Читать книгу The Dare Collection October 2018 - Nicola Marsh - Страница 18

MARGOT WOKE SLOWLY, a delicious sort of warmth all over her.

It took her a long moment, then another, to understand where she was.

Iceland. Thor Ragnarsson’s famous sex hotel. Trapped at the notorious Hotel Viking by a blizzard, no less.

Which meant she’d actually survived the most intense night of her life.

She opened her eyes and found herself out on one of the low, wide couches in the main room in Thor’s stark penthouse. She could hear his voice, though she couldn’t see him from where she lay, sprawled out on the sofa that could have fit them both—and had, if she wasn’t mistaken. She shifted, realizing as she did that he had tucked her under a thick duvet and that was what was keeping her toasty warm despite the fact she was still naked.

Margot sat up slowly, blinking as she looked around. There was still snow on the other side of the large windows, but the difference was that she could see light out there as well. Far more light, anyway, than she had seen since yesterday morning in Reykjavík.

It took her a moment to find Thor. He was far away, down at the other end of the great space in what she quickly realized must have been his office. He was speaking on the phone in rapid Icelandic, standing with his back to her and his gaze out at the storm.

He had dressed. More than simply dressed. He was wearing the kind of suit that made it perfectly clear that he was a man of international clout. It was dark and cut to flatter, making him look taller, somehow. More beautiful, if such a thing was possible. He held one hand on the top of his head, as if he’d started to rake it through his blond hair but had forgotten to complete the action.

And Margot was fiercely, fervently glad that he couldn’t see her. That she had a moment without that piercing blue stare of his boring into her. That she could take a breath or two to compose herself. Hell, to remember herself. To try to put the jumble of thoughts and sensation into some kind of order without knowing he was watching her do it.

She had only the vaguest memories of what had happened there before the fire after that last, intense round of this game that didn’t feel anything like a game at all. She had no idea how long they’d lain there together. She’d been slightly aware when he’d moved them to the couch, and she knew that he had slept there with her for some time. She had no memory of him leaving her, and even less of him covering her up.

She was almost certain it was morning, though she supposed it could be later on into the day, with all that snow.

Margot felt like a different person.

She found her fingers on her mouth, as if she expected to feel bruised there. But she thought that really, if there were any marks, they would be inside her. She felt torn apart. Rearranged.

Changed beyond recognition.

She pulled the duvet more tightly around her and took stock of her body, realizing with an uneasy sort of sensation that even her own limbs didn’t feel like hers any longer.

Margot had dedicated her life to the pursuit of knowledge, but Thor had taught her—over and over and over again—how very little she knew about something as basic and fundamental as sex.

She’d spent her adult life studying something she had never experienced—not really, not like this or anything near this—and she suspected that, given time, she would find that horrifying. And maybe also sad.

She felt too many things, all at once, and her experience with that damned napkin had already taught her too well.

She didn’t try to interpret them. She didn’t try to analyze them.

It was as if they rolled through her, one wave and then the next. A deep kind of regret that she had never known what she was missing. That she had been so certain she was in the position to lecture on the topic of sex in the first place when all the sex she had ever had before had been so...deficient. There was an exultant kind of exhilaration that her body could do those things. That she could feel those things. That she was capable of so much she hadn’t even known was possible.

Looking at Thor made her sad. Furious. Giddy. And so silly that she could feel a smile on her mouth for absolutely no reason at all.

One wave and then the next.

She felt ashamed that it had taken a gag in her mouth to teach her how to find her voice. She had a picture of herself in her head, that napkin in her mouth and her hand between her legs, and she felt it, too. The memory turned her on even as it made something in her stomach turn over, as if she thought she ought to find it sickening. But mostly it just made her hot all over again.

She felt.

And Margot had no earthly idea how she was ever going to manage to put these things she felt into any kind of order. How she was ever to make sense of them.

Thor finished his conversation and tossed his phone on the desk that spread there across the whole of one wall in a kind of nook that prevented her from seeing his numerous screens straight on. He didn’t turn around. He stayed where he was, staring out the window, and Margot thought she would give anything at all to see the expression on his face.

