Читать книгу The Dare Collection October 2018 - Nicola Marsh - Страница 15

“YOU MUST BE HUNGRY,” Thor said with a kind of easy courtesy that reminded her who he was. What he did.

And why she was here.

Margot was grateful. She was humming inside, as if she’d been tuned to a station she couldn’t hear with her ears but could feel in every part of her flesh and deep into her bones. She didn’t know what was happening to her, but that humming thing made it impossible to find that as terrifying as she might have otherwise. As perhaps she should have.

There was some kind of magic in this place, she couldn’t keep herself from thinking, and it didn’t seem to matter that she was a rational woman of scientific inquiry who didn’t believe in magic.

There was some kind of magic in this man, too.

It wasn’t that Margot had ever disliked performing oral sex, per se, because she didn’t. She hadn’t. It wasn’t her favorite thing in the world to do, of course, but it was always the other aspects of the act that had gotten to her more than the main event.

Like the positions it required her to get into. Kneeling, for example. So submissive and problematic, especially when a man wrapped his hands in her hair as if he wanted to control her head—and then often did.

Yet doing it to Thor had been a completely new and different thing. She hadn’t suffered through it without getting much out of it herself because that was what grown adults sometimes did in service to their partners’ needs, the way she always had in the past.

She’d loved every second of it.

Margot was going to need to interrogate herself at length about the things this man made her feel, all those twisted things she’d thought she’d evolved past years ago, but she still felt slippery. Her pussy felt swollen into a kind of shivery ripeness. Her skin was overly sensitive, all over, so that every brush of the soft, cashmere wrap Thor had settled around her sent spirals of pleasure all through her.

He had washed her. He’d used those big hands, if not in the dark ways she’d wanted, and the soap he’d made into a thick lather between his palms. Something about the attention he’d paid to every square inch of her body had tugged at her, but Margot hadn’t wanted to say anything to break the spell. She couldn’t say she’d enjoyed that fierce look of concentration on his face so much as she’d thrilled to it.

It had made her feel whole and even cherished in ways she didn’t know how to process.

And there was something wrong with her. Something terribly wrong, down into her wiring. She understood it, but she couldn’t seem to bring herself to analyze it the way she knew she should. But her wrongness glowed there, deep in her gut and splashed all over her skin.

What bothered her was that she didn’t care about that, here with Thor, as much as she should have.

For one thing, she’d liked it far too much when she’d been on her knees in that shower, Thor’s cock in her mouth. She’d wished that Thor had used that hand of his in all the dark, dirty ways she would have hated if anyone else had tried. She’d wanted to feel what it was like to be under his control, no matter how problematic.

He hadn’t done anything with the hand in her hair except hold it there, and Margot had found herself entertaining wild fantasies, what-ifs... What if he held her head where he wanted it? What if he controlled the pace, the depth of each thrust?

What if he...took her over completely?

Her pussy ached even imagining it.

And she knew she ought to be ashamed of the way she melted more and more at each dark and dirty little what-if that she could come up with.

Letting him wash her had been much the same. This is the ultimate objectification, her brain had argued, but the rest of her hadn’t cared. He’d tended to her as if she was his possession. Something precious to him, something he needed and cared for.

Something he owns, a voice in her had supplied.

And she knew that she should have been sickened by the very idea.

But instead, she had felt soothed. Adored, even. Thor had washed her everywhere. He’d even washed her hair. His hands were so big and she knew all the things they could do to her body, but there in the shower he had gently, carefully washed her clean as if doing so was his responsibility. His privilege.

And when they’d gotten out, he’d bundled her in a huge towel and dried her off as if that, too, was a part of this ritual he needed to perform. And despite all the words that crowded into her head—infantilizing, condescending, daddy issues, problematic—Margot had stood there and basked in his attention.

And that humming in her had continued.

Now she sat with her legs crossed on the low-slung couch to one side of the fireplace in his bedroom that should have been too big to feel cozy but somehow managed it despite its unwieldy size. He had exchanged the big, fluffy bath towel for this almost unbearably warm and soft wrap she wore now, and Margot told herself that she was merely drying her hair by the fire. That there was nothing to it but that.

That she wasn’t watching Thor as he moved around the room. That she wasn’t marveling in the things firelight did for a man as sculpted as he was. He was all muscle and sinew, cast in liquid gold thanks to the crackling flames.

“Are you in a trance?” he asked, and she realized with a jolt that he had been standing there, waiting for her response, for some time.

