Читать книгу The Dare Collection October 2018 - Nicola Marsh - Страница 17

SHE WAS SO beautiful it hurt.

So brave it didn’t merely make his cock hard, it made him worry that he didn’t have the control he knew he needed to do this thing.

Because Thor knew that he needed to do it properly if he wanted to do it at all.

He fought to find his center. To calm himself down by focusing on her instead of that greedy fist of need that had him entirely too close to the edge already.

Because she might look at him with those bright gold eyes of hers lit with suspicion, but she trusted him. Although they had never met before tonight, he wasn’t the only one who no longer felt as if they were strangers. As if they had never really been strangers.

As if she was more to him in ways he wasn’t sure he liked.

It was such an odd sort of intimacy, but Thor didn’t fight it. Because she had put that gag in her mouth for no other reason than that he’d suggested it.

She trusted him.

Not because she knew him or really anything about him. Not because she’d heard enough rumors about him from random people in Reykjavík to form a sketchy opinion that might allow her to engage in a quick, meaningless fuck. Not because he was Daniel St. George’s eldest illegitimate son and somehow the most accessible of the lot—or so it seemed to Thor when the three of them had their stilted, careful conversations, as ordered by the father none of them had known or liked all that much.

Margot might have known a few broad details about Thor, the way everyone did since the will had come out and made him an international person of interest instead of merely one of Iceland’s relatively few celebrities. But none of that was why she was willing to trust him tonight.

None of that was why she was standing before him, her eyes wide and that napkin distorting the shape of her lovely mouth.

She trusted him because of what had happened here, over the course of this deliciously endless night. She trusted him because he hadn’t told her who he was, he’d shown her.

And now he had the opportunity to show her who she was, too.

It was a privilege.

Margot was breathing hard and a little too fast through her nose, and he could see the sheen of glassiness that made her eyes gleam ever more gold. Her hands kept forming into fists at her sides, then releasing. Over and over, as if she was this close to bolting.

But she didn’t balk. She didn’t break.

And when he reached over to liberate that wrap from around her shoulders, the only reaction he got was the faintest, finest little tremor snaking down her torso before she squared her shoulders and repressed it.

Out in the main, rambling room of his penthouse that he liked because it told visitors nothing about him, she looked like the finest of the art he collected and hung in the house he kept in the city. Except better. More precious.

Thor stood back from her and took a moment to admire her. All that fine, flushed skin. The upturned pink of her nipples, the strawberry blond curls between her legs. And the lavender hair that fell all around her, cascading over her shoulders in a kind of artless invitation.

And she trusted him.

It was enough to make him lose it right there, but he didn’t.

Somehow, he didn’t.

He took her hand and led her out from the seating area where they’d eaten, closer to the enormous fireplace that was built into one sleek wall and looked as if the fire rose directly from the decorative volcanic rock. But he didn’t stop there. He kept moving until they stood before the giant window that in good weather looked out over the brooding sea. Tonight it would be much too dark and stormy to see anything even if he’d had all the lights on.

Which he didn’t. So what he saw when he looked at his window was Margot’s reflection in the glass and, here and there, hints of the driving snow outside.

He stood behind her for a moment, soaking in the view.

He could also see that Margot didn’t like it. He saw the way her brows drew together, and that snap in her gaze when it met his in the glass.

“See?” he murmured, snaking an arm around her middle to haul her closer to him and enjoying the feel of her, silky and warm. He held her with her back flush against his front so she could feel his heat. His strength. His greedy cock in the small of her back. “Your nonverbal communication comes across loud and clear. You do not want to look at yourself like this. You do not want to be on display. No doubt you have some concerns about objectification.”

Her nostrils flared slightly. Then, slowly, she nodded.

Thor brushed her hair away from her neck on one side and bent to taste her there, sweet and hot.

“Perhaps it is time we talk about the differences between objectification and admiration,” he said, right there against her skin where he could taste the way she trembled. “You assume that being on display makes you less, somehow, when we raise our gods and our icons high, the better to adore them. We elevate the things we cherish. We create pedestals, cathedrals, museums. Why should it be any different between lovers?”

He put his hands on her skin, running one palm over that tattoo on her side that declared her persistence. And he moved the other higher on her rib cage until it rested just below her breast, and tried not to let the sight right there in the window before them roar through him unchecked, because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep himself under control if it did.

“You were so concerned about power dynamics earlier,” he continued. “But ask yourself this. Did I give you orders or make suggestions? And if I did issue an order, why are you focusing on the order rather than your need to follow it? Is it problematic if you want to do it or only if you think I want you to do it?”

He studied her face and that frown she still wore, though her teeth were clenched down hard on the napkin. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anything prettier or more compelling than Margot fighting her need to tear that napkin from her mouth and light into him with all those mighty words she knew.

But it was his turn to do the talking.