But when he turned, she had the sense that he’d known that she was awake and watching him all along, because his expression was wiped clean.

For a moment they only stared at each other, all the rambling, empty space of the penthouse between them.

Margot thought there was a whole lot more distance than that. And more, she could feel it gape wider and more impassable inside her the longer they did nothing but...look at each other.

When his phone rang again, it was a relief.

Thor held her gaze for a long moment. The ringing continued, but he didn’t move to answer anything and she wasn’t sure what she saw in his face. It wasn’t as simple as resignation. His eyes were too blue for that. And she was sure that all that aloofness she’d noticed before was different now.

Everything is different now, something intoned, deep inside her.

His phone kept ringing.

“I have to take this,” he told her, almost stiffly, in a voice that didn’t sound loud at all and yet managed to echo down the length of the great room.

Margot inclined her head as if she was giving him her permission. And she could see Thor didn’t like it. If she were a better person, she would have offered to remove herself to the next room while he handled his business.

But this was the man who’d encouraged her to put a fucking napkin in her mouth.

“Intimacy takes many forms, doesn’t it?” she replied, also pitching her voice to carry. “It’s really the gift that keeps on giving.”

She saw temper flash across Thor’s face, but he didn’t argue with her any further. He turned back to his office and rummaged for something on his desktop. Not that anyone would have known it was the desktop. Margot hadn’t seen the desk before, and it took her perhaps too long to realize that was because it was the sort of desk that could be hidden away in a cabinet. Imagine that. A whole life that could be easily tucked away from prying eyes whenever the mood took him.

It seemed she knew more about Thor than she’d realized. That she had been right on target, in fact.

Margot waited to feel a surge of triumph, but it was something else that moved in her, making her feel a little too close to a man who was standing as far away as it was possible to get from her while still being in the same sprawling penthouse.

“It’s angled,” Thor said, which made no sense. “You’re not in the frame.”

She didn’t understand that, or why he hadn’t answered that ringing, but then the huge, flat screen on the wall behind his desk area bloomed into life and color.

“Why do you always look like you’re standing in a fucking morgue?” came a low, raspy voice with an American accent. Not just a random, unplaceable American accent that could have been from anywhere, but one laced with hints of the South and a faint, dirty drawl.

Margot sank down on the couch, suddenly entirely too aware that Thor was on a video call and she was naked. Covered up in a comforter, sure. Out of frame, he’d said. But she was naked all the same, and that felt...wrong when there was another voice. And when it sounded like that.

“I assume you mean that my Nordic sensibilities offend you,” Thor was saying in reply.

And he sounded...not quite like the man she thought she’d come to know over the course of a night that Margot felt had lasted several lifetimes already. Something scraped at her, thick and insistent, and she realized that he sounded like the Thor she had met downstairs last night. There in the bar, when he’d come up behind her and she’d thought he was nothing but another hotel guest. Who’d been attempting to hit on her.

It made her feel a little dizzy to think about how different things were now. How much a single night had changed them both.

“Sensibilities don’t offend me, brother,” the same voice replied.

“Aloha, motherfuckers,” a third voice chimed in then. Richer, darker. And with a lilting sort of hint of an accent that Margot found unfamiliar but assumed went along with the Hawaiian greeting.

She peeked her head up over the back of the couch to sneak a look at the screen, hoping she really was out of frame. She assumed she must have been when no one said anything, and that allowed her to study the screen. It was split in two. On one side sat a very large, gorgeously muscled man bathed in sunlight with palm trees and blue water behind him. His eyebrows were arched and jet black, a fascinating contrast to his brown skin and the smirk on his surprisingly lush mouth. His black hair fell around his face, a little too long to Margot’s way of thinking. A little too messy.

He wasn’t beautiful, but he was purely carnal. Margot was surprised he didn’t sizzle.

She was surprised she didn’t, simply from looking at him.

