whether by design or indifference.
Thor had no intention of falling into that trap himself. And he’d spent decades more or less immune to emotion, which was a terrific way to make certain he steered clear of it all.
This was no different, he assured himself. He was no different now than he’d ever been. It had been a long night, that was all.
He spent the next week congratulating himself on his wisdom in sending his purple-haired American on her way before he could confuse the issue further with more private thoughts he should never have shared with her.
And not only because he could see that sympathetic look on her face every time he closed his eyes.
Thor couldn’t say he particularly cared for the revelations he’d had about how his behavior matched Daniel St. George’s famously debauched approach to life in general and women in particular, but he could handle that. After all, there was an easy solution if a man no longer wished to be the kind of man-whore Daniel St. George had always been.
And Thor quickly discovered that abstaining from the pleasures of the flesh was far easier than he ever would have imagined.
He removed himself from the hotel a few days after Margot left, telling his staff that a change of scene was in order.
It was good to get back to his house in Reykjavík. To remind himself that his real life wasn’t that brooding hotel, but one stuffed full of his art, his books and all the things he’d collected over the years to show he was not and never would be his father. He had no interest in spending his life in an antiseptic warehouse the way Daniel St. George had.
Thor spent his nights in his clubs in the city, doing his usual rounds to make sure they were all running as smoothly as he liked. He made note of every detail about each place, then sent his thoughts and suggestions to his managers ahead of the monthly managers’ meetings he insisted upon.
It wasn’t until he found himself standing out on Laugavegur an hour or so before dawn one night, the bitter wind licking at him straight off the harbor, that he understood what he was doing.
He’d been so busy congratulating himself on taking a break from the hotel and his reputation that he’d somehow failed to notice that what he was really doing out here every night was looking for Margot.
And it was one thing to tell himself lies while he was tucked up in warmth and luxury. It was something else again when he was out in the thick, heavy dark of the approaching winter, just Thor and the night sky.
He found he didn’t really try.
And the not trying felt a good deal like surrender.
Worse still, it appeared that his stubborn professor was full up on her research, because she was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t in the bars or the clubs or any other of Reykjavík’s hot spots—and this was Reykjavík. There were only so many places.
If she’d been out at night, conducting her interviews, he’d have run into her already.
Thor was standing out in the cold, pretending he was clearing his head after the loud live music he’d been listening to at the last bar.
He’d been pretending a lot of things lately, it seemed.
The truth was, Thor had been alone all his life, in one way or another. He had been alone in his parents’ painful loop of unrequited love. He had been alone when he’d made his way in the world. He’d been alone when he’d built himself a tidy little empire and he’d certainly been alone throughout his adult life.
It had never occurred to him that there was another way.
And yet despite all of that, Thor had never been lonely.
Until now.
And he didn’t know what the hell to do about it.
Margot locked herself in her bright and cozy little sublet, flatly refusing to entertain the dark emotions that traipsed around inside her. Instead, she threw herself into her work.
Because everything was different now. She could feel her shift in perspective like a kind of bone-deep tremor all throughout her body. It was a physical manifestation of what she’d done and said and felt that night at Thor’s hotel and it made her hands ache. It made her legs feel weak even when she was lying down, scowling at her sloped ceiling, wishing herself asleep.
And she told herself she didn’t mind if she carried the remnants of that night—and that napkin, and everything that had come after—with her forever. She knew she would. It was as if that night was a tattoo she wore on her skin, much brighter and more vibrant than the text she’d already put there.
Margot could choose to ignore the tattooed sensation and that trembling thing that lived in her now, every time she thought about Thor. Or she could try. But she was determined that her research reflect the change she’d lived through that night.
She flipped through all the notes she’d made on all those nights out in the city’s bars and clubs. She listened to the voice recordings she’d made, imagining the faces of the people she’d met, and if she pretended that there wasn’t one particular face that she saw above all, well...that was no one’s business but hers.
She begged off from coffee dates and dinners her friendly colleagues invited her to and threw herself into her work with the kind of passion she remembered from way back in the last of her doctoral dissertation days.
That was the last time she had given herself permission to immerse herself in her research completely. She’d thrown herself into her dissertation and hunkered down with it until it was done at last. Until she couldn’t quite tell the difference between the writing, the thinking and her. Until she wasn’t sure where the words ended and she began, as a separate being.
Margot told herself it was a kind of freedom. Even a sort of bliss.
And she ignored the part of her that whispered that really what she was doing was hiding.
She restructured her arguments. She developed new theories.
“I still don’t understand why you picked such a dramatically remote place to spend your sabbatical,” her father told her with his usual condescension when she took a break from it all on Sunday evening to call her parents like the dutiful daughter she’d always been. “But I suppose Iceland is all the rage these days. As are treatises on sexuality, one supposes.”
Margot burned with her usual shame and fury at that.
And normally she would have fallen all over herself to explain what she was doing. To try to make herself palatable to the one person alive who had never approved of a single thing she’d ever done—
But there was that tremor inside her. There was that ache in her fingers. There was the memory of the bluest eyes she’d ever seen and the approval in them that had made them seem lit on fire.
She wasn’t the same person she’d been before she’d gone to Thor’s hotel.
Maybe that was why she laughed instead of launching into the usual host of hurried explanations her father never paid much attention to anyway.
“I’m a tenured professor, not a teenager trying to be dramatic, Dad,” she