“If we are two consenting adults and we both get something out of a power dynamic, why must it be considered problematic at all?” he asked. “Why do you imagine you get to decide how it is that other people get off in the first place?”

She made a little noise of protest and he smiled. “It seems to me that if a woman tells you that she enjoys submission, as you claim you do not, you are the one who is infantilizing her if you decide that the only way she can enjoy such things is if she has somehow betrayed herself. Or does not know her own mind sufficiently to make that determination. If a woman tells you that she is no victim but you decide that you know better, who is truly victimizing her?”

Thor didn’t glance toward her face to see if he could divine her answer from her expression. He didn’t need to. He could feel the way she trembled in his hands. He indulged himself instead, shifting his palm so he could cover one of those velvety nipples that stood there, pink and proud.

He moved his palm in slow, lazy circles and kept his mouth at her neck.

“I think that no matter how you try to politicize sex or what good intentions you might have for doing it, all you truly end up doing is judging personal preference. And my suggestion to you, Professor, is that personal preference is none of your business.”

And he punctuated that thought by finding her hot, wet pussy with his free hand.

He could hear the moans she made in her throat, sweet and needy. He could feel that same neediness in a rush of damp heat against his fingers.

Thor stroked her folds, gently playing with her clit. Almost as if it was an afterthought, and her hips moved as if of their own accord in time to his every light, teasing stroke. Her hands fisted and released at her sides.

Again and again.

“All this research you do. All these papers you write. All the many ways you try to convince yourself that this isn’t real.” He put his mouth to her ear and it was as if he could taste her arousal, all that delirious heat. He made his strokes longer, lazier, and felt the way her hips hitched. “Does it feel real now?”

She made another noise. Frustration. Helpless need. Thor reached over to take one of those convulsive little hands in his, then drew it between her legs.

And had the particular delight of feeling her freeze. Then bloom with heat.

Everywhere.

“Feel yourself. Your pussy doesn’t lie, Margot.” He was teaching her a lesson, and yet it was the first time he hadn’t called her Professor. And that seemed to strike an odd little note in him, a ringing like a bell that seemed to move in all his limbs at once, but he shoved it aside. “You’re either wet or you are not. Your pussy knows exactly what it wants. And it has no compunction about telling you. Feel your wetness. Feel how you quiver. Your body knows what it needs, what it desires. It is only you who are confused.”

She made another one of those angry, frustrated sounds and he smiled, there in the crook of her shoulder where she could feel it.

“If you could talk, would you tell me that you are not confused at all? I think you would. But that’s the trouble with words. They are indirect. They stretch across feelings and analyze them, contain them, change them in the telling. Your body is more direct. Uncompromising, you might say. There’s a certain purity in a hard cock and a wet pussy. Everything else is a complication. Everything else is what we put on it, not what it is.”

He slid his fingers over hers, there in all her slickness, and showed her exactly what he wanted her to do.

“Make yourself come,” he ordered her, his voice like a growl. “And the beauty of the gag in your mouth is that you cannot tell me if that’s possible or impossible. You can only do it.”

She made another noise, but it wasn’t a word. He wasn’t sure it was even an attempt at words. He lifted his head so he could see the look of flushed frustration on her face in the window, and that ever-present frown of hers that he found he’d begun to crave. She looked as if she wanted to object. To argue.

But the truth was in that hand beneath his, buried between her thighs. She rocked her palm against her clit and she didn’t stop. She didn’t even pause, no matter how she scowled at him.

“The more you think, the less you feel,” Thor told her, his gaze fused to hers in the reflection before them. “And if you are talking, you cannot be listening. So this is my challenge to you, Professor. Stop thinking. Stop talking—especially to yourself. Lose yourself in this.”

And for a while there was nothing but the sound of her breath and the soft sound of her hand working between her legs.

Thor played with her nipple. He watched her face. “It either feels good or doesn’t. You will either come or you won’t. Does your body know what it wants? And if it does, do you give it what it wants or do you deny it out of some misplaced notion of what you ought to like?”

Her breathing was heavy. He couldn’t tell if it was frustration or something else now, but either way, she didn’t stop. He stood there behind her, the scent of her heavy in the air between them. It was a musky female arousal and a sharp, full vanilla that was all Margot. He wanted to taste her. He wanted to lift her up, tip her forward and settle her on his own aching cock at last.

But he waited, though he thought the waiting might kill him. He shifted to move his hands over her curves instead. As if he was settling and soothing her as much as he was attempting to excite her. He traced the span of her hips. He smoothed his palms up her sides, then along her arms.

He explored her as if he was committing her to memory, stroke by stroke.

And all the while she fucked herself with her hand, rolling her hips to meet her own palm.

Thor got to watch that delicious flush spread out over her skin, from the sweet triangle of her coppery curls to her lavender hair that fell down all around her, teasing the tips of her breasts. Her eyes drifted closed. Her head lolled back against his shoulder.

