The Dare Collection October 2018. Nicola Marsh

it means if it does. Can a philosophical need translate into a sexual one?”

      “That sounds as if you think we are all able to pick and choose our sexualities.”

      “I don’t think that.” She shifted against the couch. “But I do think that we have a responsibility to make certain our expression of our sexualities doesn’t betray our principles.”

      Thor sighed and ran one of his big hands through his hair. “You either think something is hot or you don’t, Professor. It either gets you off or it doesn’t. The end.”

      “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

      “Which is why you have created this life of yours that celebrates all the many ways you have complicated basic needs.”

      “Because you know best, of course. I can’t possibly know myself or what I actually find hot. It can’t be that people are different and want different things.”

      “I don’t know about people in general,” Thor said with that mildness that the heat in his gaze completely contradicted, and it made her stomach twist, then drop. “But I do know about you. Or maybe you’ve forgotten already.”

      “I had a few orgasms, yes,” Margot threw back at him, and forced herself to unclench her teeth. “Forgive me if I don’t think that makes you a god.”

      “I am not the one who considers myself a sex god. Nor am I the one who found each successive orgasm quite so overwhelming. This leads me to imagine that you are not so used to coming and coming and then coming again. And that, Professor, suggests that the kind of sex you are used to having is perhaps a little too intellectual.”

      “There’s no such thing as too intellectual,” she gritted out.

      “If you say so.”

      “There’s nothing wrong with intellect. Thinking is not a bad thing.”

      He didn’t laugh, but she could see the gleam of it in his blue gaze. “I don’t believe I said it was.”

      “I’m not embarrassed by the fact I’m more intellectual than physical. I like it that way.”

      Thor smiled. “And yet you are the one who appears upset. You are the one who feels there must be a separation between your head and your body.”

      Margot realized she was clenching her fists in frustration and forced herself to straighten out her fingers before she tore the airy cashmere draped around her.

      “My father was an academic, too,” she said after a moment, and she had no idea where that had come from. She never talked about her family. But tonight had been filled with things she never did. “He’s a remarkably intelligent man who could spend days playing chess and conducting rousing debates. I was raised to prize that kind of intellectual engagement above all things. And I discovered as I grew that I agreed with the way I was raised. That I want the same things.”

      “Chess and a rousing debate.”

      “Yes.” She lifted her chin. “I like people who arrange their lives around ideas.”

      “Let me guess. The only way your father gave you any kind of attention was if you proved your intellect to him.”

      Too late Margot realized her mistake. She didn’t want to talk about her father like this. Or at all. She didn’t want to tear apart her family’s dynamics and expose them here in this powerfully strange place. She didn’t want to talk about what it had been like to be raised the only child of towering intellect and swaggering academic genius Ronald Cavendish. She didn’t want to recount the number of times she had fallen short of her father’s expectations, confronted over and over again with her own limitations. Or the many ways she still did.

      And she definitely didn’t want to talk about her mother. Or all the ways Margot had learned since her earliest days that a marriage that wasn’t between intellectual equals was like a stifling prison at best and something far grimmer than that at worst. She’d seen it with her own eyes. She’d lived it.

      So instead she frowned at the door as if she could make their food come quicker that way. And so she didn’t have to watch the way Thor was studying her and likely seeing far too much.

      “Fathers are tricky,” she said. “Take yours, while we’re on the subject.” He went very still at that, there beside her, but he didn’t protest. So she forged on ahead. “Your last name, for example. Shouldn’t it be Danielsson rather than Ragnarsson? Your actual father’s name was Daniel St. George.”

      “Thank you. I am aware of Iceland’s patronymic conventions.” He sighed, but she’d been looking at the door. By the time she turned to him, he was only gazing back at her in that mild way that made her wonder how he got anyone to believe he wasn’t wildly dangerous when it was that very studied languidness that announced it. “My mother married my stepfather before she had me, and when she did, they both decided to give me his name because my mother never expected to see my father again. And indeed, she did not.”

      It was as if being around this man had opened up dark pockets inside her that she had never known were there. Because she felt something like envy at his flippant, careless tone. The things he said should have been upsetting, surely. But Thor didn’t look upset in the least. He merely lounged there, as if there was no story at all to how he came to be raised as another man’s son.

      Meanwhile, Margot couldn’t say anything bad had ever happened to her outside of her father’s disappointment in her. She hadn’t been treated badly. Her needs had always been met. Her parents had supported her academic aspirations all the way. So why wasn’t she relaxed and flippant in turn?

      “I’m no tremendous intellect, but even a dullard like me recognizes an attempt to change the subject when it appears before him,” Thor said quietly.

      “I do not have daddy issues,” Margot snapped.

      “Then you would be remarkable indeed.” His blue gaze was kind, and Margot found that unacceptable because it made her want to cry. “Are we not all stitched together by our pasts? And is the thread not often the color of the people who raised us?”

      Margot could feel her heartbeat, each thud like a nail into a coffin. Her coffin, she had no doubt.

      “I don’t want to talk about needlework,” she threw at him. “I don’t want to talk at all. You told me Icelanders communicate with sex, not idle chitchat.”

      “I would not call something that makes you this upset idle, Professor.”

      “I’m not upset.” When the elevator sounded from the main room, announcing the arrival of their food, she was almost pathetically grateful. She forced herself to smile. “But maybe I’m a little bit hungry.”

      Thor took his time getting to his feet. He kept his gaze on her, and Margot would have given anything to look away. To hide. To pull on her clothes and run.

      But she couldn’t seem to move.

      “Very well,” he said after a moment, when he was standing there before her again. “I look forward to all the epic, athletic, silent sex we’ll be having once you replenish your energy stores and restore your delightful mood.”

      “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? I’m tired of all this talking.”

      Because she couldn’t seem to help herself. And because anything was better than the unwieldy things sloshing around inside her, threatening to tip over and poison her there and then.

      His smile was like a weapon. “I’ll endeavor not to hold myself back any longer, then, shall I?”

      Thor left her there as he walked toward the elevator, her heart like a lump in her throat and her body alive with a new sort of fire, wondering what fresh hell she’d dropped herself in this time.

      And why she couldn’t seem to do anything but stay right where she was.

      Shivering