Blame it on the Mistletoe

by Tawny Weber

  “Wonderful.” Layla clapped, curling up next to Rita to dig into the box of photos between them. Alison leaned over the back of the couch.

  “Hey, remember this?” Alison asked, holding up a picture of the three of them in front of the bus they used to travel in. Rita grinned. Her nine-year-old self had a fashion magazine tucked under one arm. Layla’s mandolin was curled in her arms like a baby, and Alison, as usual, looked perfect.

  “I miss that bus,” Alison said with a soft smile. Everything about her was soft tonight. Rita narrowed her eyes, wondering when she’d ever seen her sister so mellow.

  “You look happy,” Layla said, voicing Rita’s thoughts.

  “I feel happy.” Alison glanced at the tree, then gave a sigh. “Like all my holiday wishes came true.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Rita sighed. Tyler was picking her up later to take her to his mom’s. Holy cow, she’d finally found a man who wanted her to meet his mother. She giggled.

  “Cookies, ladies?”

  Their mom took the tray from her husband and set it down before curling into his arms. “Look, Eric. It’s the best Christmas ever, isn’t it? Our girls, all grown-up, happy and in love.”

  “I’ll be having a talk with their young men this week and make sure they understand just what I expect when it comes to my little girls,” Eric said. His tone was joking and his smile proud, but Rita knew he wasn’t kidding. He was the reason they’d all found perfect guys. Because he believed in the magic of love and everything that went with it.

  Rita leaned her head against Layla’s and curled her hand over Alison’s where it rested on her shoulder. Smiling, they watched their parents and their wonderful example of happily ever after.

  “With a love like theirs all around us,” she murmured to her sisters, “how could we miss?”

  * * * * *

  SPECIAL EXCERPT FROM

  Notorious seducer Thor Ragnarsson runs the scandalous Hotel Viking in Reykjavik, where tourists go to fulfil their wildest fantasies. When strait-laced American professor Margot Cavendish gets snowed in, Thor challenges her inhibitions with some very hands-on research…

  Read on for a sneak preview of UNLEASHED by Caitlin Crews,

  published by Harlequin DARE October 2018.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “I’m sorry,” the overly polite receptionist said from behind the polished surface of the gleaming marble desk in Hotel Viking’s iconic lobby. “The weather has turned foul. There will be no possibility of returning to Reykjavík tonight.”

  Professor Margot Cavendish squared her shoulders as if the woman had taken a swing at her, and forced a smile. It wouldn’t do to let her irritation get the better of her, especially when she was mostly—okay, entirely—annoyed with herself.

  She’d seen the weather with her very own eyes. She’d known that coming all the way out to this remote village was a risk, especially when there’d been no indication that the man she’d come to see would take a few minutes out of his busy schedule of sin and temptation to meet with her. He hadn’t condescended to answer her emails or bothered to return her calls. And yet she’d gone ahead and come all this way anyway.

  This was what she got for being spontaneous, she told herself darkly.

  “It was snowing on the way here,” she said, as if she could argue her way back to the little flat she was renting in central Reykjavík during her semester sabbatical. “It was a little slippery, but fine.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. The road over the mountains had been treacherous. The snow had been coming down much harder up high than it had been in the city. But her taxi driver had been undeterred. And Margot was used to blustery Midwest winters at the University of Iowa, where she’d taught in the humanities department since completing her doctorate a few years back.

  She wasn’t afraid of a little snow. But she’d never spent a winter this close to the arctic, either.

  “It’s a developing storm, I’m afraid.” The woman typed ferociously on her keyboard as if she was transmitting that same information to the public as she spoke. The tag on her chest read Freyja. “These winter storms are so unpredictable. It might very well clear up by morning.”

  “By morning?”

  Margot’s voice was too loud in the hushed, expensive lobby, which made her want to cringe. There was something about this place that got under her skin: its epic pageant of ice and fire on display wherever she went; elves and trolls and sagas wherever she looked, in one form or another. Like this hotel, a monument to sin that its reclusive owner somehow made seem attractive when Margot thought it should all be seedy. She could imagine the sort of things that must go on here, even if she hadn’t seen much of it besides this damned lobby.

  She forced her shoulders down an inch from where they’d crept up toward her ears. “You can’t be suggesting I stay here overnight?”

  She might or might not have emphasized the word here a bit too much.

  The previous owner of the famous Hotel Viking, larger-than-life Daniel St. George, had died in a dramatic car accident in Germany some months before. His will had divided up his boutique hotel properties to the sons it had always been rumored he’d littered about the globe, though he’d never acknowledged them while alive. One of those assets had been Hotel Viking, the remote Icelandic hotel and resort that billed itself as the first and last stop in international fantasy. And it was only a couple of hours outside Reykjavík in good weather, so Margot had decided she had to go see it for herself.

