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