The man on the other side of the screen was blond, though a darker, dirtier blond than Thor. He was also built out of lean, hard muscles and razor-sharp lines, like those fascinating cheekbones of his. And maybe it was his similarities to Thor that clued her in: his blue eyes, though a darker, moodier blue than Thor’s; a tilt to his head that suggested he was up to no particular good; the kind of mouth that made Margot’s mind seem to go blank for a whole beat or two.

She understood that these must be Thor’s half brothers. Thor’s famous half brothers, made objects of international interest the moment their existence had been confirmed at the reading of Daniel St. George’s will six months ago.

Her heart thudded a little too hard for her peace of mind, but it wasn’t because Thor’s half brothers were so ridiculously attractive. It was because Thor himself looked so...stern and disapproving as he glared at his screen.

“I thought aloha was a Hawaiian thing,” the blond with the drawl said.

He was Charlie Teller, if Margot remembered her research into Thor correctly. The article she’d read about Daniel St. George’s long-lost sons had made vague references to Charlie’s brushes with the law and potentially dangerous associates. He didn’t look dangerous on screen—or he didn’t only look dangerous. He was grinning broadly, tipped back in a chair in a room somewhere. With terra-cotta walls that struck Margot as...insistent, somehow.

“It is a Hawaiian thing. I’m a Hawaiian thing.”

That third voice was Jason Kaoki. She’d read about him, too. A local Pacific Island boy turned good, the fawning article had called him. He had gone off to college on the mainland on a full football scholarship and had even played a few years pro before sustaining the kind of injuries that had forced him into early retirement. He was rumored to be a major, if anonymous, philanthropist in Hawaii and other Pacific Islands. And then had come the will.

“You’re not actually in Hawaii, though, are you?” Charlie asked. “I thought you were on some random ass island out there in the middle somewhere.”

“Are you trying to throw down with me about some Pacific Island shit, you haole fuck?” Jason demanded, then belted out a big, broad laugh that seemed to warm up even this cavernous room where Margot lay, far across the planet from his light and sea and palm trees, surrounded by snow and ice.

And a chilly Thor besides.

“As delightful as this questionable camaraderie is,” Thor interjected coolly then, as if he could hear Margot’s thoughts, “I believe this is meant to be a business call, is it not?”

“I’d tell you to chill out, brother,” Charlie said, and Margot wondered if she was the only one who heard the sardonic kick in the way he used that word. Brother. “But I’m not sure that Viking ass could get any colder.”

Jason laughed again and it had the same effect as before. Bright and loud, as if he didn’t have a care in the world and didn’t care what the idiots on his screen were talking about.

Though Margot imagined it would be a very foolish person indeed who failed to note the clever gleam in his dark gaze.

“I find Viking commentary entertaining,” Thor said. “I do. But these conversations are supposed to be about money.”

“I like money,” Jason said, and he still sounded as merry. As lazy. “But how much can any one man have?”

“Meaning you’re still holding out,” Charlie replied, as if that was a code. “You might as well surrender, brother. The long arm of Daniel St. George reaches from beyond the grave whether you want it to or not. You can tell yourself whatever lies you want, but believe me, you’re going to end up building that hotel.”

Jason smiled, big and broad, but Margot was caught on the shrewd look in his gaze.

“You had a lot of good reasons to leave the mainland. I’m assuming Italy was one of those reasons. Maybe your life choices on the mainland were another reason.” Jason shrugged as if it was no matter to him. As if he couldn’t see the way Charlie’s smile became indefinably more dangerous. “But I like my island the way it is.”

“Jason is still holding off on development plans. How is the Amalfi Coast treating you?” Thor asked Charlie with no particular inflection in his cool voice.

“Italian, Thor. It seems really fucking Italian.”

There was more laughter, though somehow, it didn’t surprise Margot that Thor didn’t join in.

“Everything continues apace here in Iceland,” Thor told them. “Business is booming.”

“Sex always sells,” Charlie said with a shrug. “And water is wet, the sun comes up in the east and a douchebag is what a douchebag does.”

“Is that life advice?” Jason asked.

“I’m a life coach in my spare time,” Charlie drawled.

“We could all say a great many things about the man, certainly,” Thor said, an edge in his voice that made goose bumps prickle along Margot’s arms—and also cut through his half brothers’ laughter. “But our father always had excellent taste in hotels.”

