on the places where she melted and ached for him. She thought about the dark fantasies she didn’t dare speak out loud and would have denied she had, if asked. The things she’d never told another living soul and hardly admitted to herself.
What he was offering was a chance to explore them. And if she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t talk herself out of it, could she?
“There has to be a signal,” she said, still scowling at him. “I have to be able to tell you to stop if I want you to stop.”
“There is a very simple signal. All you have to do is remove the gag. Then say whatever it is you wish to say. Tell me to stop. Tell me to never stop. Tell me whatever you like—but understand that the goal is to see if you can tell me all the things that go on in that beautiful head of yours without uttering a single word.”
There was a different sort of tremor making its way through her then. Margot shook, but on the inside. Her eyes felt too glassy, and she worried that all the uncertain, off-center things tilting and slopping around inside her were close to spilling over and revealing her.
You’ve already revealed yourself, a stern voice in her head chimed in then. Repeatedly.
But Margot knew, somehow, that there was so much more.
And she was worried about the things he might do to her. She was worried she might hate them—but if she was honest, she was far more concerned that she might not hate them at all.
And, most of all, she was worried that if she didn’t do it, if she didn’t take this opportunity no matter how it made her shake inside, no matter what it said about her or what it made her to even entertain the notion, she would regret it for the rest of her life.
It sat there between them, as stark and unrelenting as the coldly masculine room they stood in. As Thor himself, waiting there before her. As irrevocable as that pounding, swirling storm that beat at the windows and sounded too much like her terrified, deliriously wanton heart.
She didn’t want to do this. She only knew she had to, or die.
And it didn’t matter how many times Margot told herself she was being needlessly melodramatic. The feeling she had to do this—she had to—only grew the longer she stood there.
“What do you get out of it?” She hadn’t meant to ask that question, but once she had, she found she desperately wanted to know the answer. It was her turn to study Thor for a moment, and she found herself lingering on the sharp blades of his cheekbones as if they were clues. “What do you like about playing games like this?”
“Other than the sex?”
But she didn’t believe the lazy way he said that, as if all he cared about was getting his end away.
“This isn’t about sex. Or not only sex. If it was, you wouldn’t be quite so concerned with how I use my voice or what words I choose.”
“I don’t know that I would consider sex a game at all. Intimacy is not a few sets of tennis on a summer afternoon, is it?”
Margot was tempted to comment on the game of tennis itself, and more specifically its scoring system that used love to mean zero, but refrained. She had a feeling that what sounded clever in her head would sound very different here in this cavernous room with her very own Viking.
“If you play at it, is it really intimacy at all?” she asked instead.
“I am not certain that I am the one playing,” Thor said. He didn’t back away as he spoke. He stayed right where he was, big and tall and taking up entirely too much space without seeming to try very hard. Or notice it. “You are the one who needs a university-sanctioned research project to allow yourself to push your own boundaries. I do not require these masks and charades. If I want to fuck, I fuck. The end.”
It was something she knew firsthand now, though Margot found she still couldn’t quite believe it. Not quite. No matter that she was close enough to naked and could still feel him all over her, like a new tattoo.
“But sometimes you do it with gags. And whips and chains or other such implements in a dungeon built for precisely that sort of transgressive sex, presumably.”
“You seem unduly concerned with a dungeon you have never seen.” Thor laughed, a low, rolling scrape of sound that made her feel entirely too warm. “If you would like to experience it, Professor, you need only ask. Here in this hotel we exist to satisfy your every desire.”
She ignored that last part and concentrated on the issue at hand. The issue that was literally still in his hand. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that playing sex games with gags operates as a training ground for the kinds of things people decide they need to do in dungeons.”
“Not everything I do has an agenda.” Thor laughed again, though this time it felt more like fire. “I am not a vaunted professor of human sexuality, after all. I am merely a lowly practitioner of the art.”
Margot found herself smiling the way she did at unruly first-year students. “You and I both know what kind of power dynamic a gag indicates. Don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that could be an accident on your part. What I’m wondering now is if that’s part of who you are. Were you a sexual dominant before you came into possession of a sex hotel? Or is that something working here brought out in you? And how does sexual dominance work in a country filled with women so passionately feminist? Does that complicate it?”
Thor’s laugh was louder than before, and this time when he reached out to move his fingers over her cheek, Margot could have sworn there was something affectionate in the way he did it. And in the way he gazed at her.
But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that. This was about work, not her lonely little heart.
She was instantly horrified that she was thinking about her heart at all. Much less in those terms.
“I try not to complicate my sexual desires unnecessarily,” he said drily. “And I’m not sure that I think the practice of sexual dominance and feminism are at odds anywhere but in the heads of skeptics who are more concerned with metaphors than with screaming, delirious orgasms.”
“There is not a single submissive bone in my body,” Margot gritted out.
And only realized once she did that he hadn’t argued otherwise.
The curve in his mouth felt like an indictment. “If you say so.”
“You know what strikes me as notably un-feminist? You believing you know what I want better than I do.”
He was still so close, and that meant she could see the way his blue eyes gleamed. It made every hair on the back of her neck prickle, the way the dance of the northern lights across these far northern skies did. As if he was that elemental and otherworldly.
She told herself he was just a man. Nothing more and nothing less.
No matter that there was a part of her that wanted to make him a myth instead.
“What I believe is that all of us are made of a storm of competing desires and needs,” Thor said, almost gently. As if he knew the real storm was the one happening inside Margot. “Some of us privilege one over the other. Some of us take pride in our labels, but these are always attempts
