The Dare Collection October 2018. Nicola Marsh

sometimes you do it with gags. And whips and chains or other such implements in a dungeon built for precisely that sort of transgressive sex, presumably.”

      “You seem unduly concerned with a dungeon you have never seen.” Thor laughed, a low, rolling scrape of sound that made her feel entirely too warm. “If you would like to experience it, Professor, you need only ask. Here in this hotel we exist to satisfy your every desire.”

      She ignored that last part and concentrated on the issue at hand. The issue that was literally still in his hand. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that playing sex games with gags operates as a training ground for the kinds of things people decide they need to do in dungeons.”

      “Not everything I do has an agenda.” Thor laughed again, though this time it felt more like fire. “I am not a vaunted professor of human sexuality, after all. I am merely a lowly practitioner of the art.”

      Margot found herself smiling the way she did at unruly first-year students. “You and I both know what kind of power dynamic a gag indicates. Don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that could be an accident on your part. What I’m wondering now is if that’s part of who you are. Were you a sexual dominant before you came into possession of a sex hotel? Or is that something working here brought out in you? And how does sexual dominance work in a country filled with women so passionately feminist? Does that complicate it?”

      Thor’s laugh was louder than before, and this time when he reached out to move his fingers over her cheek, Margot could have sworn there was something affectionate in the way he did it. And in the way he gazed at her.

      But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that. This was about work, not her lonely little heart.

      She was instantly horrified that she was thinking about her heart at all. Much less in those terms.

      “I try not to complicate my sexual desires unnecessarily,” he said drily. “And I’m not sure that I think the practice of sexual dominance and feminism are at odds anywhere but in the heads of skeptics who are more concerned with metaphors than with screaming, delirious orgasms.”

      “There is not a single submissive bone in my body,” Margot gritted out.

      And only realized once she did that he hadn’t argued otherwise.

      The curve in his mouth felt like an indictment. “If you say so.”

      “You know what strikes me as notably un-feminist? You believing you know what I want better than I do.”

      He was still so close, and that meant she could see the way his blue eyes gleamed. It made every hair on the back of her neck prickle, the way the dance of the northern lights across these far northern skies did. As if he was that elemental and otherworldly.

      She told herself he was just a man. Nothing more and nothing less.

      No matter that there was a part of her that wanted to make him a myth instead.

      “What I believe is that all of us are made of a storm of competing desires and needs,” Thor said, almost gently. As if he knew the real storm was the one happening inside Margot. “Some of us privilege one over the other. Some of us take pride in our labels, but these are always attempts to control the uncontrollable, are they not? You are the expert, after all. Surely you must know this already. People can talk. People can define themselves and others in any number of ways. But desire, passion, need—these things are not quantifiable no matter how we might wish they were. And for all our advances across the centuries, no one has yet figured out how to control them.”

      “I don’t believe in that kind of passion,” Margot whispered.

      She didn’t. She knew she didn’t and she never had. She had written papers on the subject of passion and the many ways people tried to personify the feeling. Because if it was a kind of person, a being, they could blame it for all manner of things, like a demon of yore. A devil intent on their destruction.

      If passion was responsible, the actual person in question need never be.

      But there was something about saying it out loud, here, to Thor, that made her gut tighten as if she’d told him a lie.

      “Passion is like truth, I am afraid,” Thor told her, almost sorrowfully. “It does not require your belief to exist.”

      “You haven’t answered the question.”

      He lifted the hand that held that bright white napkin, but the way he waved it between them had nothing to do with surrender. Or, at least, not his surrender. “And you have gone to great lengths to avoid this little bit of cloth, have you not?”

      Margot’s heart gave a terrific thump in her chest, or maybe it was in her belly. Or her pussy, where she felt a sharp jolt. It was everywhere. It was all of her.

      She felt ripped wide-open. As if he’d wheeled in a giant spotlight and aimed it directly at her, so bright she could feel the heat of the light itself.

      “If you are afraid, there is no shame in admitting it,” Thor said in that same surprisingly gentle way she would have said he didn’t have, which somehow made her feelings of exposure worse.

      “Do I need to be afraid?”

      “I would never dream of telling you what you need—lest I be accused of single-handedly imposing the will of the patriarchy upon you.”

      She glared at him, and at that dry way he talked about the things she’d spent years studying and considering and immersing herself in as if they were so much teenaged caterwauling.

      “I would suggest that you view this as a test, nothing more.”

      Margot didn’t tell him that she had always been excellent at tests. “What am I meant to be testing? How much I trust you?”

      “I think the fact that you are here, naked and alone in my rooms, speaks to how much you trust me already.” And there was nothing threatening in the way he said that. It was a simple statement of fact. And still, Margot felt as if he’d dropped a noose around her neck and pulled it tight. “In any case, this is not about me. It is about you.”

      “How convenient for you.”

      “Professor, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You never have to do anything you don’t want to do. I thought we covered this already when we experimented with consent in the other room. Repeatedly.”

      “I can assure you that I never, ever do a single thing I don’t want to do.”

      He didn’t point out, again, that she was naked and alone with him and had already done things she really ought to be ashamed of. But he didn’t need to when Margot was capable of doing it herself, did he?

      “What I think is that you do want to do this,” he said instead, with all that maddening, seductive patience. “And more, I think the fact you want to put this gag in your own mouth and see what it teaches you, that the very idea makes you wet and greedy, is what scares you most.”

      Her body was on his side, not hers. Her pussy swelled at his words, and she felt her own wet heat on her thighs.

      Damn him.

      “It amazes me that you think you can know anything about another person on so short an acquaintance,” Margot said loftily, because she didn’t know how to do anything but fight. “We are strangers. A state of undress doesn’t change the fact that you don’t know anything about me.”

      Thor smiled. “Here is what I know. You cannot bear to let a challenge go unmet, no matter what it costs you. You will force yourself to do things that make you uncomfortable rather than risk losing face. You concentrate on the task set before you, simply because it has been set before you, rather than look inward to see whether or not you want to do it at all.”

      Margot stiffened. He didn’t know her life. He didn’t know all the committees she sat on at the university when she wasn’t on sabbatical, all because she