“Don’t call that asshole our father,” Charlie muttered. “Jesus.”

“He’s nothing to me but one more haole,” Jason said, which Margot interpreted as his agreement.

“I’m thrilled we agree on something,” Thor said. “I’ll send the usual email outlining our continued progress in our respective areas. Duty calls, gentlemen. Next week?”

“Next week,” Charlie said with that same smile that the longer Margot looked at it, the less she thought was all that nice. “Every fucking week.”

“Aloha, bitches,” Jason said merrily.

And then there was silence when the screen went dark.

Margot stayed where she was. She was frowning toward the windows closest to her, shifting pieces around in her head, and it took her a moment to notice when Thor came to stand behind the couch. Next to her, but separated by the back of the couch.

And yet even though he had moved closer, it was as if he was on the other end of one of those video cameras. He looked as remote as if he’d carved himself from ice.

He made her feel shivery inside in a way that had nothing to do with sex, but felt a lot more as if she might tip over into tears at any moment. That closed-down look on his face made her hurt.

“Are you okay?” she asked quietly.

He looked startled, but only for a moment. Then it was straight back to ice and stone, shuttered and forbidding.

“It is a stipulation of the contracts we signed to take over the hotels our father left us that we hold these pointless conversations.” He didn’t sound like the man who had spent a long night weaving spells around Margot with his words alone. He sounded almost stilted. The way he had while he’d talked on his call. “Weekly.”

“Does it stipulate that you have to be best friends on all those calls?” Margot pushed herself up, until she could cross her legs beneath her and sit up straight. “Either way, they didn’t sound particularly awful.”

“They are not awful. They are perfectly fine, I suppose, for full-grown men I am apparently related to and must now interact with as if we have some kind of history.” Thor shook his head, but it was more as if he was shaking something off. “I do not understand brothers.”

Margot thought that what he couldn’t understand was connection, however new and strange, but she didn’t say that. She didn’t think it was the sort of thing he could hear at the moment. And probably not from her as she sat there, still sure she could taste that napkin in her mouth. “Have you met them in person?”

“The will was read in Germany.” And once Thor said it, Margot remembered that she’d read that, too. The article had shown pictures of a law firm in Hamburg and paparazzi shots of men in dark coats and sunglasses. It was odd to think that she now knew what one of those dark-coated men tasted like. “The only thing more awkward than finding out that your father, who you never met and never wanted to meet, left you property you didn’t want after his death is discovering that he did the same to others.”

Margot wanted to touch him. She settled for her hands in fists in the duvet and a smile. “Do you think maybe he wanted all of you to band together and become some kind of family after he was gone?”

Thor laughed, though it was a far hollower sound than the laughter they’d heard from his half brothers. And it seemed to lodge between Margot’s ribs. “He would have to have been delusional to imagine such a thing. But then, I think it is fairly clear that he was exactly that or he wouldn’t have used his will to perform paternal acts in absentia. So who knows? Maybe this is what he thinks a family is.”

“Thor...”

He was still dressed in that glorious dark suit of his and she considered it for a moment. He hadn’t been wearing a suit yesterday. In her time in Iceland, come to that, she hadn’t seen very many suits at all. They didn’t go very well with the weather, for one thing. Which made her wonder why, exactly, Thor had chosen to throw one on this morning when he’d known he had to have this phone call with the half brothers he hardly knew.

She thought she could guess.

The idea that Thor, the strongest and most fascinating man she’d ever met, should feel the need to put on his armor before dealing with his family made a hot, prickling sensation threaten the backs of her eyes. Margot didn’t dare let a single drop of moisture fall, but she had to blink a little too quickly to make sure.

And she gripped her duvet tighter.

“They say that a man is not truly a man until he teaches his son the sagas,” Thor told her, after a long, taut silence. “I suppose it is another way of talking about fatherhood. But the man who taught me the sagas was my stepfather. Ragnar raised me. He taught me to read. He took care of my mother and me. He was a good man, always. In all my memories of childhood, I cannot recall a single time he drank too much or raised his voice. He was a big, kind, gentle man.”

