The Dare Collection October 2018. Nicola Marsh

understand was connection, however new and strange, but she didn’t say that. She didn’t think it was the sort of thing he could hear at the moment. And probably not from her as she sat there, still sure she could taste that napkin in her mouth. “Have you met them in person?”

      “The will was read in Germany.” And once Thor said it, Margot remembered that she’d read that, too. The article had shown pictures of a law firm in Hamburg and paparazzi shots of men in dark coats and sunglasses. It was odd to think that she now knew what one of those dark-coated men tasted like. “The only thing more awkward than finding out that your father, who you never met and never wanted to meet, left you property you didn’t want after his death is discovering that he did the same to others.”

      Margot wanted to touch him. She settled for her hands in fists in the duvet and a smile. “Do you think maybe he wanted all of you to band together and become some kind of family after he was gone?”

      Thor laughed, though it was a far hollower sound than the laughter they’d heard from his half brothers. And it seemed to lodge between Margot’s ribs. “He would have to have been delusional to imagine such a thing. But then, I think it is fairly clear that he was exactly that or he wouldn’t have used his will to perform paternal acts in absentia. So who knows? Maybe this is what he thinks a family is.”

      “Thor...”

      He was still dressed in that glorious dark suit of his and she considered it for a moment. He hadn’t been wearing a suit yesterday. In her time in Iceland, come to that, she hadn’t seen very many suits at all. They didn’t go very well with the weather, for one thing. Which made her wonder why, exactly, Thor had chosen to throw one on this morning when he’d known he had to have this phone call with the half brothers he hardly knew.

      She thought she could guess.

      The idea that Thor, the strongest and most fascinating man she’d ever met, should feel the need to put on his armor before dealing with his family made a hot, prickling sensation threaten the backs of her eyes. Margot didn’t dare let a single drop of moisture fall, but she had to blink a little too quickly to make sure.

      And she gripped her duvet tighter.

      “They say that a man is not truly a man until he teaches his son the sagas,” Thor told her, after a long, taut silence. “I suppose it is another way of talking about fatherhood. But the man who taught me the sagas was my stepfather. Ragnar raised me. He taught me to read. He took care of my mother and me. He was a good man, always. In all my memories of childhood, I cannot recall a single time he drank too much or raised his voice. He was a big, kind, gentle man.”

      Margot was afraid to ask the next question. She had to force it out. “Is he...?”

      “He died years ago, when I was twenty-five. He got a cough that wouldn’t go away, and within three months, he was dead.”

      Margot searched his face and saw nothing. Only stone and ice and something harder still in the blue depths of his gaze.

      “I’m so sorry,” she said anyway.

      “I am not telling you this story for your sympathy,” Thor said with a kind of quiet menace that felt a lot like a kick to the gut, but Margot refused to show him that he’d landed a hit. “I always knew who my father was and it was not Daniel St. George. It was never Daniel St. George. I knew that name. I would have given anything not to know that name, but it was unavoidable. I hated him. But I never, not once, considered him my father.”

      Margot couldn’t read him. There was a voice inside her that tasted a lot like panic, and it kept urging her to stop this. To go. To retreat from the tension, take a shower, pretend she couldn’t tell that Thor was going through something.

      But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “It makes sense to hate the man for leaving you.”

      Thor’s mouth curved, cold and harsh. “You have to acknowledge a child in order to leave it, I think. Daniel St. George never condescended to do any such thing. I think I told you that my mother married Ragnar before I was born. But she never got over Daniel St. George. Never.”

      He shoved his hands into the pockets of his suit trousers, as if he didn’t know what he meant to do with them. A kind of bitterness hung over him, like a cloud. She could see it in his eyes and in the twist of his lips. Worse, she could feel it, chilling her skin even though she still sat with the duvet wrapped around her.

      “My mother is the one who drinks too much, Professor. And when she does, she cries. She becomes maudlin and bemoans all she has lost. Some might suggest that she lost nothing, but she never got over the man who left her without a second thought all those years ago. She spent the whole of her marriage to my stepfather nursing her broken heart. It was not something she bothered to hide. Her epic, eternal sadness, her inability to love Ragnar back, her grief—this was the third presence in our house. There was no point in making a child of their own because they not only had me, they had their very own ghost.”

      Margot thought of her own chilly upbringing. The pressure of her father’s expectations. The way her mother had bent and contorted and still always proved that she was no match for the man she’d married. Margot’s father had long since given up pretending he had anything but contempt for his spouse. And Margot understood now, in a different way than she had when she was younger, that she should be deeply ashamed that she, too, often had followed his lead because she and her mother had been engaged in a sick little competition to win the man’s affection and regard.

      It wasn’t as if she wanted to hold her own family up as any kind of ideal. But there had never been any third parties in her parents’ marriage or in the house where Margot had grown up. There had been no ghosts, only regrets.

      “Did she ever see Daniel St. George again?” Margot asked gently, carefully. Because she didn’t dare call the man Thor’s father. She suspected that was a weapon he tolerated only when he wielded it himself.

      Thor’s gaze was so cold it made Margot’s bones ache. “He had no desire to see her again, something that only became clear to her when he died. In many ways, he left her twice. He left her pregnant and alone, and then, all these years later, he left that will so he could slap her down once again by virtue of ignoring her once more. And between you and me, I am not certain she will ever fully recover.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “It seems it took the callousness of the man’s will to finally make it clear to my mother what kind of man he was,” Thor said, all that bitterness and icy chill making his voice sound different. Almost scratchy. “The newspapers would have you believe that it was an act of kindness. An old man reaching out to the sons he’d abandoned and offering a kind of olive branch from the grave. Perhaps my half brothers think so, I do not know.”

      “But you don’t.”

      “I think it was one more demonstration of his cruelty.” Thor swallowed hard, and Margot had the sense he could hear that scratchiness in his voice. And hated it. “Because his will made it clear he knew exactly who we were and where we had been, all this time. He knew who had raised us and how. He knew the details of our lives, which means he’d been paying attention, all these years. He could have made contact at any point, but didn’t. Daniel St. George was interested in one thing only, and that was the perpetuation of his name. Through his sons. He didn’t care who he’d made those sons with.”

      “Thor...”

      “And do not deceive yourself. He has no interest in the daughter he made, either. The only difference between my overlooked half sister and the women my father impregnated and abandoned is that my sister was summoned to the will reading and left an insult. Neither my mother nor anyone else was even mentioned. As far as Daniel St. George was concerned, they never existed.”

      “He sounds like a very sad, pathetic old man with dynastic pretensions.”

      Thor raked a hand through his hair, and it seemed he’d lost the battle with the emotion in his voice. It cracked. And it bled through into his blue gaze, too. “Now when my mother