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was so stressed out she thought that ache in her shoulders might never go away, she knew full well she had no one to blame but herself and her own stubbornness.

      All he knew about her was how to find her clit. Not a bad skill to have. But not exactly psychic powers, either.

      “I complete tasks because that’s what adults do, generally speaking,” she said. From between her teeth. “It’s part of not being a coddled child. The alternative is leaving tasks undone, and that leads to chaos, in my experience. Maybe you like having the power turned off because you forgot to take the time to complete the simple task of paying the bill. I don’t.”

      “You didn’t have to remove your clothes simply because I asked you to.” Thor was studying her again, that fierce blue gaze of his seeing far too much. “I asked you to prove something to me and you did. But why did you do it? Why should you have to prove anything? You could simply have said what you wanted, enthusiastically and repeatedly. But it made you feel safer to have an adversary, did it not?”

      She felt dizzy. He might as well have kicked her, hard, in the solar plexus. It took her a long, desperate moment to catch her breath. “I don’t think that’s true at all.”

      “But you do think that wanting to experiment with things that have overtones that humorless people take great pleasure in excavating for evidence of wrongdoing makes you weak, somehow. I saw the expression on your face when I suggested that you turn your mouth off for a while. It intrigues you as much as it terrifies you.” Thor’s smile hurt her. It actually hurt. “You pride yourself on your mind and your mouth, do you not? Who are you if you cannot express yourself exactly as you wish, whenever you wish it? Are you afraid you will cease to exist? I can assure you, my suspicious professor—you will not.”

      She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, but she knew that she could. That she was. She could feel her own chest rise and fall too rapidly. She could hear the ragged sound of her own breath, telling him everything he needed to know without her having to form a single word.

      Proving him right.

      “I don’t think...” she began.

      “But that is what we are arguing about. You are not a brain in a jar, Margot. What you think is not independent of your flesh. Your passion. One cannot destroy the other, no matter how hard you try.”

      “I don’t understand what you get out of this. Is it simply that you enjoy the act of humbling—” She almost said women, then. But something in the way he watched her kept her from it. “Do you want to humble me? Is that what this is about?”

      “I don’t want to humble you.”

      “Then what? Why?”

      “I like the things that sex can do above and beyond the act itself. I don’t think it’s a game. I don’t think you can research it the way you might a cell or a virus. Humans are deeply complex and emotional creatures, are we not? Sometimes, if we push our own boundaries, we discover things we never knew were there.”

      “I have to tell you, Thor. That doesn’t sound anything like a handshake.”

      He smiled anew at that, then took her hand as if he meant to shake it, though he didn’t.

      “Are you finished talking?” he asked quietly. “Or do you have more nerves to work through?”

      Margot knew she had to do it. She had to try, anyway.

      She knew other things, too. Such as the fact that somehow, though it shouldn’t have been possible, this man really had discovered things about her without benefit of the usual narratives she told about what she liked and didn’t like. About who she was or wasn’t.

      How had he seen all of that? How had sex given him that sort of key to her?

      It made her feel restless deep inside.

      But when all she wanted to do was open her mouth and comment on that, extensively and possibly with footnotes, she knew she was stalling.

      She made herself reach over and take the napkin from him. And if he saw the way her hand shook, he didn’t mention it, proving yet again how unexpectedly kind he was.

      It burned through her with its own kind of heat.

      It sank down into her bones. It shivered through her, like the blood in her veins. It made her want to cry.

      She almost lost her courage, then.

      Why are you doing this? that part of her she’d always considered her most rational demanded. Why are you submitting yourself to something like this?

      But she wanted to see.

      She wanted to know.

      And Thor stood there before her, that patient intensity illuminating his bright blue gaze and tearing her up inside in too many ways to count.

      As if this wasn’t about the storm and never had been, but was about Margot herself—and he could wait forever if that was what it took.

      It astounded her how much safer she felt when her gaze connected with his and held.

      Or better yet, when approval flashed over his lean, fierce face.

      Margot rolled the napkin into a long, thin tube, concentrating perhaps a little too hard on making it even. Then she lifted it to her mouth, took a deep breath and fit the napkin between her teeth like some kind of bit for a horse.

      She wouldn’t call it surrender. She wasn’t certain she wanted that word in her vocabulary.

      But either way, she caught the blue in his eyes. She felt all of that dark intent like his hands around her neck, a perfect storm in the form of a necklace she doubted she’d ever take off, and Margot stopped fighting.

      She took a deep breath...and let go.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      SHE WAS SO beautiful it hurt.

      So brave it didn’t merely make his cock hard, it made him worry that he didn’t have the control he knew he needed to do this thing.

      Because Thor knew that he needed to do it properly if he wanted to do it at all.

      He fought to find his center. To calm himself down by focusing on her instead of that greedy fist of need that had him entirely too close to the edge already.

      Because she might look at him with those bright gold eyes of hers lit with suspicion, but she trusted him. Although they had never met before tonight, he wasn’t the only one who no longer felt as if they were strangers. As if they had never really been strangers.

      As if she was more to him in ways he wasn’t sure he liked.

      It was such an odd sort of intimacy, but Thor didn’t fight it. Because she had put that gag in her mouth for no other reason than that he’d suggested it.

       She trusted him.

      Not because she knew him or really anything about him. Not because she’d heard enough rumors about him from random people in Reykjavík to form a sketchy opinion that might allow her to engage in a quick, meaningless fuck. Not because he was Daniel St. George’s eldest illegitimate son and somehow the most accessible of the lot—or so it seemed to Thor when the three of them had their stilted, careful conversations, as ordered by the father none of them had known or liked all that much.

      Margot might have known a few broad details about Thor, the way everyone did since the will had come out and made him an international person of interest instead of merely one of Iceland’s relatively few celebrities. But none of that was why she was willing to trust him tonight.

      None of that was why she was standing before him, her eyes wide and that napkin distorting the shape of her lovely mouth.

      She trusted him because of

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