in the sweet hitch and the hot slide. There was no getting away from the fact that nothing about this felt appropriately academic.
She felt alive. She felt wide-open and exposed. She knew that he could see her—really see her—from that flush that rolled over her skin to the way her breasts jiggled as she worked herself against him. She wanted that to distance her from what was happening, what she was doing. She wanted it to throw up a wall.
She wanted something about this to feel the way sex normally felt.
Good, always good, but always her.
It wasn’t that she didn’t feel like herself with Thor, it was that she couldn’t tell the difference between them. There was just that brilliant, blistering ache between them, and they were both a part of it.
It was heavy and it was dark. It was bright and it was hot. It was the place where they joined and it was all around them, like the eye of a storm and the driving snow at once, and there was no escaping it.
There was only going toward it.
She felt shattered already, she felt ripped into pieces and possibly broken, and that was before that crazy fire began to climb to its flashpoint inside her.
Again.
She thought he should have used his fingers. That it should take work, the way it sometimes did, instead of that too-good slide of her clit against him on her lush upstroke.
Margot kept waiting to crash into one of those walls—
But there was nothing there. Just too much sensation, the bluest eyes she’d ever seen and Thor surging inside her over and over again, pounding her out of her own skin and into the ether.
Once. Then again, those hands moving up to grip her waist as she came apart around him.
He held her there, still keeping that same hard pace, making her moans flip over into something that sounded perilously close to screams as he kept going.
And kept going, fucking her straight through that first shattering and into another, far higher and far more dangerous one, because she wasn’t entirely sure she’d survive it—
This time he went with her, groaning out something in Icelandic as he pumped himself into her.
And Margot collapsed against that wide, hard chest of his, finally as boneless as he was, tried to catch her breath and waited for the shame of losing herself so completely to claim her.
THOR HAD NO idea how long they lay there like that, heaped together on his bed as if neither one of them was likely to walk again under their own power. Or even breathe normally.
He wasn’t sure he’d mind.
And it was a sign of how far gone he was that it took a moment for that thought to penetrate the haze he was in like the warning it was.
Margot was sprawled across his chest, her head tucked into the crook of his neck so that all he could see was the bright fall of all that purple. She was breathing deep and low, suggesting that she’d drifted off into sleep.
Or was still lost out there in the storm they’d built together that put the one outside to shame.
And Thor didn’t know why he felt...different.
It was more than the simple release of a good orgasm. It felt...layered. Something a little too close to complicated.
As if this woman wasn’t like any of the others he’d taken to his bed.
He didn’t like anything about it.
He shifted Margot off his body, placing her gently to one side. He meant to jackknife up, head to the bathroom suite and wash the strange, lingering hangover from that truly excellent bit of sex straight off him before the strange layers stuck to him.
But he didn’t move.
It took him a minute to realize that he was pressing the palm of one hand against his chest.
He stopped the moment he realized what he was doing. But he found himself frowning, there in his bedroom with the latest winter storm at the window and nothing inside but this confounding, surprising woman and the dance of the fire in its grate.
He felt almost...thrown. And he couldn’t have said why, when he was a man very rarely lost for words.
It was something to do with the sheer honesty of Margot’s responses. It was the way they’d fit together, the tight grip of her pussy around his cock so good and right it had felt nearly supernatural. It was the way she’d stared down at him as she’d ridden him, those eyes of hers gleaming gold with a kind of wonder in them.
He realized he was quickly becoming maudlin as he lay there. Something he certainly wouldn’t have tolerated in anyone else and had no intention of allowing in himself.
Thor rolled to the side of the bed and sat there a moment, amazed that he really did feel as if he’d had too much to drink, even though he had trimmed back on his excesses years before, the better to enjoy all the many things self-control could give him.
He hadn’t come close to losing control since. Why did this particular woman test that? When he couldn’t recall the last thing that had?
“Are we done?”
Her voice was sleepy. A little bit husky and thick, which lodged itself in Thor’s chest as if he was still rubbing his hand there.
He hated that he had to check.
“Do you feel that you collected enough data here? Is your experiment at an end?” Thor wasn’t sure he recognized his own voice. He sounded...darker.
Different. Again.
When it was just sex. There was no reason he should feel anything, and certainly not some intangible difference. He rubbed his palms over his face to wake himself up from whatever spell this was and ordered himself to get a grip.
“I understand the limitations of male biology, that’s all,” Margot said.
Thor couldn’t quite place that note in her voice, but he knew he didn’t like what she was suggesting. He turned his head so he could lift an eyebrow at her over his shoulder.
She’d pulled herself up in the bed. Now she sat there with the sheet wrapped around her, hugging her own knees.
He would have thought she looked like a child had he not had an instantaneous response to those lush lips of hers that he had felt against his skin, but wasn’t allowed to taste.
“I beg your pardon, Professor. What limitations do you imagine I possess?”
Margot’s face changed as she gazed back at him, as if she had no idea what her mouth did to him. Her expression was equal parts wistfulness and something a lot more like resignation. “Everybody talks big, Thor. It’s part of the game. And I understand
