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
