Читать книгу The Dare Collection October 2018 - Nicola Marsh - Страница 16

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.”

She ignored that last part and concentrated on the issue at hand. The issue that was literally still in his hand. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that playing sex games with gags operates as a training ground for the kinds of things people decide they need to do in dungeons.”

“Not everything I do has an agenda.” Thor laughed again, though this time it felt more like fire. “I am not a vaunted professor of human sexuality, after all. I am merely a lowly practitioner of the art.”

Margot found herself smiling the way she did at unruly first-year students. “You and I both know what kind of power dynamic a gag indicates. Don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that could be an accident on your part. What I’m wondering now is if that’s part of who you are. Were you a sexual dominant before you came into possession of a sex hotel? Or is that something working here brought out in you? And how does sexual dominance work in a country filled with women so passionately feminist? Does that complicate it?”

Thor’s laugh was louder than before, and this time when he reached out to move his fingers over her cheek, Margot could have sworn there was something affectionate in the way he did it. And in the way he gazed at her.

But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that. This was about work, not her lonely little heart.

She was instantly horrified that she was thinking about her heart at all. Much less in those terms.

“I try not to complicate my sexual desires unnecessarily,” he said drily. “And I’m not sure that I think the practice of sexual dominance and feminism are at odds anywhere but in the heads of skeptics who are more concerned with metaphors than with screaming, delirious orgasms.”

“There is not a single submissive bone in my body,” Margot gritted out.

And only realized once she did that he hadn’t argued otherwise.

The curve in his mouth felt like an indictment. “If you say so.”

“You know what strikes me as notably un-feminist? You believing you know what I want better than I do.”

He was still so close, and that meant she could see the way his blue eyes gleamed. It made every hair on the back of her neck prickle, the way the dance of the northern lights across these far northern skies did. As if he was that elemental and otherworldly.

She told herself he was just a man. Nothing more and nothing less.

No matter that there was a part of her that wanted to make him a myth instead.

“What I believe is that all of us are made of a storm of competing desires and needs,” Thor said, almost gently. As if he knew the real storm was the one happening inside Margot. “Some of us privilege one over the other. Some of us take pride in our labels, but these are always attempts to control the uncontrollable, are they not? You are the expert, after all. Surely you must know this already. People can talk. People can define themselves and others in any number of ways. But desire, passion, need—these things are not quantifiable no matter how we might wish they were. And for all our advances across the centuries, no one has yet figured out how to control them.”

“I don’t believe in that kind of passion,” Margot whispered.

She didn’t. She knew she didn’t and she never had. She had written papers on the subject of passion and the many ways people tried to personify the feeling. Because if it was a kind of person, a being, they could blame it for all manner of things, like a demon of yore. A devil intent on their destruction.

If passion was responsible, the actual person in question need never be.

But there was something about saying it out loud, here, to Thor, that made her gut tighten as if she’d told him a lie.

“Passion is like truth, I am afraid,” Thor told her, almost sorrowfully. “It does not require your belief to exist.”

“You haven’t answered the question.”

He lifted the hand that held that bright white napkin, but the way he waved it between them had nothing to do with surrender. Or, at least, not his surrender. “And you have gone to great lengths to avoid this little bit of cloth, have you not?”

Margot’s heart gave a terrific thump in her chest, or maybe it was in her belly. Or her pussy, where she felt a sharp jolt. It was everywhere. It was all of her.

She felt ripped wide-open. As if he’d wheeled in a giant spotlight and aimed it directly at her, so bright she could feel the heat of the light itself.

“If you are afraid, there is no shame in admitting it,” Thor said in that same surprisingly gentle way she would have said he didn’t have, which somehow made her feelings of exposure worse.

“Do I need to be afraid?”

“I would never dream of telling you what you need—lest I be accused of single-handedly imposing the will of the patriarchy upon you.”

She glared at him, and at that dry way he talked about the things she’d spent years studying and considering and immersing herself in as if they were so much teenaged caterwauling.

“I would suggest that you view this as a test, nothing more.”

Margot didn’t tell him that she had always been excellent at tests. “What am I meant to be testing? How much I trust you?”

“I think the fact that you are here, naked and alone in my rooms, speaks to how much you trust me already.” And there was nothing threatening in the way he said that. It was a simple statement of fact. And still, Margot felt as if he’d dropped a noose around her neck and pulled it tight. “In any case, this is not about me. It is about you.”

“How convenient for you.”

“Professor, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You never have to do anything you don’t want to do. I thought we covered this already when we experimented with consent in the other room. Repeatedly.”

“I can assure you that I never, ever do a single thing I don’t want to do.”

He didn’t point out, again, that she was naked and alone with him and had already done things she really ought to be ashamed of. But he didn’t need to when Margot was capable of doing it herself, did he?

“What I think is that you do want to do this,” he said instead, with all that maddening, seductive patience. “And more, I think the fact you want to put this gag in your own mouth and see what it teaches you, that the very idea makes you wet and greedy, is what scares you most.”

Her body was on his side, not hers. Her pussy swelled at his words, and she felt her own wet heat on her thighs.

Damn him.

