Unleashed

Margot was used to traveling alone. It rarely took more than a few cool words and an unapproachable expression on her face to deter unwanted male advances. Especially in Iceland, which prided itself on its civility. But the man standing over her was...different, somehow.

He was so big, for a start. Iceland was filled with tall men, broad of shoulder and long of leg as befit the descendants of Viking raiders. This man was all that, but something else besides. Something more. Every inch of him was packed with lean muscle, as if he carried a leashed danger in every sinew and held it in through sheer force of will.

And yet the way he stood there was easy. Lazy, almost.

Margot was meant to be a clear-eyed observer of humanity in all its complexities, damn it, so she was forced to acknowledge the simple fact that this man was easily the most striking she’d ever seen. He was beautiful, in fact. His hair was a tawny gold, worn in a careless length that looked as if he spent his days raking his fingers through it—or more likely letting others do that for him, if he spent time here.

And he had the face of a saint.

Nordic cheekbones. A carnal mouth.

And eyes so blue they burned.

Good lord, she burned.

“Exactly what have you heard about the hotel?” he asked in that same boneless, effortlessly suggestive way.

Margot tried to school her expression to her usual academic disinterest, but she couldn’t quite get there. Her pulse seemed to be everywhere, too hard and too fast. She fingered the stem of her wineglass and sat back in her chair, hoping she looked as irritated as she wished she felt.

“The hotel is the premier international destination for extremely high-class pursuits of pleasure,” she said, well aware that she was practically quoting from the website. “In whatever form they might take.”

“Perhaps you misunderstand the word pleasure,” he replied, but Margot doubted it. Not when she was looking at his mouth, hard and sensual. “A ‘sex hotel’ suggests a certain lack of consent. Prostitutes, for example. There’s none of that here. The Hotel Viking caters to consenting adults.”

“And of course there are no blurred lines,” Margot said, as if she was auditioning to be a Puritan, all pursed lips and clutched pearls, when all she really wanted to know was how he made the word consent sound so hot. “Not in such a fine establishment as this.”

“Some lines are better blurred.” There was a gleam in the wild blue of his eyes that made her think of the northern lights that danced in the skies here, unworldly and impossible all at once. “But lines are not laws. Laws, you will find, are taken very seriously here.”

She felt breathless, which was ridiculous. As if something about the simple fact of this man standing next to her table had reached inside her and scraped her hollow. Margot felt something like...jittery.

It was the storm, she told herself. The unpleasant novelty of finding herself stranded when she couldn’t fix it. She couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t simply call a cab. There was no amount of intellect or cash that could beat back the snow.

Of course she didn’t like it.

Margot told herself that was why she was reacting to this man the way she was. As if he was electric, when she didn’t believe in that kind of thing. She didn’t want it—it was messy and she hated opera and she had no interest in sex hotels on remote Icelandic peninsulas. She had too much work to do.

It was more than time to send him on his way. “It wouldn’t matter if this was a convent. I’m not interested.”

He laughed again, louder and longer than before. And once again, Margot could feel it everywhere, licking all over her like flames against her skin.

“I admire a woman who speaks her mind so distinctly. So there can be no mistake. You would be surprised how many people do not possess that particular talent.”

“And yet here you still are.”

“Forgive me,” the man said, and that mouth of his curved into a smile that Margot absolutely did not feel directly in her breasts. Or in between her legs. Because she liked sex that was fun while it was happening but didn’t interrupt her life afterward. Or even her schedule. She did not like...this. “I didn’t come over here to ask you for a quick little fuck while the snow rages down, as diverting as that sounds. I am Thor Ragnarsson. I believe you’re here to see me.”

He pulled out the seat beside her and settled himself into it, while Margot couldn’t seem to do a single thing but stare in shock.

Her heart was pounding in her chest, and her mind was spinning, desperately trying to figure out how she hadn’t recognized him, while her body was getting a little too...operatic for her peace of mind. It was the angle, maybe. She’d seen pictures of him straight on, not from below, looking up. She might as well have been kneeling before him, head tipped back to receive his cock—

She sat up straighter, ignoring the fact her ears felt red and singed with the force of her embarrassment.

It had to be embarrassment that made her flush like that. It couldn’t be anything else.

“Yes,” she said, stiffly, casting around for her lost professionalism. “Mr. Ragnarsson, of course. I’ve been trying—”

“This is Iceland. We are not so formal. Call me Thor.”

He was watching her intently and she told herself that was why his name seemed to sit there on her tongue like sugar. It wasn’t an unusual name, not here. But there was something about him that made her think less of Icelandic naming traditions and a whole lot more about his namesake. The god of thunder.

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.