Margot dared to suggest.
He didn’t like that. That was clear, though all he did was stare down at her, his icy gaze glittering.
“And in one night, one single night, I have betrayed myself completely.”
Margot moved again then, without thinking it through. Because she was in a panic, bright and searing, and she didn’t know what to do except climb over the back of the couch and slide to the ground. And then she stood there before him, her hands gripping the jacket of his suit as if it was some kind of harness. As if she could lead him somewhere. As if she could muscle him into doing what she wanted—
Even if she didn’t know what it was she wanted.
“This is what family is,” she told him fiercely. “No one feels that they fit. Everyone thinks that they’re missing something, somehow. If you’re lucky, there’s enough love in the mix that it all balances out, or so I hear, because it wasn’t as if my father was any easier.”
Margot felt disloyal saying such a thing out loud. Worse, she felt weak. As if in acknowledging that her father had been something less than ideal, she was showing her true colors after all. She was showing how little she had always been worth, just as her father had always suspected.
And if she’d been alone, that might have wounded her. That might have given her pause, at the very least. But she was too focused on Thor to care.
“Even if you followed in your father’s footsteps, who cares?” she asked, because he’d handed her that napkin and freed her, somehow. And she wanted to do the same for him. “You’re still not him. You’ll never be him. You need to ask yourself why you think you have no choice in the matter.”
She didn’t miss the way her own words slammed into her, too. She didn’t miss the fact that she’d never asked herself that question, either. What had she been trying to prove all this time? Why had she always allowed her father to make her feel, no matter what she did, that she didn’t measure up?
And how could she tell Thor that he was the reason she was even capable of recognizing her own complicity in these things that had twisted her life around into something she wasn’t sure she even wanted?
Margot didn’t want to be a brain in a jar. She didn’t want to hide in her words and her theories and her research.
She wanted to live her life, not study it.
With a quick breath for courage, she lifted herself up on her tiptoes and tilted her head back, because she knew exactly what she needed to do. She let go of his suit jacket and moved her hands up the hard-packed wall of his chest, every inch of which she’d tasted. Touched. And could likely re-create from memory, if necessary.
She looped her hands around his neck, letting her thumbs move over the splendor of his fine jaw.
“Margot.”
Her name was a warning, but she didn’t heed it. Instead, she lifted herself up even farther and went to press her lips to his.
But he stopped her. He reached up and took her upper arms in his hands, holding her away from him so she couldn’t make contact.
“I want to kiss you,” she said, and she knew, somehow, that it was more than a kiss.
That it was everything.
And more, she could see that he knew it, too. It was that gleaming light in his gaze, though his expression remained tortured.
It was everything, but he was keeping her from doing it.
“No,” he said, as if the word was torn from him. “It’s against the rules.”
“I made the rules. I can break them, if I want.”
“But I agreed to those rules. No kissing, Professor.”
Margot didn’t simply recognize the anguish she saw in his face then. She felt it, deep inside her. As if he was a part of her. As if he always would be, no matter what came next.
And she knew what was coming. She could see it. It was written all over him, and even though it was no more than they had agreed upon, it felt like the end of the world.
“Look out the window,” he ordered her, though his voice told her things she knew he wouldn’t. “The snow has stopped.”
She didn’t have to look. She didn’t want to look. If she’d been paying attention to something other than Thor, she would already have noticed the sunlight beaming into the room, as crisp and cold as he was.
“You were trapped in my hotel while the storm ran its course,” Thor said, as if he was handing down a sentence. As if he was throwing them both into prison, forever. “And now it has.”
“Thor...” The next word stuck in her throat, but she forced herself to keep going, because she didn’t care about power differentials when her heart was breaking into pieces. “Please...”
“We had an agreement, Margot,” Thor said, and just like that, the torment on his face disappeared. She watched it go, leaving nothing but ice behind. Until it was as if he had carved himself from the same volcanic rock that littered this island. It was as if he was nothing but sharp edges and the distant memory of ancient fires. As if the Thor she knew was gone. Or had never been at all. “And it’s time for you to go.”
EVERYTHING WAS FINE.
More than fine, as a matter of fact. Thor was not in the habit of having emotional responses to his sexual exploits, because there was no place for such absurdities in the face of a mere physical release, and he was determined that this should be no different.
Because it was no different, he told himself sternly.
The only thing that made his night with Margot unlike other nights he’d had was that she’d gotten a rare glimpse into the personal life Thor preferred to keep as private as possible—despite what everyone thought they knew about him, thanks to his successes and that damned will. It was an error he would have prevented if he’d thought it through that morning. And one he’d compounded by talking to her about things he never, ever discussed.
Never.
Thor had no idea why he’d done any of that—and he had no intention of ever repeating his mistakes.
There were some rules even he never broke.
The professor had left in a taxi Thor had ordered himself. And once she had gone, Thor took great pleasure in telling himself that he could breathe again. That the world made sense again. That the strange urges and feelings that he’d experienced during that storm were more about the storm than anything else. They weren’t about Margot, because they couldn’t have been.
Because that didn’t make any sense.
That wasn’t who Thor was.
Thor had spent the whole of his childhood watching the people in his life claim that love was the reason
