The god of sex, they’d called him back in Reykjavík, with those suggestive little laughs.
She fought back a little shudder.
“Thor, then,” she corrected herself. “I’ve emailed and left a number of messages. I am—”
“I know who you are. The American professor who wants to talk about sex.”
There was no reason that should have sounded the way it did—intimate, suggestive—when it was the simple truth.
“Sex in a cultural sense, not a personal one,” she clarified. “In case that’s unclear.”
His mouth curved again and its effect was even more pronounced when she was this close to him, tucked away in these high-backed chairs that concealed them from the rest of the bar. It was impossible not to notice how beautiful he was, there next to the howling storm outside. As if they were made of the same fury.
“Noted,” he said, those eyes lit with suppressed laughter.
And something else she chose to ignore, because it felt a little too much like a kind of aria, lighting her up from the inside out.
Margot fumbled with her bag, reaching for her notebook. “I have some questions to ask you. I’m mostly interested in how you think this hotel complicates the feminist reputation of Iceland’s women, particularly in a sexual sense.”
But when she wrestled her notebook to the table and looked up again, Thor was only sitting there in the same lazy way, studying her as if she fascinated him. As if she was the subject under consideration, not him.
Which she should not have found at all sexy.
“That is a very boring question.”
She’d been staring at his mouth, so it took too long to process his actual words. “I beg your pardon?”
“Is that really what you want to know? You could have put that in an email. Instead, you took it upon yourself to drive out from Reykjavík. You tried to argue your way past my reception desk. All this because you wanted to know such a tedious thing?”
There was something fluttering deep inside her, making her entirely too aware of the growing heat and softness between her legs.
“So your answer is that you find feminism silly?”
“Not at all. I celebrate it.”
He lounged there in his seat as if it was a throne and she was entirely too aware of him. The way his shoulders fit in the jacket he wore over a T-shirt that clung to the sculpted planes of his chest. How very long his legs were, thrust out before him. The way his hands moved on the arms of his chair, his fingers long and clever. He looked like what he was: a very confident, even arrogant man, who clearly imagined himself the winner in any game he chose to play.
But Margot had never been very good at losing.
“How exactly do you celebrate feminism?” she asked, her gaze steady on his, because she was the professor and he was the pervert, no matter the odd little scenarios that kept playing on repeat in her head. If she really did kneel. If he moved a little closer, here where no one could see. If he pressed into her from behind, her skin flushed and hot against the cold glass of the windows... But she had to stop this madness. “Is it by throwing one of your sex parties?”
“There’s nothing I love more than a woman who knows her own mind and every inch of her own body,” Thor told her, his teeth flashing in a grin that was much too dangerous for a man who looked so at his ease. Or maybe it was just too dangerous for her, because she couldn’t seem to breathe past it. “I find nothing sexier than equality, particularly in bed.”
It took everything Margot had not to squirm in her seat. She didn’t want to think about him in bed.
And she couldn’t seem to think about anything else.
“By your response, am I to assume that you think feminism is a sexual act?”
“It is when I do it,” he said, amusement flickering over his face. “But perhaps not for you, of course. You have my condolences.”
“I would prefer if you keep things professional,” she said, but for the first time in her academic life, she wasn’t sure that was true.
“I know all about your research, Dr. Cavendish,” he said, and Margot was certain she detected a mocking inflection to the way he said her name. Because, of course, Icelanders did not use titles or even surnames for that matter. “I’ve been receiving reports of you almost from the very moment you set foot on our little volcanic island.”
Margot frowned. “Reports?”
“If it had appeared that your questions bothered my customers, I would have had to encourage you to conduct your experiments elsewhere. You understand.”
Margot’s frown deepened. “You can’t think—”
“But all you have collected are stories.”
There was something in the way he said that that made her stop protesting. She found herself leaning forward, as if compelled against her will, except that couldn’t be right. Margot made it a point never to do a single thing she didn’t want to do.
Did that mean she wanted this? Him?
Because when Thor smiled at her, all thunder and heat, she just wanted to melt.
“Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if you stopped recording secondhand stories and found out for yourself?” he asked idly.
Though there was nothing idle about the way he looked at her.
She sat straighter, because it was that or succumb to the madness coursing through her veins, making her imagine...all kinds of things. Operas and perversities, decadent and lush, and his hands all over her while they did them. “Let me guess. This is where you offer to get into my pants, for the good of my research.”
“Icelanders fuck, Dr. Cavendish.” He lounged there, as intent and watchful as he was boneless. “They do not waste all this time talking. Fuck first, then, if it is any good, perhaps talk a little. Haven’t you already discovered this in all your research?”
She nodded, trying to pull herself together. “It’s that exact permissiveness that interests me.”
“There are some things that intellect cannot help you with. I think you’ll find that sex is one of them.”
Margot sat back in her chair. “I see no one has told you the most powerful sexual organ in a woman’s body is her brain.”
“You say that,” Thor said, a rich vein of laughter in that deep voice of his. “But I’ve had a remarkable amount of success with the clit.”
Which meant she could do nothing but feel that laughter in hers.
“Exactly what are you offering?” she asked, perhaps more harshly than necessary, crossing her legs against the intense throbbing sensation where she least wanted it. “If you wanted to hit on me, you should have said so from the start.”
“This ‘hitting’ on you,” he said, as if he was unfamiliar with the term. “As if attraction is an assault. Is that how you see sex? Is that an American thing—or is it you?”
Margot didn’t like that his comment landed, hard. It made her feel a little dizzy. “It’s a figure of speech.”
“Surely an academic such as yourself loves nothing more than to dig her claws into figures of speech.”
“Because you have a vast interest in academic pursuits, of course.”
“In pursuits, yes. Not necessarily