“Come,” he ordered her, low and gritty. “Come, Professor. Now.”

And when she obeyed him, it was like a tempest shook through her. He found himself gripping her hips to hold her steady. To keep her on her feet. Or better yet, to keep her from toppling over where she stood.

She shook and she shook. And when the shaking subsided, her hand dropped from between her thighs and she slid, boneless and still breathing hard, against him.

Thor turned her around in his arms, then picked her up and carried her over to the thick rug before the fire. He dropped to his knees and set her on hers.

And then he took his time and a good deal of care pushing her hair back from her face. He tucked the damp lavender strands behind her ears. And he didn’t know what to call that weighty, complicated, knotted thing that squatted there in his chest and refused to be dislodged.

He didn’t know what to call the urges that rolled through him then, none of them about the heavy need in his cock. None of them about pounding his way to oblivion.

The trouble with teaching lessons was that he couldn’t avoid learning a few of his own while he did it.

And one of them was the simple fact that this woman was nothing like the many other women Thor had enjoyed in his past. He was too...involved. He was obsessed with that mouth he wasn’t allowed to kiss. He was entirely too invested in the things he wanted to show her. About herself. About the pair of them. About sex itself. But he wasn’t as removed as he usually was. He couldn’t seem to find his footing or his usual distance.

Something about Margot was lodging its way deep inside him whether he liked it or not. As if she was leaving scars he wasn’t entirely sure would ever heal.

Worse, he must have liked it. Because he wasn’t doing a thing to stop it.

Especially when Margot pulled the napkin from her mouth. She made a face as she ran her tongue around inside her own mouth, tossing the bit of cloth to the side.

“Dry?” he asked, feeling as close to desperate as he’d ever been.

Because he wasn’t used to this...wanting. He hadn’t lied to her. Icelanders fucked. He certainly did and it had always been fun. Sometimes an intense kind of fun.

But it had never been like this, as if she was stripping away layers of his skin every time she met his gaze. Every time she frowned at him. Every time she came in that pink rush.

Even though she’d removed her gag, Margot didn’t speak. She blinked once, then again, as if she was getting her bearings. And when she lifted her gaze to meet his, the gold in them was so brilliant he nearly looked away.

She was flushed and she was fierce and he wanted her in ways he didn’t understand. He wanted to fuck her. He wanted to lose himself in her. He wanted her, all of her. Not just her nakedness, but every complicated thought in that fascinating head of hers.

She was breaking all his rules.

Margot reached over, put her hands on his chest and didn’t say a word as she pushed him backward.

Thor could have fought her, of course, but he saw no reason to do such a thing. Not when he could fall back against the rug and let her climb over him and surrender himself to part of what he wanted.

He kept expecting her to say something. To challenge him in that way of hers. To analyze what had already happened and throw her buzzwords at him in that way she did.

Because he craved that, too.

But it seemed that she had taken his advice to heart, because she didn’t say a word.

She simply...helped herself to his body as if he was the object.

Or, if he corrected himself, as if he was what she admired.

And she took her sweet time admiring him.

She used her mouth all over his chest. Her mouth and her hands and the seductive sweep of that lavender hair. She tasted him and she teased him, licking her way over his nipples and then tracing the outline of his pectoral muscles. She knelt beside him and explored each arm, and each leg, the way he’d done. She tugged off his loose trousers and threw them aside, and then she started all over again.

She kissed him everywhere except his cock and his mouth, and by the time she crawled back up the length of him and threw herself down beside him, Thor thought he might go out of his mind. He worried he already had. He thought his skin might crack wide-open with the force of his need—

And the only way he knew how to handle it was to get inside her.

Even though he already understood it wouldn’t be enough.

She still hadn’t said a word.

“Have you gone mute?” he gritted out, his control a pale shadow of what it ought to have been. He knew that, and even if he hadn’t, he could hear it. He couldn’t tell if it was anger or anguish or some passionate form of torment in between the two, but he couldn’t keep it in. It spilled out of him as if of its own accord.

And the crazy part was, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to care about that the way he should have. The way he knew he would, if he survived.

“Tell me what you want,” she demanded, her voice husky from disuse.

And more, with something else that it took him long moments to realize was a kind of sheer, humming power that resonated inside him like the towering wall of the ferocious North Atlantic over a black sand beach.

Like home.

“You,” he growled. “Now.”

“You have to be more specific,” she told him, and even though her lips curved, there was still that fierceness, a kind of wickedness that made every part of his body pull tight and hard.

She was a goddess. Gold and purple, flushed sweet cream.

Thor was lost.

“I need you beneath me, Margot,” he managed to grit out.

He didn’t know which one of them moved then, only that they were flipping around until he was on top of her at last, pressing himself into that sweet cradle between her legs.