Margot cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said, striving for that same overtly polite tone, the sort she’d have used if a waiter had caught her daydreaming in a fancy restaurant. “I think I’m starving, actually.”

“I will send down to the kitchen for some food.” She didn’t know when he’d pulled on those athletic trousers he wore now, but they rode low on his hips, making it impossible for her to do anything but marvel at that ridge shaped like a V that pointed down beneath his waistband.

“Why are you taking care of me?” Margot asked.

And then wished she hadn’t.

Thor’s gaze found hers, something like affront in all that blue. He held up a finger, then spoke into the phone at his ear. Margot caught only the odd word here and there as he spoke in rapid Icelandic, never dropping her gaze.

When the call was finished, he dropped the hand holding the phone to his side as he regarded her for another long moment that seemed to scrape through her.

Maybe that was why she kept talking, when every word that spilled over her tongue made her feel more exposed. “I just mean that none of this is necessary. You’re treating me like some kind of treasured guest when I’m not. It’s supposed to be an experiment—”

“Yes, yes. Only an experiment. So you keep telling me. I was unaware that meant I should fuck you and then throw you out in the hall like rubbish.”

There was an edge to his voice that Margot didn’t understand. But she didn’t particularly want to acknowledge it, either.

“I want to make sure that we’re not blurring any boundaries here, that’s all,” she said coolly, and hoped that he couldn’t see that she was blurry all the way through. So blurry she could hardly see straight.

That edge in his voice seemed locked on his mouth then. “Because I wish to eat? Because sex can work up an appetite? These are hard boundaries of yours that cannot be crossed?”

“You said yourself that Icelanders prefer sex to dinner dates.”

“Think of it as fuel.” His blue eyes glittered. She had the strangest notion that she had offended him, somehow. “After all, the blizzard rages on. And inside, it is warm and safe and the night is young.”

“You can’t possibly...” She drifted off, her gaze following that tempting V all the way down.

Where, if she wasn’t mistaken, his cock was stirring yet again.

“How old are you?” she asked in disbelief.

And whatever tension had been building there between them, it shattered when he laughed. That same mighty laugh that reminded her where she was, tucked up here on the top of the world in this land of trolls and dark and men who were named for very old gods, she wondered if she could see in his face.

“Are you worried that I’m an adolescent boy?” he asked. “I regret to inform you that I haven’t been anything like an adolescent in a very long while.”

“If you say so.”

“Adolescent boys have erections as easily as breathing, it is true.” Thor was still laughing, and it was unfair, the things that did to his already too-beautiful face. “But it is like a summer storm. All that noise and carrying on, yet they do not have any control.”

“But you do.”

Another laugh, and it was just as dangerous as before. “Do you doubt it? I’m sorry. I must have lost track of how many times I made you come.”

She felt her ears get hot. Some part of her wanted to curl into a ball and hide under the couch, but he’d told her about this. Icelanders talked about sex. With a frankness that made every last bit of Margot’s Midwestern soul curl up and want to die.

But she told herself this, too, was part of the experiment she was conducting.

She inclined her head. “I counted.”

His smile was delighted. And infinitely wicked. “I am pleased to hear that. I did, too.”

“I suppose it could be the novelty,” she continued, frowning a little. “As you said yourself, there’s no such thing as a sex god. There’s chemistry. But that always wears off, usually pretty quickly.”

“Here is what I do not understand.” Thor moved to sit down, and he didn’t choose the chair across from the couch like a civilized person might have while discussing this research project they were undertaking together. Instead, he settled himself on the other end of the same couch where she sat, making it that much smaller in an instant. And he did it in that same languid, boneless way he did everything, lounging there and taking up more than his fair share of the couch, which only made Margot frown. “Your field of study is sex, is it not?”

Her frown deepened. “Well, sex is a fairly broad category, obviously, and my specialty is significantly narrower because I’m primarily concerned with—”

“I will take that as a yes.”

“—human sexuality in cultural contexts. I’m specifically intrigued by the particular intersection—”

“Professor. Control yourself.” And there was that curve in his mouth again, which meant that when she obeyed him it felt like some kind of caress. She didn’t understand that, either, but it made that humming thing inside her grow deeper. Louder. “I don’t want to debate your thesis. I’m sure it’s fascinating. What specifically intrigues me is that you live and breathe sex in your work, yet seem singularly disposed to take the joy out of it. Why is that?”

“I don’t think I do that at all.”

“I have known you for a few hours and already I understand that you think sex is in many ways a chore, that you think chemistry comes and goes and cannot be depended upon. You think men cannot control their penises and you have a great many strange ideas about what any man is capable of in the course of an evening. You seemed astounded that I made you come at all, much less over and over again.”

