Читать книгу The Dare Collection October 2018 - Nicola Marsh - Страница 14

THOR HAD NO idea how long they lay there like that, heaped together on his bed as if neither one of them was likely to walk again under their own power. Or even breathe normally.

He wasn’t sure he’d mind.

And it was a sign of how far gone he was that it took a moment for that thought to penetrate the haze he was in like the warning it was.

Margot was sprawled across his chest, her head tucked into the crook of his neck so that all he could see was the bright fall of all that purple. She was breathing deep and low, suggesting that she’d drifted off into sleep.

Or was still lost out there in the storm they’d built together that put the one outside to shame.

And Thor didn’t know why he felt...different.

It was more than the simple release of a good orgasm. It felt...layered. Something a little too close to complicated.

As if this woman wasn’t like any of the others he’d taken to his bed.

He didn’t like anything about it.

He shifted Margot off his body, placing her gently to one side. He meant to jackknife up, head to the bathroom suite and wash the strange, lingering hangover from that truly excellent bit of sex straight off him before the strange layers stuck to him.

But he didn’t move.

It took him a minute to realize that he was pressing the palm of one hand against his chest.

He stopped the moment he realized what he was doing. But he found himself frowning, there in his bedroom with the latest winter storm at the window and nothing inside but this confounding, surprising woman and the dance of the fire in its grate.

He felt almost...thrown. And he couldn’t have said why, when he was a man very rarely lost for words.

It was something to do with the sheer honesty of Margot’s responses. It was the way they’d fit together, the tight grip of her pussy around his cock so good and right it had felt nearly supernatural. It was the way she’d stared down at him as she’d ridden him, those eyes of hers gleaming gold with a kind of wonder in them.

He realized he was quickly becoming maudlin as he lay there. Something he certainly wouldn’t have tolerated in anyone else and had no intention of allowing in himself.

Thor rolled to the side of the bed and sat there a moment, amazed that he really did feel as if he’d had too much to drink, even though he had trimmed back on his excesses years before, the better to enjoy all the many things self-control could give him.

He hadn’t come close to losing control since. Why did this particular woman test that? When he couldn’t recall the last thing that had?

“Are we done?”

Her voice was sleepy. A little bit husky and thick, which lodged itself in Thor’s chest as if he was still rubbing his hand there.

He hated that he had to check.

“Do you feel that you collected enough data here? Is your experiment at an end?” Thor wasn’t sure he recognized his own voice. He sounded...darker.

Different. Again.

When it was just sex. There was no reason he should feel anything, and certainly not some intangible difference. He rubbed his palms over his face to wake himself up from whatever spell this was and ordered himself to get a grip.

“I understand the limitations of male biology, that’s all,” Margot said.

Thor couldn’t quite place that note in her voice, but he knew he didn’t like what she was suggesting. He turned his head so he could lift an 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 been so sure of down in the bar. “You don’t get naked?”

“I get naked alone, yes. And I shower alone. I also dress myself alone, before you ask. I’m not sure how I feel about making it a communal activity.”

“But we are all of us just bodies,” Thor said. “Flesh and blood. Bones and sinew. Beautiful in our own ways.”

And there was something about the heat, the wet. It sank into him, smoothing out the edges of that hollow place in his chest. Or maybe it was her. His suspicious professor. Maybe it was something about the way Margot tipped her head back to look up at him, and didn’t seem to care that her mouth looked so vulnerable.

He had the disarming notion that it was entirely too possible that she didn’t know.

“Of course,” she said, but her voice had gone soft. Ragged. “Just bodies. Just a selection of interlocking parts. Nothing but a complicated handshake or two, the way people like to perform them.”

Thor wasn’t thinking. That was what he told himself, anyway. The water pounded down around them, locking them away in all the steam and heat. He reached over and found her hand, one and then the next. He laced their fingers together into a new kind of complicated handshake and then backed her up until she was pressed against the slickness of the far wall.

Her lips parted a little, just enough to drive him crazy. Vulnerable and challenging at once, and he...forgot himself. He bent his head and moved to fit his mouth to hers—

“No,” she said, though the word sounded like more of a question. “No kissing, remember?”

Thor didn’t want to remember. He wanted to taste her. He wanted to glut himself on her.

He wanted in ways as new to him as she was.

But he acquiesced, dropping his head to the line of her neck instead. And his hands rose almost of their own accord, lifting hers until he could pin them, one on either side of her head—and that mouth she continued to deny him.

“Thor...” she moaned as he made her shiver.

It was only sex. They were only bodies.

Or so he kept telling himself.

He didn’t want to feel hollow. He didn’t want to feel anything at all except sated. He dropped to his knees before her, finding her nipples again. He let go of one of her hands and traced his way down the length of her body as he sucked on one breast, exulting in the broken little moans she let out.

He found her pussy wet. Hot. And he didn’t wait. He plunged his fingers deep inside her, using his thumb to drag against her clit on the outstroke.

Thor didn’t know what he was proving. He didn’t know what he was trying to do.

But then he didn’t care, because Margot was so ripe and so lush and she came apart beneath his hands and his mouth as if she had been put on this earth for that purpose alone.

Just bodies, he told himself as Margot’s cries echoed off the tiles of his shower.

Thor told himself that was what he had wanted. Exactly that sound she made. The way she clenched around his fingers. The sweet velvet of her nipples, the way she threw her head back, the line of her throat as she gave herself over to abandon.

That was what he wanted. Nothing else.

Because there was nothing else, he told himself sharply, no matter how beautifully she came for him.

He stood and didn’t know what he meant to do next. There were too many competing things fighting for supremacy inside him. Too many of those layers he didn’t want to admit were there.

It took a moment for Margot’s eyes to open, but when they did, they were bright gold.

And she smiled—and this time there was nothing the least bit awkward about it. It felt a little too much like spring to a man who’d been raised in relentless winter.

She didn’t say a word. She simply knelt down before him and tipped her head back so he could see the exquisite hunger all over her face. She wrapped her hands around his cock, smiled again and took him deep into her mouth.

“Look at you,” Margot murmured after she’d sucked him in deep and then taken her time dragging her mouth off him again, scraping her teeth against the back of his head as she went. “You really do defy your own biology, don’t you?”

But she didn’t give him a chance to answer. And Thor couldn’t think straight when she took him deep in that mouth of hers again and again.

Her mouth was so hot. Her tongue moved against the plump head of his cock, swirling and dancing and sending that crackling electric current all throughout his body. He leaned back against the wall of the shower, slightly concerned his legs might give out, and anchored himself with one hand sunk deep in her streaming wet hair.

But he didn’t try to guide her. He wanted to see what she’d do, so he let her do her worst.

And Margot explored him. She licked him up and down as if he was dessert, and then she took him in deep, as if she was teaching herself how to deep throat right here in his own shower.

He meant to pull out. To give her warning or lift her up against him so he could ride her into completion again—but she didn’t stop. It was as if she felt his balls tighten, his whole body stiffen, and she took him in even deeper—

Then listened to him groan as he poured himself down her throat.

And when he pulled himself out of her mouth at last, she was still kneeling there, her face tipped up to his while the water fell all around her, her smile wide and pleased.

Something gleaming brighter than gold in her gaze.

And Thor knew this was more than a run-of-the-mill hangover.

His professor was trouble.