They were both blessedly naked. And for a moment Thor held himself there, enjoying the simple perfection of her bare skin against his. The way his cock notched into her soft heat.

The anticipation.

“I’m beneath you,” Margot said in that same demanding, daring way that lit him up everywhere they touched. And everywhere they didn’t. “Now what?”

“I am not the one who hides behind words,” he said, though everything in him shouted for him to simply tilt his hips, find her slick entrance and bury himself in her pussy at last. “Do you think I need to learn the same lessons?”

“I think that you’re so certain you don’t need to learn a thing that it probably means you do,” Margot replied simply, that powerful current running through her and into him.

And the fact she was saying something he didn’t want to hear didn’t change that electricity.

If anything, it turned a simple charge into a lightning strike.

“I already told you. I’m fluent in all kinds of languages. My body isn’t a mystery to me, Margot.”

And as if he had to prove it, right there and then, he thrust himself deep inside her.

She groaned. He did, too. And for a moment the pleasure was so intense, almost excruciating, it was as if they had to freeze to survive the impact of it.

Thor held himself above her, his palms braced against the ground on either side of her head. And Margot was a flushed tangle of purple hair and bright eyes beneath him.

“But you have no issues, of course,” Margot murmured, her voice soft but still infused with that note of power that made him think of the sea. “You have no needs. You’re near perfect, just as you are.”

There were a thousand things Thor could have said then, but he didn’t. He pulled out, taking his time in making certain he dragged the head of his cock over all the parts of her he could, there in that tight channel where he’d already found each and every place that made her shiver. He found them all again. He reminded them both how well he fit. Then he thrust himself back in.

But Margot was still talking. “It’s perfectly normal to run a hotel like this. To live in an antiseptic penthouse that echoes when you walk. You have no daddy issues at all. If we opened up a dictionary right this minute, we would find your picture next to the word well-adjusted. I’m certain of it.”

He knew she was taunting him. And he thought he should stop it. Or counter it, anyway. He certainly couldn’t allow it to go unchallenged—

But he didn’t use words. He thought words were beside the point.

He used the deep thrust, then the slow drag out. He used the angle of his hips and the way he moved them. He used the intensity of his pace and the way he could alter it at will to throw her toward the edge and then keep her there.

And keep her there.

She laughed, breathless and more than a little bit wild. And then she braced her hands on his chest as if that could stop this. As if anything could stop this.

“Here’s what I know about you, Thor,” Margot said, and her voice was thicker now. He could hear the little breaths that caught in her throat every time he surged deep within her, but she didn’t stop. “You like to talk. You claim to be about the body, but the truth is that it’s all mind games, isn’t it? The only question I have is—who are you playing those games for, me or you?”

He shifted, going down on his elbows so he could press the wall of his chest against the glory of her breasts and make it all ache that much more.

“You’re so cool. So aloof. You claim you listen to your body, but even while you fuck you’re analyzing. Cataloging.” Her gaze was a blaze of gold. “No wonder sex is your favorite form of recreation. You don’t have to worry about true intimacy when everything is so clinical.”

Thor didn’t tell her what he thought about her sudden abiding interest in intimacy. He showed her. He picked up his pace, moving just fast enough so that she hitched up her knees on either side of him, putting her feet flat on the rug to give herself a little purchase to lift up and meet each thrust.

“You live in a sex hotel. You have this stark and empty penthouse all to yourself. You’re so busy building walls around yourself that you don’t even know you’re doing it. Nothing can touch you. No one can know you. The more available you make yourself, the less you can be seen. But I see you.”

Her voice broke then. And Thor wasn’t thinking. He wasn’t sure he was listening so much as he was withstanding the way each word she said burned into him, and scorched him deep inside.

And all the while he was lost in that sweet, delirious slide. He couldn’t tell anymore if he was keeping to a pace or if he was simply losing himself inside her.

He couldn’t tell if he was lost.

And he didn’t care.

“I see you, Thor,” she whispered again, and then everything was fire. There was a blistering light that ate them both alive, an electric madness that he didn’t know whether to crave or fear.

He did neither. Both. He pounded into her and she met him, and he couldn’t tell who was fucking who.

It was as if they were moving parts of the same whole, making a blistering storm all their own.

He felt her shake again, and he knew her now. He knew the way she came apart. He knew that tight, hot clench of her pussy around his cock. The way her thighs clamped down on the outside of his. The way she lifted herself to take more of him, all of him, arching her back to press herself even more firmly against him.

And Thor kept going. He fucked her through one orgasm, then straight on into another.

It was too hot. It was too right. He believed that she could see him and more, worse, he could see himself at last.

And when he released himself inside her, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was lost.

The trouble was, he understood as he heard himself shout out her name and tumble off into the madness of that storm they’d built, he didn’t think he wanted to be found.