Kitabı oku: «Unleashed», sayfa 2

CHAPTER TWO

THE PROFESSOR HAD purple hair.

Well, it was more properly a deep lavender. It cascaded over her shoulders and caught the light, and was almost impossible not to reach out and touch.

But he managed it.

It wasn’t as if Thor had never seen brightly colored hair on a woman before. Still, he had never met a woman so determined to present herself as profoundly serious while supporting such...unserious hair.

The contrast intrigued him.

But then, everything about Margot Cavendish was intriguing.

Why had she come all the way to his hotel in the middle of a storm, for example, only to pretend that it was some kind of accident? It wasn’t as if Thor was a hermit. He made it into Reykjavík often. It would have been easy enough for this American professor to camp out in one of his city clubs if she really wanted to run into him.

Thor did not believe in accidents. He’d been running Hotel Viking for almost six months now, ever since the man he did not consider his father in any real sense had left it to him in that odd will. The same will that had also presented Thor with two half brothers he’d never met—and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. And one thing he’d learned in his months as the proprietor of the world’s finest and most remote purveyor of fantasies was that no one rolled up to this place by accident.

Oh, they might tell themselves otherwise. They might make up all kinds of stories to convince themselves they hadn’t meant to come here. As if it was possible to accidentally end up in Iceland. Or to take a wrong turn in the middle of Reykjavík and end up hours away on a lonely little peninsula that was near absolutely nothing but the pitiless sea.

It never took long to reveal that, in point of fact, they’d been heading for Hotel Viking all along.

Thor led the prickly, lavender-haired professor out of his sumptuous bar, built to be an endless celebration of luxurious sin. He nodded at the bartender as he went, smiling when he saw that one of the guests—a Mr. Oliveras from Portugal—was chatting Kristjan up.

“Do you let your employees date your guests?” his professor asked as they passed.

Thor was fairly certain that was a touch of judgment he heard in her tone. But that wouldn’t surprise him. Thor had yet to meet an American—no matter how supposedly liberal—who didn’t carry that country’s moralistic roots inside themselves somewhere.

He allowed that he found that just as fascinating, having not a shred of the puritanical anywhere in him. At all.

“Some establishments that cater to the kinds of sexual fantasies we do have all kinds of draconian regulations about the behavior of staff toward guests, but Hotel Viking isn’t one of them.” Thor smiled down at her and wondered why he so badly wanted to taste that intriguing little furrow between her eyes as she frowned at him, very obviously thinking at him. “Our staff are encouraged to follow their passions as they like.”

“That sounds problematic.”

“Only if you find happy, satisfied and loyal employees problematic. I do not.”

He kept one hand in the small of Margot’s back as he moved her through the big bar doors and back into the gleaming lobby, as much to maintain contact with her as to guide her anywhere.

And also because he suspected any hint of chivalry would irritate her. The more irritated she was, the more likely she was to stay off balance.

And Thor had a powerful urge to rattle this woman, just a little. Just enough. To peel away her composure and see beneath it.

He had thought she was attractive from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, stalking across his hotel and then sitting as far away as it was possible to get from the place while still being in it. But it was something else again to talk with her.

Especially when she’d been so committed to shutting down what she’d seen as his unwelcome advances. Thor couldn’t remember the last time he’d been rejected. He’d enjoyed the experience, if he was honest.

And he’d enjoyed her.

Thor liked her brain—especially when he could see her using it.

At him.

He’d always had a thing for smart women, but he found himself particularly intrigued by Margot, who seemed to be so delightfully unaware of her own body’s needs and the way she was broadcasting them. He could feel her anticipation even now. It was like a hum just beneath her skin and he could feel it in the fingertips that grazed her back.

Thor led her across the lobby, smiling at Freyja behind the main desk, and headed for his private elevator far in the corner.

“Let me guess. You’re taking me to your dungeon.”

Thor studied Margot as they stepped into the lift and she put as much distance between them as it was possible to get in such a small, enclosed space.

“I can tell that you are joking,” he said after a moment. “But perhaps not entirely joking, yes?”

“Of course I’m joking.” She sounded fierce. But Thor noticed that it wasn’t until the elevator doors were closed behind them and the lift moved upward that she released the breath she was holding. Her shoulders inched down from around her ears.

“Professor, you must trust me on this, if nothing else,” he murmured, enjoying himself far more than he should. “You are in no way ready for the dungeon.”

He was fascinated anew by the flush that stained her cheeks and swept down her neck. And the suggestion of heat—and a thousand questions—in her gaze.

And more than all that, the fact she didn’t reply.

Thor felt certain that her silence said a great deal more than she likely wished to reveal.

“Why no kissing?” he asked mildly as the lift rose, slow and steady. He lounged across from her, crossing his arms and his legs at the ankle as if they were off to discuss something prosaic. Numbers, perhaps. Or taxes.

