The Dare Collection October 2018. Nicola Marsh
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had dressed. More than simply dressed. He was wearing the kind of suit that made it perfectly clear that he was a man of international clout. It was dark and cut to flatter, making him look taller, somehow. More beautiful, if such a thing was possible. He held one hand on the top of his head, as if he’d started to rake it through his blond hair but had forgotten to complete the action.
And Margot was fiercely, fervently glad that he couldn’t see her. That she had a moment without that piercing blue stare of his boring into her. That she could take a breath or two to compose herself. Hell, to remember herself. To try to put the jumble of thoughts and sensation into some kind of order without knowing he was watching her do it.
She had only the vaguest memories of what had happened there before the fire after that last, intense round of this game that didn’t feel anything like a game at all. She had no idea how long they’d lain there together. She’d been slightly aware when he’d moved them to the couch, and she knew that he had slept there with her for some time. She had no memory of him leaving her, and even less of him covering her up.
She was almost certain it was morning, though she supposed it could be later on into the day, with all that snow.
Margot felt like a different person.
She found her fingers on her mouth, as if she expected to feel bruised there. But she thought that really, if there were any marks, they would be inside her. She felt torn apart. Rearranged.
Changed beyond recognition.
She pulled the duvet more tightly around her and took stock of her body, realizing with an uneasy sort of sensation that even her own limbs didn’t feel like hers any longer.
Margot had dedicated her life to the pursuit of knowledge, but Thor had taught her—over and over and over again—how very little she knew about something as basic and fundamental as sex.
She’d spent her adult life studying something she had never experienced—not really, not like this or anything near this—and she suspected that, given time, she would find that horrifying. And maybe also sad.
She felt too many things, all at once, and her experience with that damned napkin had already taught her too well.
She didn’t try to interpret them. She didn’t try to analyze them.
It was as if they rolled through her, one wave and then the next. A deep kind of regret that she had never known what she was missing. That she had been so certain she was in the position to lecture on the topic of sex in the first place when all the sex she had ever had before had been so...deficient. There was an exultant kind of exhilaration that her body could do those things. That she could feel those things. That she was capable of so much she hadn’t even known was possible.
Looking at Thor made her sad. Furious. Giddy. And so silly that she could feel a smile on her mouth for absolutely no reason at all.
One wave and then the next.
She felt ashamed that it had taken a gag in her mouth to teach her how to find her voice. She had a picture of herself in her head, that napkin in her mouth and her hand between her legs, and she felt it, too. The memory turned her on even as it made something in her stomach turn over, as if she thought she ought to find it sickening. But mostly it just made her hot all over again.
She felt.
And Margot had no earthly idea how she was ever going to manage to put these things she felt into any kind of order. How she was ever to make sense of them.
Thor finished his conversation and tossed his phone on the desk that spread there across the whole of one wall in a kind of nook that prevented her from seeing his numerous screens straight on. He didn’t turn around. He stayed where he was, staring out the window, and Margot thought she would give anything at all to see the expression on his face.
But when he turned, she had the sense that he’d known that she was awake and watching him all along, because his expression was wiped clean.
For a moment they only stared at each other, all the rambling, empty space of the penthouse between them.
Margot thought there was a whole lot more distance than that. And more, she could feel it gape wider and more impassable inside her the longer they did nothing but...look at each other.
When his phone rang again, it was a relief.
Thor held her gaze for a long moment. The ringing continued, but he didn’t move to answer anything and she wasn’t sure what she saw in his face. It wasn’t as simple as resignation. His eyes were too blue for that. And she was sure that all that aloofness she’d noticed before was different now.
Everything is different now, something intoned, deep inside her.
His phone kept ringing.
“I have to take this,” he told her, almost stiffly, in a voice that didn’t sound loud at all and yet managed to echo down the length of the great room.
Margot inclined her head as if she was giving him her permission. And she could see Thor didn’t like it. If she were a better person, she would have offered to remove herself to the next room while he handled his business.
But this was the man who’d encouraged her to put a fucking napkin in her mouth.
“Intimacy takes many forms, doesn’t it?” she replied, also pitching her voice to carry. “It’s really the gift that keeps on giving.”
She saw temper flash across Thor’s face, but he didn’t argue with her any further. He turned back to his office and rummaged for something on his desktop. Not that anyone would have known it was the desktop. Margot hadn’t seen the desk before, and it took her perhaps too long to realize that was because it was the sort of desk that could be hidden away in a cabinet. Imagine that. A whole life that could be easily tucked away from prying eyes whenever the mood took him.
It seemed she knew more about Thor than she’d realized. That she had been right on target, in fact.
Margot waited to feel a surge of triumph, but it was something else that moved in her, making her feel a little too close to a man who was standing as far away as it was possible to get from her while still being in the same sprawling penthouse.
“It’s angled,” Thor said, which made no sense. “You’re not in the frame.”
She didn’t understand that, or why he hadn’t answered that ringing, but then the huge, flat screen on the wall behind his desk area bloomed into life and color.
“Why do you always look like you’re standing in a fucking morgue?” came a low, raspy voice with an American accent. Not just a random, unplaceable American accent that could have been from anywhere, but one laced with hints of the South and a faint, dirty drawl.
Margot sank down on the couch, suddenly entirely too aware that Thor was on a video call and she was naked. Covered up in a comforter, sure. Out of frame, he’d said. But she was naked all the same, and that felt...wrong when there was another voice. And when it sounded like that.
“I assume you mean that my Nordic sensibilities offend you,” Thor was saying in reply.
And he sounded...not quite like the man she thought she’d come to know over the course of a night that Margot felt had lasted several lifetimes already. Something scraped at her, thick and insistent, and she realized that he sounded like the Thor she had met downstairs last night. There in the bar, when he’d come up behind her and she’d thought he was nothing but another hotel guest. Who’d been attempting to hit on her.
It made her feel a little dizzy to think about how different things were now. How much a single night had changed them both.
“Sensibilities don’t offend me, brother,” the same voice replied.
“Aloha, motherfuckers,” a third voice chimed in then. Richer, darker. And with a lilting sort of hint of an accent that Margot found unfamiliar but assumed went along with the Hawaiian greeting.
She