Margot was afraid to ask the next question. She had to force it out. “Is he...?”

“He died years ago, when I was twenty-five. He got a cough that wouldn’t go away, and within three months, he was dead.”

Margot searched his face and saw nothing. Only stone and ice and something harder still in the blue depths of his gaze.

“I’m so sorry,” she said anyway.

“I am not telling you this story for your sympathy,” Thor said with a kind of quiet menace that felt a lot like a kick to the gut, but Margot refused to show him that he’d landed a hit. “I always knew who my father was and it was not Daniel St. George. It was never Daniel St. George. I knew that name. I would have given anything not to know that name, but it was unavoidable. I hated him. But I never, not once, considered him my father.”

Margot couldn’t read him. There was a voice inside her that tasted a lot like panic, and it kept urging her to stop this. To go. To retreat from the tension, take a shower, pretend she couldn’t tell that Thor was going through something.

But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “It makes sense to hate the man for leaving you.”

Thor’s mouth curved, cold and harsh. “You have to acknowledge a child in order to leave it, I think. Daniel St. George never condescended to do any such thing. I think I told you that my mother married Ragnar before I was born. But she never got over Daniel St. George. Never.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his suit trousers, as if he didn’t know what he meant to do with them. A kind of bitterness hung over him, like a cloud. She could see it in his eyes and in the twist of his lips. Worse, she could feel it, chilling her skin even though she still sat with the duvet wrapped around her.

“My mother is the one who drinks too much, Professor. And when she does, she cries. She becomes maudlin and bemoans all she has lost. Some might suggest that she lost nothing, but she never got over the man who left her without a second thought all those years ago. She spent the whole of her marriage to my stepfather nursing her broken heart. It was not something she bothered to hide. Her epic, eternal sadness, her inability to love Ragnar back, her grief—this was the third presence in our house. There was no point in making a child of their own because they not only had me, they had their very own ghost.”

Margot thought of her own chilly upbringing. The pressure of her father’s expectations. The way her mother had bent and contorted and still always proved that she was no match for the man she’d married. Margot’s father had long since given up pretending he had anything but contempt for his spouse. And Margot understood now, in a different way than she had when she was younger, that she should be deeply ashamed that she, too, often had followed his lead because she and her mother had been engaged in a sick little competition to win the man’s affection and regard.

It wasn’t as if she wanted to hold her own family up as any kind of ideal. But there had never been any third parties in her parents’ marriage or in the house where Margot had grown up. There had been no ghosts, only regrets.

“Did she ever see Daniel St. George again?” Margot asked gently, carefully. Because she didn’t dare call the man Thor’s father. She suspected that was a weapon he tolerated only when he wielded it himself.

Thor’s gaze was so cold it made Margot’s bones ache. “He had no desire to see her again, something that only became clear to her when he died. In many ways, he left her twice. He left her pregnant and alone, and then, all these years later, he left that will so he could slap her down once again by virtue of ignoring her once more. And between you and me, I am not certain she will ever fully recover.”

“What do you mean?”

“It seems it took the callousness of the man’s will to finally make it clear to my mother what kind of man he was,” Thor said, all that bitterness and icy chill making his voice sound different. Almost scratchy. “The newspapers would have you believe that it was an act of kindness. An old man reaching out to the sons he’d abandoned and offering a kind of olive branch from the grave. Perhaps my half brothers think so, I do not know.”

“But you don’t.”

“I think it was one more demonstration of his cruelty.” Thor swallowed hard, and Margot had the sense he could hear that scratchiness in his voice. And hated it. “Because his will made it clear he knew exactly who we were and where we had been, all this time. He knew who had raised us and how. He knew the details of our lives, which means he’d been paying attention, all these years. He could have made contact at any point, but didn’t. Daniel St. George was interested in one thing only, and that was the perpetuation of his name. Through his sons. He didn’t care who he’d made those sons with.”

“Thor...”