Margot frowned. “You agreed.”

He couldn’t quite hide his smile. “I agreed, yes. I’m wondering why.”

“Because it made more sense that way.” She blinked, as if she hadn’t wanted to say that. Or not quite that way. “Kissing is too...”

“Intimate?”

He watched another flush of color move over her face, deeper this time, making an interesting counterpoint to the lavender of her hair. It made her look prettier, though that shouldn’t have been possible. It made her look delicate, and oddly young in contrast to the scowling severity she had exuded down at the bar.

And he felt that like a long, hot lick down the length of his cock.

“Kissing is something you do in a relationship,” Margot declared as if she had a doctorate in the subject. It was possible she did. “It has no place in this sort of arrangement.”

“You say that with great authority. Have you had many such arrangements?”

“We already agreed that this is for research, Mr.—” She stopped herself. “Thor. There’s no need to confuse the issue.”

He shrugged. “I cannot say that I have ever found kissing confusing.”

“You also consider sex to be about as intimate as a handshake. It’s possible that you’re not really the ideal control group for this experiment.”

That amused him. “I can tell the difference between sex and a handshake.”

He wondered if she realized that she had crossed her arms over her chest, too. Mirroring him, perhaps. Or Thor supposed it was possible she was simply naturally defensive. Either way, that awkward bristling, endearing as it was, melted away the more professorial she got.

He filed that away.

“You said downstairs that you get to know people through sex.”

“There is little that’s more revealing. I mean that literally, of course.” His mouth curved. “As the participants are usually naked.”

“And modesty is not a huge concern here, is that right?”

“It is my belief that false modesty has no place anywhere,” Thor replied. “But Icelanders spend a lot of time in the baths, as I’m sure you know. We are used to seeing all sorts of different body shapes. It is not like America, where you are bombarded with images of unhealthy bodies constantly. It’s a wonder that Americans ever take their clothes off at all.”

Margot nodded as if he’d confirmed something for her. “So your position is that sex ought to be as casual as a trip to the hot tub. And you would prefer to start with sex rather than beginning with a coffee or a dinner date, which I’m sure you know is more common in other countries.”

He laughed. “It must surely be far more awkward to share a meal with someone who, for all you know, will completely fail to satisfy you in any way sexually. Why waste all that time?”

Thor was being somewhat facetious. But there was something about the way she frowned at him. There was something about the way her theories seemed broadcast across her face. He could see her turn over the things she thought, one after the next. He wasn’t entirely sure why he thought it was so hot.

And why not play into her ideas about their cultural differences? She wasn’t entirely wrong. Thor had spent a very informative year in America when he’d been of university age. He had been amazed at the gulf between the permissiveness of the American media, in all its forms—like bikini-clad models on hand to sell a hamburger—and the actual behavior of its citizens in private.

“Do you consider yourself a sexual libertine?” she asked him, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, as if the word libertine was one people usually threw about so casually in conversation.

“Are you asking for personal reasons, given what we’re about to do? Or is this more of your general research?”

“Research. Of course.”

“I have been called many things in my time,” Thor replied. And then laughed. “Why do you ask?”

“Yours was the name that came up repeatedly while I was doing interviews on Laugavegur. I’m trying to decide if you’re different from the average Icelander or if you’re a decent representative of Icelandic mores.”

“I consider myself a unique little snowflake, of course.”

“Well, there are a lot of those in Iceland,” she said. She smiled. “Snowflakes, I mean.”

Thor liked that. He liked the glint of challenge in her hazel eyes that looked gold in the elevator light. And he was looking forward to getting his hands in all that hair.

“There is a great deal of snow in Iceland, it is true. Just as I believe there are a legion or two of purple-haired women in your precise demographic. Is that not so?”

Margot reached up and tugged on a strand of her hair. “I like it.”

“But why do you like it?” Thor asked, mildly enough. “Isn’t this the sort of thing you study? Why it is that certain habits or choices—casual sex, let us say, or the sudden rise of purple-haired women—suddenly sweep the planet?” He studied her as she stared back at him. “Perhaps we all like what we like, Professor.”

He wasn’t sure she liked that too much, but then they arrived. The elevator doors opened smoothly and delivered them directly into the owner’s penthouse that rambled over the entire top floor of the hotel.

Thor walked in, turning on a light here and there as he went. He didn’t look back to see if Margot was following him. He didn’t have to. He could hear her feet in her heavy winter boots on his blond wood floors.

“This is...” He could hear the nerves in her voice, making her sound huskier than before. It made him that much harder. “Stark.”

“Nordic, I think you mean.”

“This seems excessively Nordic.”

