The amusement in his gaze shifted, growing darker and more focused at once. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. He only watched her, and she thought she could see a muscle tense in his lean jaw.
Holding her gaze, Thor reached into the pocket of his jacket and drew out a key. It was an old-fashioned key with an exuberant flourish on its end. He placed it on the table between them with a decisive click.
“This is your room key,” he told her quietly. She was riveted by the thunder that stormed around beneath those seemingly soft words. “There is no price. You may stay until the storm blows itself out, with my compliments.”
“Did I... Did I offend you?” she asked, not certain why that possibility seemed to tilt madly inside her, as if she was on some kind of roller coaster.
“It is my mistake,” Thor said with a faint smile. “This is a cultural thing, I think. Icelanders talk very openly about sex. Having it, not having it. Who they wish to have it or not have it with. Offers are made, accepted, rejected. This happens all the time. I would have thought you’d know this, given your field of study.”
Once again, Margot felt off balance, and she hated it. “Is this the part where you try to make me feel bad, as if I’m somehow unsophisticated and repressed for calling you out?”
“You can call me whatever you wish,” Thor said, his voice deeper, somehow. Or maybe that was just how it felt inside her, where her body was acting as if it belonged to someone else. Someone who wanted sex to be a whole lot more than enjoyable. “I do not require payment for kindness. It insults me that you might think otherwise, but I understand. You come from a place where sexual politics are significantly more adversarial. You cannot help but fight, no matter what it is that you want.”
Margot didn’t know which was drier, her lips or her throat. Especially when he shrugged as if she was that easily summarized. That easily understood.
“And I suppose you’re here to tell me what it is that I want?”
“I don’t think it’s accidental that you chose to come to my sex hotel.” And the way he said those words, sex hotel, was like sharp blades. “On the day of a storm.”
“You think I planned to strand myself in a snowstorm?” Margot laughed and told herself it wasn’t the least bit forced. “For this? For you?”
He didn’t laugh. “I like sex. I’m not afraid of it.”
“I’m not afraid of sex.”
But there was something in the denial that made her wish she could snatch the words back. Especially when his blue gaze seemed hotter. Wilder.
“Maybe you are and maybe you’re not.” He shrugged. “What I know about you is that you have done nothing but watch. What I can offer you is the opportunity to do a little fieldwork.”
“Fieldwork?” She blinked. “Is that a joke?”
“I never joke,” he said, deadpan. “I’m far too perverse. Do you need to get to know someone before you sleep with them?”
“You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”
“Not at all,” Thor said. “But in Iceland, that’s back to front. I could sit here and tell you my life story or you could come to my rooms with me and I will show you. It will be there in the chemistry between us, or not. Every answer to every question you have, laid out before you clearly and inarguably.”
“Because you’re that good in bed.”
Thor laughed, though it was quieter than before. And somehow, she thought, more volatile. “I don’t believe in ‘good in bed.’ Either people connect or they don’t. One woman’s sex god is another’s dud. It is all chemistry.”
“What if we have no chemistry?”
He smiled at that and it felt like fire. Then he leaned forward, putting his hand on the table, his palm up.
“Maybe we don’t.” He nodded at his hand. “Why don’t you touch me and see.”
Margot ordered herself to remain calm. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had tied her into knots the way this one was doing so effortlessly.
Was that chemistry? Or was she in over her head with this latter-day Viking?
This was her opportunity to put them back on proper footing. Before things spiraled even further out of control.
But Margot wasn’t one to back down from a challenge. Instead of turning it over and over in her head the way she probably should have, she leaned forward and slid her hand over his.
She expected him to be strong. For his hand to be warm and to envelop hers the way it did. But the contact jolted through her like a flash of lightning, and she had to bite back the involuntary little noise she made.
Not that it mattered. She could see from the burning thing in his gaze that he felt it, too. And more, that he had heard her.
As if he could feel that same lightning. As if it crackled in them both.
“Here is your opportunity to be less American and more Icelandic,” Thor said, his voice rougher than before. Lower. “You’ve been trying to talk to me for weeks now. This is your opportunity.”
“You’re not offering to talk.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Thor murmured. His palm slid against hers as he flipped her hand over. “I’m fluent in all kinds of languages.”
Margot fought the urge to yank her hand away from his. Because there was too much sensation, suddenly. Because she’d completely lost control of this interaction. Because there was a part of her that didn’t quite know what to do with all the wild things she could feel storming around inside her, competing with the swirling snow outside the windows.
Be practical, she ordered herself. Think this through.
It was unorthodox, certainly. But she would be lying if she tried to pretend that she hadn’t wondered what it would be like to be one of those Icelandic girls, casual in ways she had never quite managed to be.
Margot had never had sex with a stranger. She wasn’t the kind of woman men tended to pick up in bars. Because she was generally unimpressed with drunken attempts at conversation. And because she preferred to spend her time in libraries and classrooms. The men in her life had always been like her, academic and intellectual and more interested in an intense conversation than sex.
Not so intensely physical and overwhelming that she’d forgotten they weren’t alone in the room.
Maybe it was time to see what all the fuss was about. And who better than Iceland’s god of sex?
“It would be for research purposes only,” she heard herself say.
Thor’s impossibly carnal mouth curved. But his eyes were like flame. “Of course.”
“Just sex,” Margot said. “And only during the storm.”
“If you insist.”
“I do insist.” There was something about the way he was regarding her then, leashed and ready, as if he knew something she didn’t. As if he knew her better than she knew herself, which Margot didn’t like at all, no matter how wet the notion made her. “And no kissing.”
She wasn’t sure he would agree to that, and the more she stared at his mouth, the more she wondered why she’d said it in the first place. Because the urge to lean forward then, to crawl across the table between them and set her mouth to his, was nearly overwhelming.
But that half smile of his only deepened.
“No kissing,” he agreed.
“Great,” she said brightly, as if they were discussing the kind of sex she studied, not the kind she was going to have. “I’m sure one round