Kitabı oku: «The Dare Collection October 2018», sayfa 9

And yet there was something in her that wanted—needed—to explain.

The worst part was the little voice whispering that the need came from the same place as the part of her that had loved kneeling down before him. The part of her that had drifted off into the kinds of fantasies she normally strictly forbade herself to have, because they were remnants of patriarchal harm that every woman carried around inside her. They weren’t real. She’d never allowed herself to believe they could possibly be real.

She should have forbidden herself this, too. And yet here she was, opening up her mouth.

“Sex is fascinating,” she told him as if her life depended on it. As if she was on trial. “Why wouldn’t I want to study it? You’ve built your life around sex, too, as far as I can tell.”

“I built my life around pleasure. I’m not sure it’s the same thing.”

“What interests me are the ways that sexuality fuels change. If it does.” She thought about the things she’d wanted him to do in that shower. The way she’d wanted to exult in his strength, his control. “What it means if it does. Can a philosophical need translate into a sexual one?”

“That sounds as if you think we are all able to pick and choose our sexualities.”

“I don’t think that.” She shifted against the couch. “But I do think that we have a responsibility to make certain our expression of our sexualities doesn’t betray our principles.”

Thor sighed and ran one of his big hands through his hair. “You either think something is hot or you don’t, Professor. It either gets you off or it doesn’t. The end.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Which is why you have created this life of yours that celebrates all the many ways you have complicated basic needs.”

“Because you know best, of course. I can’t possibly know myself or what I actually find hot. It can’t be that people are different and want different things.”

“I don’t know about people in general,” Thor said with that mildness that the heat in his gaze completely contradicted, and it made her stomach twist, then drop. “But I do know about you. Or maybe you’ve forgotten already.”

“I had a few orgasms, yes,” Margot threw back at him, and forced herself to unclench her teeth. “Forgive me if I don’t think that makes you a god.”

“I am not the one who considers myself a sex god. Nor am I the one who found each successive orgasm quite so overwhelming. This leads me to imagine that you are not so used to coming and coming and then coming again. And that, Professor, suggests that the kind of sex you are used to having is perhaps a little too intellectual.”

“There’s no such thing as too intellectual,” she gritted out.

“If you say so.”

“There’s nothing wrong with intellect. Thinking is not a bad thing.”

He didn’t laugh, but she could see the gleam of it in his blue gaze. “I don’t believe I said it was.”

“I’m not embarrassed by the fact I’m more intellectual than physical. I like it that way.”

Thor smiled. “And yet you are the one who appears upset. You are the one who feels there must be a separation between your head and your body.”

Margot realized she was clenching her fists in frustration and forced herself to straighten out her fingers before she tore the airy cashmere draped around her.

“My father was an academic, too,” she said after a moment, and she had no idea where that had come from. She never talked about her family. But tonight had been filled with things she never did. “He’s a remarkably intelligent man who could spend days playing chess and conducting rousing debates. I was raised to prize that kind of intellectual engagement above all things. And I discovered as I grew that I agreed with the way I was raised. That I want the same things.”

“Chess and a rousing debate.”

“Yes.” She lifted her chin. “I like people who arrange their lives around ideas.”

“Let me guess. The only way your father gave you any kind of attention was if you proved your intellect to him.”

Too late Margot realized her mistake. She didn’t want to talk about her father like this. Or at all. She didn’t want to tear apart her family’s dynamics and expose them here in this powerfully strange place. She didn’t want to talk about what it had been like to be raised the only child of towering intellect and swaggering academic genius Ronald Cavendish. She didn’t want to recount the number of times she had fallen short of her father’s expectations, confronted over and over again with her own limitations. Or the many ways she still did.

And she definitely didn’t want to talk about her mother. Or all the ways Margot had learned since her earliest days that a marriage that wasn’t between intellectual equals was like a stifling prison at best and something far grimmer than that at worst. She’d seen it with her own eyes. She’d lived it.

So instead she frowned at the door as if she could make their food come quicker that way. And so she didn’t have to watch the way Thor was studying her and likely seeing far too much.

“Fathers are tricky,” she said. “Take yours, while we’re on the subject.” He went very still at that, there beside her, but he didn’t protest. So she forged on ahead. “Your last name, for example. Shouldn’t it be Danielsson rather than Ragnarsson? Your actual father’s name was Daniel St. George.”

“Thank you. I am aware of Iceland’s patronymic conventions.” He sighed, but she’d been looking at the door. By the time she turned to him, he was only gazing back at her in that mild way that made her wonder how he got anyone to believe he wasn’t wildly dangerous when it was that very studied languidness that announced it. “My mother married my stepfather before she had me, and when she did, they both decided to give me his name because my mother never expected to see my father again. And indeed, she did not.”

It was as if being around this man had opened up dark pockets inside her that she had never known were there. Because she felt something like envy at his flippant, careless tone. The things he said should have been upsetting, surely. But Thor didn’t look upset in the least. He merely lounged there, as if there was no story at all to how he came to be raised as another man’s son.

Meanwhile, Margot couldn’t say anything bad had ever happened to her outside of her father’s disappointment in her. She hadn’t been treated badly. Her needs had always been met. Her parents had supported her academic aspirations all the way. So why wasn’t she relaxed and flippant in turn?

“I’m no tremendous intellect, but even a dullard like me recognizes an attempt to change the subject when it appears before him,” Thor said quietly.

“I do not have daddy issues,” Margot snapped.

“Then you would be remarkable indeed.” His blue gaze was kind, and Margot found that unacceptable because it made her want to cry. “Are we not all stitched together by our pasts? And is the thread not often the color of the people who raised us?”

Margot could feel her heartbeat, each thud like a nail into a coffin. Her coffin, she had no doubt.

“I don’t want to talk about needlework,” she threw at him. “I don’t want to talk at all. You told me Icelanders communicate with sex, not idle chitchat.”

“I would not call something that makes you this upset idle, Professor.”

“I’m not upset.” When the elevator sounded from the main room, announcing the arrival of their food, she was almost pathetically grateful. She forced herself to smile. “But maybe I’m a little bit hungry.”

Thor took his time getting to his feet. He kept his gaze on her, and Margot would have given anything to look away. To hide. To pull on her clothes and run.

But she couldn’t seem to move.

“Very well,” he said after a moment, when he was standing there before her again. “I look forward to all the epic, athletic, silent sex we’ll be having once you replenish your energy stores and restore your delightful mood.”

“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? I’m tired of all this talking.”

Because she couldn’t seem to help herself. And because anything was better than the unwieldy things sloshing around inside her, threatening to tip over and poison her there and then.

His smile was like a weapon. “I’ll endeavor not to hold myself back any longer, then, shall I?”

Thor left her there as he walked toward the elevator, her heart like a lump in her throat and her body alive with a new sort of fire, wondering what fresh hell she’d dropped herself in this time.

And why she couldn’t seem to do anything but stay right where she was.

Shivering with anticipation.

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 now, though Margot found she still couldn’t quite believe it. Not quite. No matter that she was close enough to naked and could still feel him all over her, like a new tattoo.

“But sometimes you do it with gags. And whips and chains or other such implements in a dungeon built for precisely that sort of transgressive sex, presumably.”

“You seem unduly concerned with a dungeon you have never seen.” Thor laughed, a low, rolling scrape of sound that made her feel entirely too warm. “If you would like to experience it, Professor, you need only ask. Here in this hotel we exist to satisfy your every desire.”