Thor stopped in the center of the vast living room and looked around. It was all open space, exposed steel beams and floor-to-ceiling windows that let the best and worst of the weather in. The furniture was low and spare with a modern edge. Geometric shapes, designed to make the most of the space and to enjoy what little light there was for half the year. The living area was designed to feel three times its size, and it did. But then, Thor was a very large man, a credit to his Viking forebears. He wasn’t fond of tight, cramped little spaces with low ceilings and no air.

“The rest of the hotel veers toward the lush,” he said, looking back at her. “I prefer something a little more austere.”

“Clearly.” But she kept walking toward him, even though her arms were still crossed over her chest. “I imagine that tells me all kinds of things about you.”

“That I am a product of my environment?”

“I was thinking more...lush in the streets and stark in the sheets.”

Thor let out a laugh at that and watched Margot blink, as if she hadn’t expected it.

“I don’t think stark is the word, but you will have to let me know what you think after you’ve experienced my sheets, I think.”

Thor led her all the way across the living room and then into the bedroom on the far side. It featured a wall of windows with mechanized shutters to keep out the white nights in summer, thick rugs on the floor, and his bed wasn’t the least bit clean and spare. It was a towering four-poster monstrosity that looked as if it could entertain the entire hotel.

“Better?” he asked. “Less offensively Nordic?”

She stopped just inside the door and swallowed convulsively. He watched the way her throat moved and felt it ripple through him like some kind of honey.

He moved over to the wall that faced the bed and set about building a fire in the large fireplace that was set halfway up one wall, sleek and smooth.

By the time he had the flames crackling, Margot had inched a little bit farther into the room.

He took that as a good sign. “You look remarkably nervous for a little research trip.”

“I’m not nervous at all.”

“Professor.” Thor was still squatting there before the fireplace. He turned without rising so he could keep his gaze trained on her. “This is not going to be very much fun if you lie to me.”

Her brows drew together. “I’m not lying.”

“Perhaps you do not mean to lie.” He shook his head. “But look how you are standing. Stiff. Tense. Profoundly unwelcoming. What am I to make of this body language?”

“Why do you have to make something of it?”

“Margot.” Thor liked the way she reacted to her name in his mouth. He more than liked it. He felt the air between them ignite. “I am not in the habit of fucking women who look about as excited at the prospect as they might a trip to the dentist.”

She actually jolted at that, then scowled, which he already understood was her natural progression in all things.

“You’re reading me completely wrong.” But her voice was flat, contradicting her own words.

Thor stayed where he was. “Am I?”

“I told you. This is supposed to be about research. And the research is not about me.”

“You are the one doing the research,” Thor pointed out. Patiently. “With me. And I prefer a little more enthusiasm. It is a requirement, in fact.”

“I’m enthusiastic.”

“You are quite obviously nothing of the kind.”

“I don’t think you have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Probably not.” He lifted a brow. “Prove me wrong, then.”

He wasn’t sure what Margot would do. But then again, that was precisely why these situations fascinated him. How better to know a person than to see what they would do in unforeseen, fraught circumstances?

Thor shifted back on his heels and stayed where he was. He could stay there all night, watching Margot think.

And he wondered what it would be like to know her better, to be able to tell what sort of thoughts they were that made her frown like that; that made those clever eyes of hers glitter.

She pressed her lips together as if she was girding her loins for a potentially unpleasant task, and then she marched toward the huge bed.

When she reached it, she threw a look at him as if she expected him to comment on what she was doing, but Thor only smiled. And waited.

Margot tossed her coat onto the leather chair next to the bed. She threw her bag down beside it. She did both with a level of aggression that Thor would have laughed at, had he not felt the moment was perhaps a little fragile.

So he said nothing. He waited.

Holding his gaze, Margot sat down on the edge of the chair and began to work at the laces of her boots. They were the high kind, with fur around the tops, and it took her a moment to loosen each side, then pull her leg out.

Again, she looked at Thor as she took each boot off and set it beside the chair with a certain ferocious precision.

And again, he only watched. And kept his own counsel.

“Are you just going to sit there?” she demanded.

“I am,” he replied. “I don’t think it’s my enthusiasm that requires proof, is it? After all, I’m the reason we’re here and not exchanging barbs and very little wine down in the bar.”

“You’re the one who said consent was sexy.”

“I beg your pardon.” He kept his gaze on hers, steady. Demanding. And had the great pleasure of watching that telling flush move over her face. “Do you not find me sexy?”

She didn’t answer him with words. But there was no noise in the room, save the crack and pop of the fire, and so he heard the breath she let out. In a rush.

Thor felt that was answer enough.

Her chin tipped up in another show of whatever this was. Aggression. Nerves.

Or, something in him murmured, how little she knows her own desires.

His were far more straightforward and he wasn’t in any doubt about them. He wanted to get inside her. He wanted her astride him, that lavender hair cascading all over the both of them as she rode him. He wanted his hands on her breasts and he wanted to hear what she sounded like when she came.

