The Dare Collection October 2018. Nicola Marsh

while hurting one who did.”

      Margot hardly knew she meant to move, but then there she was, kneeling up on the couch so she could move herself closer to him. So she could reach out before she thought better of it and put her hands on his body.

      She told herself not to pay any attention to that strange disconnection she felt because of it. Because he’d gone so cold overnight when she’d woken up warm all over.

      Because she felt as if she knew him so well, and yet didn’t know him at all, and she didn’t have to have a hundred morning afters like this under her belt to understand that he likely didn’t want to hear that.

      “Thor,” she said softly, amazed to find she could feel his heat through his clothes when she’d expected nothing but cold. “I’m sorry.”

      “You have nothing to apologize for. You weren’t one of the players in this game.” He looked down at her hands as if he couldn’t make sense of them, there pressed into his sides. “I didn’t build this antiseptic penthouse, you call it. I don’t live here. This is a shrine my father built to celebrate himself. Hence the reflective surfaces. You heard my half brothers call it a morgue. He was a ghost throughout my childhood. Why not haunt my adulthood as well?”

      “You’re nothing like your father,” Margot told him fiercely, and she didn’t need the scientific method to achieve that conclusion. She knew.

      “I never thought so. But then, Professor, the strangest things happen in sex hotels at the top of the world. A man who thinks he knows himself well might come to find that, unbeknownst to him, he has never been anything but a copy of the one man he hates above all others.”

      That shocked her, but she rallied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nothing that happened last night makes you a man like that.”

      “It’s all about intimacy, is it not?” Thor asked, a strange tension in his voice. She could feel it in the way he held himself. “Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to fuck in and out of each other? And yet you can’t live through a night like last night and not use it to take stock of all the other nights in your life, can you?”

      “No,” Margot said, and she didn’t know if she was agreeing with him or denying what seemed to be coming next; what that knot of foreboding in her chest told her was surely coming next, no matter how she tried to hold on to him and the night they’d shared. With her fists.

      “My father is famous for being a kind of sex god of his time. He has left the evidence littered about the planet in his wake. I have always been so certain that it was different when I did it. Because I am a different man. But perhaps that’s the biggest lie of all and I am no different.”

      “Do you have a great many children out there that you refuse to acknowledge?”

      “I have no children at all.” Thor’s mouth flattened. “As far as I know.”

      Margot told herself there was no reason she should feel so relieved to hear that. The man’s sexual history was his business, not hers, and some people weren’t parental...

      But she had to fight to keep herself from grinning, because relieved was exactly what she felt.

      “That’s one difference,” she said instead. “Another is that you’re not cruel.”

      “You have no idea if that’s true or not, Margot.” And it was as if he tried to prove it then, with that expression on his face that made her wonder if he wanted her to hurt. To wonder. To fight to keep her breath from going shallow. “You have no idea how I plan to extricate myself from this situation. Will I let you down easy? Will I tell you lies? Will I simply make myself unavailable again?”

      Her heart was slamming at her, but Margot kept her gaze trained on him. And for the first time since she’d woken up this morning, she wished she wasn’t naked.

      “You could do something truly revolutionary and choose none of the above,” she suggested as evenly as she could.

      “I promised myself two things,” Thor gritted out. “One, that I would never be my father. And yet I realize that I have made myself his twin. I sleep around, without thought for the feelings of others. I have fun, so I assume they must be having fun as well. But how would I know?”

      “You would know. Of course you would know.”

      It was almost funny to imagine he might not, after the attention he’d paid to...everything last night.

      But he ignored her. “And second, I vowed that I would never become like my mother. A slave to emotions that ruined lives. My stepfather’s. Her own.”

      “Yours?” Margot dared to suggest.

      He didn’t like that. That was clear, though all he did was stare down at her, his icy gaze glittering.

      “And in one night, one single night, I have betrayed myself completely.”

      Margot moved again then, without thinking it through. Because she was in a panic, bright and searing, and she didn’t know what to do except climb over the back of the couch and slide to the ground. And then she stood there before him, her hands gripping the jacket of his suit as if it was some kind of harness. As if she could lead him somewhere. As if she could muscle him into doing what she wanted—

      Even if she didn’t know what it was she wanted.

      “This is what family is,” she told him fiercely. “No one feels that they fit. Everyone thinks that they’re missing something, somehow. If you’re lucky, there’s enough love in the mix that it all balances out, or so I hear, because it wasn’t as if my father was any easier.”

      Margot felt disloyal saying such a thing out loud. Worse, she felt weak. As if in acknowledging that her father had been something less than ideal, she was showing her true colors after all. She was showing how little she had always been worth, just as her father had always suspected.

      And if she’d been alone, that might have wounded her. That might have given her pause, at the very least. But she was too focused on Thor to care.

      “Even if you followed in your father’s footsteps, who cares?” she asked, because he’d handed her that napkin and freed her, somehow. And she wanted to do the same for him. “You’re still not him. You’ll never be him. You need to ask yourself why you think you have no choice in the matter.”

      She didn’t miss the way her own words slammed into her, too. She didn’t miss the fact that she’d never asked herself that question, either. What had she been trying to prove all this time? Why had she always allowed her father to make her feel, no matter what she did, that she didn’t measure up?

      And how could she tell Thor that he was the reason she was even capable of recognizing her own complicity in these things that had twisted her life around into something she wasn’t sure she even wanted?

      Margot didn’t want to be a brain in a jar. She didn’t want to hide in her words and her theories and her research.

      She wanted to live her life, not study it.

      With a quick breath for courage, she lifted herself up on her tiptoes and tilted her head back, because she knew exactly what she needed to do. She let go of his suit jacket and moved her hands up the hard-packed wall of his chest, every inch of which she’d tasted. Touched. And could likely re-create from memory, if necessary.

      She looped her hands around his neck, letting her thumbs move over the splendor of his fine jaw.

      “Margot.”

      Her name was a warning, but she didn’t heed it. Instead, she lifted herself up even farther and went to press her lips to his.

      But he stopped her. He reached up and took her upper arms in his hands, holding her away from him so she couldn’t make contact.

      “I want to kiss you,” she said, and she knew, somehow, that it was more than a kiss.

      That it was