The Dare Collection October 2018. Nicola Marsh

her feet had seemed to buckle.

      It was something about that arctic blue gaze of his and the way he fixed it on her, as if he didn’t care what that kind of intense focus might tell her about him. It was the way he’d stayed there, low before the fire as if he didn’t hum with all that lethal energy and had done nothing but...watch.

      Even thinking about it made her shudder where he held her, lifted up and off the bed though her shoulders were still pressed into the mattress.

      And Thor was still dressed.

      Somehow that made it all hotter. Dirtier. He was fully clothed while she writhed about, flushed red and naked and wide-open to him.

      Imagining what she must look like to him made her shudder again, perilously close to another wild shattering.

      “I don’t beg,” she panted out at him, trying to force a little more air into her chest.

      The look on his face was too wicked to name.

      “If you say so. But I did not ask you to beg. Just ask me for what you want, Margot. Ask me, or I will simply hold you here. Like this. Forever.”

      She believed him. She wasn’t sure why, because it didn’t make any sense that he would actually do something as ridiculous as what he’d threatened when the entire point of them being here was to have sex. Not stand around in odd positions.

      But the truth was that her body didn’t find anything about Thor ridiculous.

      Not one thing. Not even his sensual threats.

      She pushed herself up onto her elbows again. She told herself she was uncomfortable, that she was cold and in a strangely angled position—but even if that was true, she couldn’t say she cared much.

      Thor’s hands were big like the rest of him, and he held her ass securely as if he really could do it forever. She felt almost as if he was burning her, his palms were so hot.

      And her pussy was so wet it occurred to her that she ought to be embarrassed.

      She told herself she wasn’t, but a kind of electric shame flashed through her, telling her what a liar she was.

      “I don’t understand,” she managed to say, though she could hardly hear her own voice over the roaring in her ears.

      “You do.”

      “I don’t see why I have to perform for you.”

      “You can either own your sexual desires or you can deny them,” Thor said, that voice of his like gravel though it rolled through her like some kind of honey, pooling in all the dark places inside her she’d never acknowledged. “But only one of those things is going to get you off.”

      Something was building inside Margot then. It felt much too intense. It felt much too close, too scary—

      But this is sex, she told herself. It’s just sex.

      And sex wasn’t scary. It was sometimes awkward, or messy, or better in theory than in practice because penises never behaved as advertised and her own orgasm was often hard to chase down, but it wasn’t scary.

      Besides, she was here for research purposes. And there was nothing scary about research. Why was she psyching herself out?

      “Put your mouth on me,” she blurted out, and it was as if she’d stuck her hands into an electrical socket. Everything went white-hot inside her, all over her, until even her breath felt edgy. Raw.

      “Where?” Thor’s voice was stern. Implacable.

      “I can’t...”

      “If you can’t name it, Margot, how can you truly enjoy it?”

      “This is no time for philosophy.”

      He didn’t relent. “Where, Professor? Where do you want my mouth?”

      She was wide-open before him. He was lifting her off the bed as if he was prepared to serve himself a taste of her—and she was bright and hot and shuddery at the very idea. Her pussy was melting and wild, with a dangerous pulse all its own.

      And it wasn’t as if the rest of her was any better.

      Margot pressed her elbows down against the mattress beneath her. Her hands were in fists against the comforter. She was tense and needy, sensations she’d never felt in her life shivering through her again and again.

      “Between my legs,” she whispered, because she had to know.

      She had to know what it would feel like.

      On some level she was appalled with herself for failing, yet again, to be as explicit as he’d been. Since when had she become so prudish? She was an academic. Not some sheltered adolescent tucked away in a convent somewhere, unable to form dirty words without imagining she’d be struck down from on high.

      But she couldn’t seem to make herself say any of the words she might have used. She couldn’t seem to force herself to be more specific.

      Thor shifted. He bent toward her, and her hips lifted of their own accord, but all he did was press his lips against the inner slope of one thigh.

      “Is that what you mean?” he asked, and she could feel the words against her tender skin, as if he was tattooing them there with his own lips. As if there was no part of her he wouldn’t mark. “I am between your legs, am I not?”

      Another wave of heat swept over her. It even pricked at the backs of her eyes, and Margot was suddenly horrified at the notion she might actually cry.

      Even more so that she would do it in front of Thor.

      Here, while she was supposedly researching Icelandic sex traditions.

      She didn’t understand how he could be doing these remarkably physical things to her, but her body seemed to want to process them as emotions.

      Too many emotions to bear.

      Margot didn’t want to understand.

      But she was too hot. She felt raw and exposed, and greedier than she’d ever imagined she could feel. About anything.

      It was as if she had never wanted before in all her life.

      As if everything before this moment was pale. Insubstantial. As pointless as a single candle against the howling blizzard outside.

      But she told herself that was the point.

      She was here to try to understand this land of fire and ice in the most intimate way possible. The way the locals did.

      “My...pussy,” she forced herself to say, and managed to get the word out without stuttering like a child. “I want your mouth on my pussy, Thor. Please.”

      If he noticed that she’d come perilously close to begging after all, he didn’t mention it. She felt his mouth curve, there against the soft inside of her thigh. Then he lifted his head and that was worse. Or better.

      He looked like some kind of god. Old-world and elemental. Fierce and uncompromising, and entirely bent on destruction.

      Margot had never wanted so badly to be destroyed in all her life.

      “Your wish is my command,” he told her, his voice dark and lazy, with an edge to it that made her wonder a little bit wildly what it would be like to choose to follow his commands.

      In the sorts of very specific ways she imagined he practiced nightly in his own, personal dungeon.

      He adjusted the way he held her, and she thought he would take the opportunity to make more challenging remarks. To draw this out even further—

      But instead he bent and set his mouth there where she needed him the most.

      He didn’t simply lick into her.

      He ate at her.

      Thor growled as he feasted on her sodden, tender flesh, then sucked