The sooner, the better.

She held his gaze then, steady and sure, which he doubted she knew was perhaps the sexiest thing she could do.

Her hands were busy with her clothes. She pulled off the jumper she wore, a thin merino wool. Then the base layer she wore beneath it. She stood there a moment, as if reveling in the fact that she was standing in front of a stranger wearing nothing but a pale blue lace bra that cupped a good-sized pair of breasts, round and plump. Her waist nipped in, then out again, to the flare of her hips.

Thor’s mouth watered.

He let his gaze track over her. He estimated she was around five feet seven, and she wasn’t skinny. She had the sort of athletic build that Thor liked best—muscled, capable and solid. She looked like a woman who could walk anywhere, hike a mountain if she felt like it and then spend a long, hot night with a lover.

Perfect, in other words, for a man like Thor, who liked to sweat in a variety of settings.

When he didn’t say anything, Margot went to work on her trousers. She pulled off what looked like snow pants, revealing another base layer. When she pulled that off, too, she worked her socks off at the same time, and then he watched as she carefully, ferociously, folded every item she’d peeled off and set it on the chair in a ruthlessly neat little pile.

And then his professor with the magical hair turned back around and stood before him in only her bra and a surprisingly suggestive pair of thong panties in a bright pink leopard print.

Thor’s mouth went dry.

Her legs were as lean and muscular as the rest of her, and long enough to give him particularly bright fantasies of how they would feel looped over his shoulders.

“Well?” she asked. In her voice that was both huskier than before and more than a little belligerent. “Are you satisfied?”

“That you know how to remove your clothes?” He did nothing to keep the amusement from his voice. Or the heat. “Yes, I am satisfied. But if this is enthusiasm, Professor, I am tempted to imagine you do not know the meaning of the word.”

The look she gave him then was something like murderous, so Thor wasn’t sure why it made him want to laugh. He thought better of it.

Margot made a frustrated sort of noise in the back of her throat. Then she moved again, unbuckling her bra and throwing it on the chair beside her. Then she hooked her fingers in her panties and tugged them down her legs, before kicking them off.

Then she was naked.

And it was like the blizzard that raged just there outside his windows disappeared. As if the world narrowed to this single woman in this shadowy room lit by the fire.

He took a long moment to appreciate the way she gleamed while the firelight licked and danced over her lean curves and gently sculpted limbs—and to make sure he was completely in control of himself despite the storm of need that pounded through him.

She was pale. She had a tattoo that wrapped around her left side, a series of typewritten words declaring her persistence. She wore a little silver ring in her navel.

And in between her legs was a triangle of strawberry blond curls.

Thor felt his pulse batter at him. In his temples. His chest. His heavy cock. He took his time lifting his gaze to hers again.

“Is that your natural hair color?”

“That’s a personal question,” she retorted.

“It was a rhetorical question. I feel certain nature did not gift you with purple hair, no matter how, exactly, you persist.”

Her hazel eyes looked like dark gold coins in the firelight. And they narrowed as she stared at him.

“Yes,” she said stiffly. “Sometimes I’m a redhead.”

Thor stood then. He was aware of the way she tracked his every movement. The way her gaze dropped to play over his chest. Then bounced back up to his face again, as if she felt guilty for taking pleasure in him.

“Explain to me what is intimate and what is not, please,” he said as he moved toward her. Slowly. Almost lazily. “You do not wish to kiss on the mouth. But you’re already naked. Your nudity is not intimate, but a question about hair color is?”

She scowled at him. He didn’t know why he found that...delightful.

“We’re supposed to be having sex,” she said, her voice ripe with impatience. “Not playing these ridiculous ‘get to know you’ games.”

“Oh, Professor,” he murmured. “I haven’t even begun to play games.”

Margot breathed harder the closer he came. He liked it. It told him more things about her than he imagined she knew she was giving away, and he liked that, too. He moved over until he stood next to the bed, facing her.

Still holding her gaze, Thor reached out and patted the mattress beside him.

She swallowed again, visibly, and he watched in fascination as she fought with herself. He could actually see the fight. It was as obvious to him as if she was taking swings at herself.

Her fists clenched and released. Once, then again.

Then she moved, jerkily, and climbed up to sit on the very spot that he’d patted with his hand.

He moved so he was standing at the side of the bed, then. He moved himself between her legs so she was forced to open them even wider. Thor leaned forward, planting his hands on either side of her as she fell back, catching herself on her elbows.

He wasn’t even touching her. But he could smell her arousal. He could see it in that telltale flush that moved down from her pretty face to cover the whole of her chest. Her breasts sloped slightly to the sides and the nipples were already pink and hard. Flushed, they seemed to gleam like heat.

She was breathing as if he was already inside her.