“And do not deceive yourself. He has no interest in the daughter he made, either. The only difference between my overlooked half sister and the women my father impregnated and abandoned is that my sister was summoned to the will reading and left an insult. Neither my mother nor anyone else was even mentioned. As far as Daniel St. George was concerned, they never existed.”

“He sounds like a very sad, pathetic old man with dynastic pretensions.”

Thor raked a hand through his hair, and it seemed he’d lost the battle with the emotion in his voice. It cracked. And it bled through into his blue gaze, too. “Now when my mother drinks, she does not regret the love she lost before I was born. She regrets the love she had all those years afterward that she could never quite accept. She regrets all those maudlin nights she cried for a man who cared nothing for her, while hurting one who did.”

Margot hardly knew she meant to move, but then there she was, kneeling up on the couch so she could move herself closer to him. So she could reach out before she thought better of it and put her hands on his body.

She told herself not to pay any attention to that strange disconnection she felt because of it. Because he’d gone so cold overnight when she’d woken up warm all over.

Because she felt as if she knew him so well, and yet didn’t know him at all, and she didn’t have to have a hundred morning afters like this under her belt to understand that he likely didn’t want to hear that.

“Thor,” she said softly, amazed to find she could feel his heat through his clothes when she’d expected nothing but cold. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for. You weren’t one of the players in this game.” He looked down at her hands as if he couldn’t make sense of them, there pressed into his sides. “I didn’t build this antiseptic penthouse, you call it. I don’t live here. This is a shrine my father built to celebrate himself. Hence the reflective surfaces. You heard my half brothers call it a morgue. He was a ghost throughout my childhood. Why not haunt my adulthood as well?”

“You’re nothing like your father,” Margot told him fiercely, and she didn’t need the scientific method to achieve that conclusion. She knew.

“I never thought so. But then, Professor, the strangest things happen in sex hotels at the top of the world. A man who thinks he knows himself well might come to find that, unbeknownst to him, he has never been anything but a copy of the one man he hates above all others.”

That shocked her, but she rallied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nothing that happened last night makes you a man like that.”

“It’s all about intimacy, is it not?” Thor asked, a strange tension in his voice. She could feel it in the way he held himself. “Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to fuck in and out of each other? And yet you can’t live through a night like last night and not use it to take stock of all the other nights in your life, can you?”

“No,” Margot said, and she didn’t know if she was agreeing with him or denying what seemed to be coming next; what that knot of foreboding in her chest told her was surely coming next, no matter how she tried to hold on to him and the night they’d shared. With her fists.

“My father is famous for being a kind of sex god of his time. He has left the evidence littered about the planet in his wake. I have always been so certain that it was different when I did it. Because I am a different man. But perhaps that’s the biggest lie of all and I am no different.”

“Do you have a great many children out there that you refuse to acknowledge?”

“I have no children at all.” Thor’s mouth flattened. “As far as I know.”

Margot told herself there was no reason she should feel so relieved to hear that. The man’s sexual history was his business, not hers, and some people weren’t parental...

But she had to fight to keep herself from grinning, because relieved was exactly what she felt.

“That’s one difference,” she said instead. “Another is that you’re not cruel.”

“You have no idea if that’s true or not, Margot.” And it was as if he tried to prove it then, with that expression on his face that made her wonder if he wanted her to hurt. To wonder. To fight to keep her breath from going shallow. “You have no idea how I plan to extricate myself from this situation. Will I let you down easy? Will I tell you lies? Will I simply make myself unavailable again?”

Her heart was slamming at her, but Margot kept her gaze trained on him. And for the first time since she’d woken up this morning, she wished she wasn’t naked.

“You could do something truly revolutionary and choose none of the above,” she suggested as evenly as she could.

“I promised myself two things,” Thor gritted out. “One, that I would never be my father. And yet I realize that I have made myself his twin. I sleep around, without thought for the feelings of others. I have fun, so I assume they must be having fun as well. But how would I know?”

“You would know. Of course you would know.”

It was almost funny to imagine he might not, after the attention he’d paid to...everything last night.

But he ignored her. “And second, I vowed that I would never become like my mother. A slave to emotions that ruined lives. My stepfather’s. Her own.”

