The Dare Collection October 2018. Nicola Marsh
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href="#u1c87c939-af95-57f2-8cb2-e70794294911">CHAPTER SIX
IT TOOK ABOUT three seconds for the silence to get to Margot. They both sat back from the meal having eaten their fill in a way that felt a bit too much like fueling for an ultramarathon.
Or perhaps it was less the silence and more the way Thor was looking at her from the other side of the table as he lounged there. It made her skin feel too tight. It made her entirely too aware of the way she was—or wasn’t—breathing.
“I think this is a perfect opportunity to take a moment to reflect and reassess,” Margot began in her best professor’s voice, as if pretending she was delivering a lecture could help her feel a little safer in her own skin.
“This is a time for silence, Margot,” Thor replied, cutting her off, his voice low and dark. Or not dark, exactly. It was astounding how much he seemed a part of the blustery night outside that made the windows shudder. “No more talking. Isn’t that what you requested?”
She might have. She wasn’t sure she could remember her own name when he looked at her like that, much less what she might have said earlier.
Thor stood without another word and came around the table. He took her hand and lifted her to her feet there before him. And Margot let him. She more than let him. She went as easily as if these were steps to a dance they’d choreographed and practiced a thousand times before.
“I can’t promise I won’t say something.” Margot didn’t mind that she sounded defiant. But it was the shakiness in her voice that she was afraid might haunt her forever.
“You won’t.”
Thor reached down and plucked something from the table. It took her a moment to understand what it was. An untouched snow-white cloth napkin.
And it took her still another moment to understand why Thor was offering it to her.
Something slammed through her, dark and mad.
“You can’t be serious. You’re not going to put...” Margot’s words deserted her, especially when she saw all the intent in his gaze and the patience he wielded the way other men used their fists. “Why am I not surprised that you want to gag a woman?”
If she’d expected him to be offended at that, she was disappointed. His eyes gleamed as if she’d told a good joke.
“Women routinely beg me to gag them,” Thor murmured. “Among a great many other things I suspect you would pretend to find appalling.”
“I’m not sure I’d be pretending.”
That blue gleam intensified. “Do women whose desires differ from yours deserve to have them met?”
Margot scowled at him. “Of course.”
“I ask because I get the distinct impression that you use your academic reflections to judge these things.”
“Academic reflection is a conversation, not a condemnation.”
“What I think is that you hide in these words of yours. These ideas you have decided are true without having experienced them yourself. Meanwhile, you have no idea what your body wants because you talk yourself out of it.” Thor ran a finger down her cheek as if he found her scowl delightful, and smiled when goose bumps prickled to life across her shoulders at the light touch. “What I am offering you is a chance to explore that directly. What if you can’t speak? What would happen then?”
“I would be handing over my voice to a man, the way women have done for millennia. Why would that be appealing?”
“But this is not ‘millennia.’ This is here, now. Tonight. I am one man, not the whole of the patriarchy arrayed against you. And I don’t want to take your voice from you, Margot. I want to hear what other things you have to say when you can’t rely on your mouth.”
She stared at him for what felt like nine or ten millennia, if not more, but Thor only gazed back at her as if he could wait forever.
And somehow that let her ignore all the shrieking things in her head and focus on the places where she melted and ached for him. She thought about the dark fantasies she didn’t dare speak out loud and would have denied she had, if asked. The things she’d never told another living soul and hardly admitted to herself.
What he was offering was a chance to explore them. And if she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t talk herself out of it, could she?
“There has to be a signal,” she said, still scowling at him. “I have to be able to tell you to stop if I want you to stop.”
“There is a very simple signal. All you have to do is remove the gag. Then say whatever it is you wish to say. Tell me to stop. Tell me to never stop. Tell me whatever you like—but understand that the goal is to see if you can tell me all the things that go on in that beautiful head of yours without uttering a single word.”
There was a different sort of tremor making its way through her then. Margot shook, but on the inside. Her eyes felt too glassy, and she worried that all the uncertain, off-center things tilting and slopping around inside her were close to spilling over and revealing her.
You’ve already revealed yourself, a stern voice in her head chimed in then. Repeatedly.
But Margot knew, somehow, that there was so much more.
And she was worried about the things he might do to her. She was worried she might hate them—but if she was honest, she was far more concerned that she might not hate them at all.
And, most of all, she was worried that if she didn’t do it, if she didn’t take this opportunity no matter how it made her shake inside, no matter what it said about her or what it made her to even entertain the notion, she would regret it for the rest of her life.
It sat there between them, as stark and unrelenting as the coldly masculine room they stood in. As Thor himself, waiting there before her. As irrevocable as that pounding, swirling storm that beat at the windows and sounded too much like her terrified, deliriously wanton heart.
She didn’t want to do this. She only knew she had to, or die.
And it didn’t matter how many times Margot told herself she was being needlessly melodramatic. The feeling she had to do this—she had to—only grew the longer she stood there.
“What do you get out of it?” She hadn’t meant to ask that question, but once she had, she found she desperately wanted to know the answer. It was her turn to study Thor for a moment, and she found herself lingering on the sharp blades of his cheekbones as if they were clues. “What do you like about playing games like this?”
“Other than the sex?”
But she didn’t believe the lazy way he said that, as if all he cared about was getting his end away.
“This isn’t about sex. Or not only sex. If it was, you wouldn’t be quite so concerned with how I use my voice or what words I choose.”
“I don’t know that I would consider sex a game at all. Intimacy is not a few sets of tennis on a summer afternoon, is it?”
Margot was tempted to comment on the game of tennis itself, and more specifically its scoring system that used love to mean zero, but refrained. She had a feeling that what sounded clever in her head would sound very different here in this cavernous room with her very own Viking.
“If you play at it, is it really intimacy at all?” she asked instead.
“I am not certain that I am the one playing,” Thor said. He didn’t back away as he spoke. He stayed right where he was, big and tall and taking up entirely too much space without seeming to try very hard. Or notice it. “You are the one who needs a university-sanctioned research project to allow yourself to push your own boundaries. I do not require these masks and charades. If I want to fuck, I fuck. The end.”
It was something she knew firsthand