Margot felt as if she’d fallen, hard, knocking all the air out of her body. “I think you’ve read me wrong.”

He lifted his shoulder, then dropped it, and even as she struggled for breath, it was impossible not to notice how beautiful he was and, worse than that, how she could feel him in parts of her body that she’d never paid all that much attention to before.

“Who have you been sleeping with?” he asked in that same mild tone.

And ordinarily, of course, Margot would have been outraged at a question like that. A person’s sexual history was no one else’s business, unless she chose to share it of her own volition. But something about the way Thor had asked the question kept her from reacting like that.

His tone was so...cool. His gaze was clinical.

It was exactly what she should have wanted. She couldn’t understand why she didn’t like it much.

“I never pick men up in bars while drunk, if that’s what you mean,” she heard herself say. “Not that I’m suggesting that there’s anything wrong with that. I support sex positivity in all its forms. Everyone should be able to enjoy sex wherever they find it, in whatever way they like it, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone and assuming they’re able to voice their explicit consent.”

“Everyone should be able to do these things, yes. Of course. But you do not.”

She didn’t. She’d never really enjoyed sex that way, with the kind of cheerful merriment that she thought she should have, but Margot didn’t know why it made her uncomfortable to say so. Out loud, anyway.

To Thor, who had made her come over and over and over with what even she had to admit had seemed a lot like reckless abandon.

“I’ve had partners, Thor. I just met them under different circumstances.”

“How mysterious. Did you grow them in a lab somewhere?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. I spend most of my time on university campuses, after all. I’ve met most of the partners I’ve had through academics in one way or another.”

“I see. You are usually seized with a sudden passion while flipping through piles of research books, or some such thing.”

She frowned. “Not quite. I’m not sure I’ve ever been seized by passion, thank you. That sounds like something that ought to be checked out by a medical health professional.” Thor laughed, and Margot kept going. “I meet a man. We talk. We usually talk quite a lot, in fact. How else can you possibly know if you suit?”

Thor’s mouth curved. “You fuck them, Margot. You can talk until you’re blue in the face. You can tell each other all manner of stories. You can compliment each other on your smart ideas and funny jokes. But if you have no sexual chemistry, then all you can ever truly be is friends.”

“Not everything is about sex.”

“Perhaps not. But I think you’ll find that fucking usually is.”

“You’re obviously looking for a more physical sort of relationship than I am. I couldn’t possibly consider someone as a partner if I didn’t feel that we connected on an intellectual level, and I’d always choose a very good friend with an astonishing brain over a fuck or two.”

“Why must you make that choice?”

She smiled at him. “You and I are different people. We look for different things.”

“I can’t decide if that was sad or patronizing.”

“I’m not trying to insult you. You don’t have to understand the things I need. I’m a tenured professor. You—”

She stopped herself, but it was too late. His dark blond brows lifted.

“I own a sex hotel and can therefore be assumed to have no intellectual interests whatsoever. A great and glorious tenured professor such as you, of course, is such a towering mind that you could never find yourself enslaved by the demands of the flesh.” But he laughed. “Am I your intellectual equal, Professor? Because I suspect your body likes me just fine.”

“It doesn’t matter who likes what here. You’re not my partner.”

“Indeed I am not.” That sat there between them. Margot told herself it was absurd that her pulse should racket about like that while he regarded her, all narrowed blue gaze and that humming thing inside her. “But you still haven’t answered the question. Why do you study sex if you think it is little more than a physical expression of what sounds to an impartial observer like a series of very long, very boring conversations?”

“Some people are more captivated by the mind than the body.”

“You are not one of those people.” He shook his head when Margot scowled at him. “What fascinates me is why you think otherwise. Because you have a job that involves your mind? So do many others. Why do you seem to think that your body and your mind aren’t connected? You can’t have one without the other.”

Margot drew the wrap tighter around her. “I think you’re misunderstanding me.”

“Proving, yet again, that I am not your intellectual equal, yes? Or is it that no one can be your intellectual equal? That must be convenient.”

Margot’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I asked you to psychoanalyze me.”

“I’m merely offering up my humble observations. It is my contribution to science, nothing more. After all, this is an experiment, is it not?”

And now there was a kind of prickly thing deep inside Margot that she didn’t understand. She should have no interest at all in explaining herself to this man. She never had to see him again after the blizzard ended. In fact, she could demand that he give her that hotel key right now and let her go off to a room somewhere. She didn’t have to tolerate any of this.

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.