“Yours?” Margot dared to suggest.

He didn’t like that. That was clear, though all he did was stare down at her, his icy gaze glittering.

“And in one night, one single night, I have betrayed myself completely.”

Margot moved again then, without thinking it through. Because she was in a panic, bright and searing, and she didn’t know what to do except climb over the back of the couch and slide to the ground. And then she stood there before him, her hands gripping the jacket of his suit as if it was some kind of harness. As if she could lead him somewhere. As if she could muscle him into doing what she wanted—

Even if she didn’t know what it was she wanted.

“This is what family is,” she told him fiercely. “No one feels that they fit. Everyone thinks that they’re missing something, somehow. If you’re lucky, there’s enough love in the mix that it all balances out, or so I hear, because it wasn’t as if my father was any easier.”

Margot felt disloyal saying such a thing out loud. Worse, she felt weak. As if in acknowledging that her father had been something less than ideal, she was showing her true colors after all. She was showing how little she had always been worth, just as her father had always suspected.

And if she’d been alone, that might have wounded her. That might have given her pause, at the very least. But she was too focused on Thor to care.

“Even if you followed in your father’s footsteps, who cares?” she asked, because he’d handed her that napkin and freed her, somehow. And she wanted to do the same for him. “You’re still not him. You’ll never be him. You need to ask yourself why you think you have no choice in the matter.”

She didn’t miss the way her own words slammed into her, too. She didn’t miss the fact that she’d never asked herself that question, either. What had she been trying to prove all this time? Why had she always allowed her father to make her feel, no matter what she did, that she didn’t measure up?

And how could she tell Thor that he was the reason she was even capable of recognizing her own complicity in these things that had twisted her life around into something she wasn’t sure she even wanted?

Margot didn’t want to be a brain in a jar. She didn’t want to hide in her words and her theories and her research.

She wanted to live her life, not study it.

With a quick breath for courage, she lifted herself up on her tiptoes and tilted her head back, because she knew exactly what she needed to do. She let go of his suit jacket and moved her hands up the hard-packed wall of his chest, every inch of which she’d tasted. Touched. And could likely re-create from memory, if necessary.

She looped her hands around his neck, letting her thumbs move over the splendor of his fine jaw.

“Margot.”

Her name was a warning, but she didn’t heed it. Instead, she lifted herself up even farther and went to press her lips to his.

But he stopped her. He reached up and took her upper arms in his hands, holding her away from him so she couldn’t make contact.

“I want to kiss you,” she said, and she knew, somehow, that it was more than a kiss.

That it was everything.

And more, she could see that he knew it, too. It was that gleaming light in his gaze, though his expression remained tortured.

It was everything, but he was keeping her from doing it.

“No,” he said, as if the word was torn from him. “It’s against the rules.”

“I made the rules. I can break them, if I want.”

“But I agreed to those rules. No kissing, Professor.”

Margot didn’t simply recognize the anguish she saw in his face then. She felt it, deep inside her. As if he was a part of her. As if he always would be, no matter what came next.

And she knew what was coming. She could see it. It was written all over him, and even though it was no more than they had agreed upon, it felt like the end of the world.

“Look out the window,” he ordered her, though his voice told her things she knew he wouldn’t. “The snow has stopped.”

She didn’t have to look. She didn’t want to look. If she’d been paying attention to something other than Thor, she would already have noticed the sunlight beaming into the room, as crisp and cold as he was.

“You were trapped in my hotel while the storm ran its course,” Thor said, as if he was handing down a sentence. As if he was throwing them both into prison, forever. “And now it has.”

“Thor...” The next word stuck in her throat, but she forced herself to keep going, because she didn’t care about power differentials when her heart was breaking into pieces. “Please...”

“We had an agreement, Margot,” Thor said, and just like that, the torment on his face disappeared. She watched it go, leaving nothing but ice behind. Until it was as if he had carved himself from the same volcanic rock that littered this island. It was as if he was nothing but sharp edges and the distant memory of ancient fires. As if the Thor she knew was gone. Or had never been at all. “And it’s time for you to go.”