everything was in Iceland, with all that geothermal goodness, and Margot sighed a little as her feet hit the tiles as if she’d expected to find them cold and unpleasant. And as if she was almost shocked when they weren’t.
That felt a bit too much like the sort of metaphor he had absolutely no desire to think about too closely, because sex wasn’t about metaphors. It was about sex—or he was doing it wrong.
Thor reached in and fiddled with the water until it was pouring down from all directions and steam billowed up. And he shoved metaphors out of his head, then told himself he wasn’t the least bit uneasy, or layered, or any of those other things he didn’t want to feel.
Just because this woman felt different, it didn’t mean he had to act any differently than he normally would.
He stepped inside the shower as well, nudging her to go farther when she hung back from the actual fall of the hot water.
“You look as if you might jump out of your skin at any moment,” he observed.
Next to him, Margot smiled, though it looked awkward. She slicked her hair back with both hands, making it look much darker with the wet and steam in it. And it was impossible, really, to notice anything on her face at all save her huge dark gold eyes. And that damned mouth.
Maybe, Thor thought then, he was the one who was damned.
“I’m not used to all this...naked time,” she said after a moment.
Thor ordered himself to stop staring at her mouth like a crazed person. To try to summon up some of that charm of his he’d