“It amazes me that you think you can know anything about another person on so short an acquaintance,” Margot said loftily, because she didn’t know how to do anything but fight. “We are strangers. A state of undress doesn’t change the fact that you don’t know anything about me.”

Thor smiled. “Here is what I know. You cannot bear to let a challenge go unmet, no matter what it costs you. You will force yourself to do things that make you uncomfortable rather than risk losing face. You concentrate on the task set before you, simply because it has been set before you, rather than look inward to see whether or not you want to do it at all.”

Margot stiffened. He didn’t know her life. He didn’t know all the committees she sat on at the university when she wasn’t on sabbatical, all because she didn’t know how to say no. He didn’t know how many papers she’d agreed to coauthor for the same reasons. He couldn’t possibly know that when she was so stressed out she thought that ache in her shoulders might never go away, she knew full well she had no one to blame but herself and her own stubbornness.

All he knew about her was how to find her clit. Not a bad skill to have. But not exactly psychic powers, either.

“I complete tasks because that’s what adults do, generally speaking,” she said. From between her teeth. “It’s part of not being a coddled child. The alternative is leaving tasks undone, and that leads to chaos, in my experience. Maybe you like having the power turned off because you forgot to take the time to complete the simple task of paying the bill. I don’t.”

“You didn’t have to remove your clothes simply because I asked you to.” Thor was studying her again, that fierce blue gaze of his seeing far too much. “I asked you to prove something to me and you did. But why did you do it? Why should you have to prove anything? You could simply have said what you wanted, enthusiastically and repeatedly. But it made you feel safer to have an adversary, did it not?”

She felt dizzy. He might as well have kicked her, hard, in the solar plexus. It took her a long, desperate moment to catch her breath. “I don’t think that’s true at all.”

“But you do think that wanting to experiment with things that have overtones that humorless people take great pleasure in excavating for evidence of wrongdoing makes you weak, somehow. I saw the expression on your face when I suggested that you turn your mouth off for a while. It intrigues you as much as it terrifies you.” Thor’s smile hurt her. It actually hurt. “You pride yourself on your mind and your mouth, do you not? Who are you if you cannot express yourself exactly as you wish, whenever you wish it? Are you afraid you will cease to exist? I can assure you, my suspicious professor—you will not.”

She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, but she knew that she could. That she was. She could feel her own chest rise and fall too rapidly. She could hear the ragged sound of her own breath, telling him everything he needed to know without her having to form a single word.

Proving him right.

“I don’t think...” she began.

“But that is what we are arguing about. You are not a brain in a jar, Margot. What you think is not independent of your flesh. Your passion. One cannot destroy the other, no matter how hard you try.”

“I don’t understand what you get out of this. Is it simply that you enjoy the act of humbling—” She almost said women, then. But something in the way he watched her kept her from it. “Do you want to humble me? Is that what this is about?”

“I don’t want to humble you.”

“Then what? Why?”

“I like the things that sex can do above and beyond the act itself. I don’t think it’s a game. I don’t think you can research it the way you might a cell or a virus. Humans are deeply complex and emotional creatures, are we not? Sometimes, if we push our own boundaries, we discover things we never knew were there.”

“I have to tell you, Thor. That doesn’t sound anything like a handshake.”

He smiled anew at that, then took her hand as if he meant to shake it, though he didn’t.

“Are you finished talking?” he asked quietly. “Or do you have more nerves to work through?”

Margot knew she had to do it. She had to try, anyway.

She knew other things, too. Such as the fact that somehow, though it shouldn’t have been possible, this man really had discovered things about her without benefit of the usual narratives she told about what she liked and didn’t like. About who she was or wasn’t.

How had he seen all of that? How had sex given him that sort of key to her?

It made her feel restless deep inside.

But when all she wanted to do was open her mouth and comment on that, extensively and possibly with footnotes, she knew she was stalling.

She made herself reach over and take the napkin from him. And if he saw the way her hand shook, he didn’t mention it, proving yet again how unexpectedly kind he was.

It burned through her with its own kind of heat.

It sank down into her bones. It shivered through her, like the blood in her veins. It made her want to cry.

She almost lost her courage, then.

Why are you doing this? that part of her she’d always considered her most rational demanded. Why are you submitting yourself to something like this?

But she wanted to see.

She wanted to know.

And Thor stood there before her, that patient intensity illuminating his bright blue gaze and tearing her up inside in too many ways to count.

As if this wasn’t about the storm and never had been, but was about Margot herself—and he could wait forever if that was what it took.

It astounded her how much safer she felt when her gaze connected with his and held.

Or better yet, when approval flashed over his lean, fierce face.

Margot rolled the napkin into a long, thin tube, concentrating perhaps a little too hard on making it even. Then she lifted it to her mouth, took a deep breath and fit the napkin between her teeth like some kind of bit for a horse.

She wouldn’t call it surrender. She wasn’t certain she wanted that word in her vocabulary.

But either way, she caught the blue in his eyes. She felt all of that dark intent like his hands around her neck, a perfect storm in the form of a necklace she doubted she’d ever take off, and Margot stopped fighting.

She took a deep breath...and let go.