Unleashed

“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 with the self-styled king of fantasy will be a perfect experiment.”

Thor took his time standing up from his chair. He didn’t let go of her hand, so Margot found herself standing with him. For a moment it was awkward, and then he pulled her toward him until she was this close to falling against his big, broad chest.

And worse, wanted to.

“I do love an experiment,” he said, in a kind of drawl, all command and blue fire. “But prepare yourself, Professor, because it won’t be just once.”

CHAPTER TWO (#u4b9be9ff-c5ee-53e0-90bd-34e07d12aef4)

THE PROFESSOR HAD purple hair.

Well, it was more properly a deep lavender. It cascaded over her shoulders and caught the light, and was almost impossible not to reach out and touch.

But he managed it.

It wasn’t as if Thor had never seen brightly colored hair on a woman before. Still, he had never met a woman so determined to present herself as profoundly serious while supporting such...unserious hair.

The contrast intrigued him.

But then, everything about Margot Cavendish was intriguing.

Why had she come all the way to his hotel in the middle of a storm, for example, only to pretend that it was some kind of accident? It wasn’t as if Thor was a hermit. He made it into Reykjavík often. It would have been easy enough for this American professor to camp out in one of his city clubs if she really wanted to run into him.

Thor did not believe in accidents. He’d been running Hotel Viking for almost six months now, ever since the man he did not consider his father in any real sense had left it to him in that odd will. The same will that had also presented Thor with two half brothers he’d never met—and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. And one thing he’d learned in his months as the proprietor of the world’s finest and most remote purveyor of fantasies was that no one rolled up to this place by accident.

Oh, they might tell themselves otherwise. They might make up all kinds of stories to convince themselves they hadn’t meant to come here. As if it was possible to accidentally end up in Iceland. Or to take a wrong turn in the middle of Reykjavík and end up hours away on a lonely little peninsula that was near absolutely nothing but the pitiless sea.

It never took long to reveal that, in point of fact, they’d been heading for Hotel Viking all along.

Thor led the prickly, lavender-haired professor out of his sumptuous bar, built to be an endless celebration of luxurious sin. He nodded at the bartender as he went, smiling when he saw that one of the guests—a Mr. Oliveras from Portugal—was chatting Kristjan up.

“Do you let your employees date your guests?” his professor asked as they passed.

Thor was fairly certain that was a touch of judgment he heard in her tone. But that wouldn’t surprise him. Thor had yet to meet an American—no matter how supposedly liberal—who didn’t carry that country’s moralistic roots inside themselves somewhere.

He allowed that he found that just as fascinating, having not a shred of the puritanical anywhere in him. At all.

“Some establishments that cater to the kinds of sexual fantasies we do have all kinds of draconian regulations about the behavior of staff toward guests, but Hotel Viking isn’t one of them.” Thor smiled down at her and wondered why he so badly wanted to taste that intriguing little furrow between her eyes as she frowned at him, very obviously thinking at him. “Our staff are encouraged to follow their passions as they like.”

“That sounds problematic.”