But the truth was in that hand beneath his, buried between her thighs. She rocked her palm against her clit and she didn’t stop. She didn’t even pause, no matter how she scowled at him.
“The more you think, the less you feel,” Thor told her, his gaze fused to hers in the reflection before them. “And if you are talking, you cannot be listening. So this is my challenge to you, Professor. Stop thinking. Stop talking—especially to yourself. Lose yourself in this.”
And for a while there was nothing but the sound of her breath and the soft sound of her hand working between her legs.
Thor played with her nipple. He watched her face. “It either feels good or doesn’t. You will either come or you won’t. Does your body know what it wants? And if it does, do you give it what it wants or do you deny it out of some misplaced notion of what you ought to like?”
Her breathing was heavy. He couldn’t tell if it was frustration or something else now, but either way, she didn’t stop. He stood there behind her, the scent of her heavy in the air between them. It was a musky female arousal and a sharp, full vanilla that was all Margot. He wanted to taste her. He wanted to lift her up, tip her forward and settle her on his own aching cock at last.
But he waited, though he thought the waiting might kill him. He shifted to move his hands over her curves instead. As if he was settling and soothing her as much as he was attempting to excite her. He traced the span of her hips. He smoothed his palms up her sides, then along her arms.
He explored her as if he was committing her to memory, stroke by stroke.
And all the while she fucked herself with her hand, rolling her hips to meet her own palm.
Thor got to watch that delicious flush spread out over her skin, from the sweet triangle of her coppery curls to her lavender hair that fell down all around her, teasing the tips of her breasts. Her eyes drifted closed. Her head lolled back against his shoulder.
“Come,” he ordered her, low and gritty. “Come, Professor. Now.”
And when she obeyed him, it was like a tempest shook through her. He found himself gripping her hips to hold her steady. To keep her on her feet. Or better yet, to keep her from toppling over where she stood.
She shook and she shook. And when the shaking subsided, her hand dropped from between her thighs and she slid, boneless and still breathing hard, against him.
Thor turned her around in his arms, then picked her up and carried her over to the thick rug before the fire. He dropped to his knees and set her on hers.
And then he took his time and a good deal of care pushing her hair back from her face. He tucked the damp lavender strands behind her ears. And he didn’t know what to call that weighty, complicated, knotted thing that squatted there in his chest and refused to be dislodged.
He didn’t know what to call the urges that rolled through him then, none of them about the heavy need in his cock. None of them about pounding his way to oblivion.
The trouble with teaching lessons was that he couldn’t avoid learning a few of his own while he did it.
And one of them was the simple fact that this woman was nothing like the many other women Thor had enjoyed in his past. He was too...involved. He was obsessed with that mouth he wasn’t allowed to kiss. He was entirely too invested in the things he wanted to show her. About herself. About the pair of them. About sex itself. But he wasn’t as removed as he usually was. He couldn’t seem to find his footing or his usual distance.
Something about Margot was lodging its way deep inside him whether he liked it or not. As if she was leaving scars he wasn’t entirely sure would ever heal.
Worse, he must have liked it. Because he wasn’t doing a thing to stop it.
Especially when Margot pulled the napkin from her mouth. She made a face as she ran her tongue around inside her own mouth, tossing the bit of cloth to the side.
“Dry?” he asked, feeling as close to desperate as he’d ever been.
Because he wasn’t used to this...wanting. He hadn’t lied to her. Icelanders fucked. He certainly did and it had always been fun. Sometimes an intense kind of fun.
But it had never been like this, as if she was stripping away layers of his skin every time she met his gaze. Every time she frowned at him. Every time she came in that pink rush.
Even though she’d removed her gag, Margot didn’t speak. She blinked once, then again, as if she was getting her bearings. And when she lifted her gaze to meet his, the gold in them was so brilliant he nearly looked away.
She was flushed and she was fierce and he wanted her in ways he didn’t understand. He wanted to fuck her. He wanted to lose himself in her. He wanted her, all of her. Not just her nakedness, but every complicated thought in that fascinating head of hers.
She was breaking all his rules.
Margot reached over, put her hands on his chest and didn’t say a word as she pushed him backward.
Thor could have fought her, of course, but he saw no reason to do such a thing. Not when he could fall back against the rug and let her climb over him and surrender himself to part of what he wanted.
He kept expecting her to say something. To challenge him in that way of hers. To analyze what had already happened and throw her buzzwords at him in that way she did.
Because he craved that, too.
But it seemed that she had taken his advice to heart, because she didn’t say a word.
She simply...helped herself to his body as if he was the object.
Or, if he corrected himself, as if he was what she admired.
And she took her sweet time admiring him.
She used her mouth all over his chest. Her mouth and her hands and the seductive sweep of that lavender hair. She tasted him and she teased him, licking her way over his nipples and then tracing the outline of his pectoral muscles. She knelt beside him and explored each arm, and each leg, the way he’d done. She tugged off his loose trousers and threw them aside, and then she started all over again.
She kissed him everywhere except his cock and his mouth, and by the time she crawled back up the length of him and threw herself down beside him, Thor thought he might go out of his mind. He worried he already had. He thought his skin might crack wide-open with the force of his need—
And the only way he knew how to handle it was to get inside her.
Even though he already understood it wouldn’t be enough.
She still hadn’t said a word.
“Have you gone mute?” he gritted out, his control a pale shadow of what it ought to have been. He knew that, and even if he hadn’t, he could hear it. He couldn’t tell if it was anger or anguish or some passionate form of torment in between the two, but he couldn’t keep it in. It spilled out of him as if of its own accord.
And the crazy part was, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to care about that the way he should have. The way he knew he would, if he survived.
“Tell me what you want,” she demanded, her voice husky from disuse.
And more, with something else that it took him long moments to realize was a kind of sheer, humming power that resonated inside him like the towering wall of the ferocious North Atlantic over a black sand beach.
Like home.
“You,” he growled. “Now.”
“You have to be more specific,” she told him, and even though her lips curved, there was still that fierceness, a kind of wickedness that made every part of his body pull tight and hard.
She