see my father again. And indeed, she did not.”
It was as if being around this man had opened up dark pockets inside her that she had never known were there. Because she felt something like envy at his flippant, careless tone. The things he said should have been upsetting, surely. But Thor didn’t look upset in the least. He merely lounged there, as if there was no story at all to how he came to be raised as another man’s son.
Meanwhile, Margot couldn’t say anything bad had ever happened to her outside of her father’s disappointment in her. She hadn’t been treated badly. Her needs had always been met. Her parents had supported her academic aspirations all the way. So why wasn’t she relaxed and flippant in turn?
“I’m no tremendous intellect, but even a dullard like me recognizes an attempt to change the subject when it appears before him,” Thor said quietly.
“I do not have daddy issues,” Margot snapped.
“Then you would be remarkable indeed.” His blue gaze was kind, and Margot found that unacceptable because it made her want to cry. “Are we not all stitched together by our pasts? And is the thread not often the color of the people who raised us?”
Margot could feel her heartbeat, each thud like a nail into a coffin. Her coffin, she had no doubt.
“I don’t want to talk about needlework,” she threw at him. “I don’t want to talk at all. You told me Icelanders communicate with sex, not idle chitchat.”
“I would not call something that makes you this upset idle, Professor.”
“I’m not upset.” When the elevator sounded from the main room, announcing the arrival of their food, she was almost pathetically grateful. She forced herself to smile. “But maybe I’m a little bit hungry.”
Thor took his time getting to his feet. He kept his gaze on her, and Margot would have given anything to look away. To hide. To pull on her clothes and run.
But she couldn’t seem to move.
“Very well,” he said after a moment, when he was standing there before her again. “I look forward to all the epic, athletic, silent sex we’ll be having once you replenish your energy stores and restore your delightful mood.”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? I’m tired of all this talking.”
Because she couldn’t seem to help herself. And because anything was better than the unwieldy things sloshing around inside her, threatening to tip over and poison her there and then.
His smile was like a weapon. “I’ll endeavor not to hold myself back any longer, then, shall I?”
Thor left her there as he walked toward the elevator, her heart like a lump in her throat and her body alive with a new sort of fire, wondering what fresh hell she’d dropped herself in this time.
And why she couldn’t seem to do anything but stay right where she was.
Shivering with anticipation.
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