  Her current research project was all about Iceland and its reputation as the most feminist country in the world. Specifically, she was interested in sex and how Iceland’s famous and highly alcoholic hookup culture intersected with those feminist principles—because to Margot’s mind, those things didn’t go together. She’d been in Reykjavík for almost a month already, consulting with colleagues at the University of Iceland and conducting interviews with as many locals as she could convince to talk with her on any given late night out there on Laugavegur—the famous street where so much of Reykjavík’s nightlife happened—as they stumbled from bar to nightclub in the cold.

  The name that kept cropping up was Thor Ragnarsson, the brand-new owner of the iconic Hotel Viking and the eldest of Daniel St. George’s sons and heirs. Thor, who they whispered personally practiced all the many wicked things his guests got up to at the hotel. Thor, who seemed to embody all the things Margot liked least about men—in bed and out.

  Overtly sexual. Too physical.

  Not that it mattered what kind of sex the man had in his private life, of course. Margot wanted to know what he thought about sex in general, that was all.

  Of course that was all. Even if she was trapped here.

  His secretary had politely refused all requests for an interview when Margot had started calling instead of emailing. So she’d decided to just show up today and see what happened.

  But she hadn’t gotten past the lobby. Freyja had been polite but firm. The hotel proper was accessible only to its guests because complete privacy was its central promise, and Mr. Ragnarsson was unavailable for even a five-minute chat. It had been foolish for Margot to come here.

  And now she had to pay for it.

  “There are worse places to be snowed in,” Freyja was saying. “After all, we’re a hotel. There are those who get stuck in the snow out on the roads in these conditions and must hope for rescue.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Why don’t you go and sit in our bar,” Freyja suggested. “Have a drink. Relax. And I’ll see how we can accommodate you tonight.”

  It wasn’t as if Margot had a choice. She could see the way the snow was beating down outside. It swirled around on the other side of the glass entry doors with visibility of about an inch, leaving her well and truly trapped. She’d let herself grow complacent this past month in Reykjavík, clearly. She’d imagined that she could handle the snow the way the locals seemed to so easily.

  And it had certainly never occurred to he
r that she could find herself stranded in a sex hotel. The whole building felt swollen with dark passions, with an undercurrent of sensuality weaving in and around everything, even the cheerful flower arrangements that adorned all the tables.

  It was…disconcerting.

  Margot had always viewed her body as an afterthought. She was a woman of intellect, not rampant, unchecked desires. She liked sex the way anyone did. Meaning, she enjoyed it. At its best it was fun. But she didn’t hunger for it. She certainly wouldn’t check into a special hotel to have particular kinds of operatic sex—mostly because she didn’t like opera that much when it was sung, much less acted out in the flesh.

  But Margot kept her thoughts on sex hotels and operas to herself. She nodded stiffly at Freyja, then made her way from the reception desk across the lobby toward the great, high doors on the far side that looked like they belonged on a Viking longhouse and led into the bar.

  Hotel Viking was beautiful, as befit the exorbitant cost of even a single night’s stay. It married the typical Scandinavian starkness of this part of the world with opulent details better suited to something more traditionally European and decadent, and somehow made it all work. And Margot found the hotel itself seemed to soothe her as she walked, not unlike a cool caress from a—

  Get a grip, she ordered herself. She was not going to succumb to the sensual promise of this place. She wasn’t a guest here. She didn’t need a pageant with her orgasm when she could come happily and quickly and move on. She was an academic observer, that was all.

  And she didn’t like the fact she had to remind herself of that.

  Almost as if she was afraid of what would happen if she surrendered to this place. As if the lure of it was that powerful, even while she was doing nothing more salacious than walking across a lobby. Margot dismissed that notion almost in the same instant. She wasn’t afraid. She was a tenured professor back home, a position that had required single-minded determination to achieve. She was a strong and capable woman, wholly self-reliant, to the point that her two last attempts at relationships had complained bitterly about her independence on their way out the door.

  Good riddance, Margot had thought, once the sting of each departure had faded. Because she didn’t believe that independence was anything to be ashamed of.

  And she certainly didn’t think that finding herself snowed in for the night in a sex hotel was any reason to fear she might lose that independence.

  Annoyed with herself, she pushed through the double doors that looked like something out of Beowulf and walked into the bar. She couldn’t remember a time she’d ever needed a glass of wine more.

  Inside, it was far more ornate than the lobby. Deep reds and golds somehow merged with a kind of industrial feel that, once again, shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. The light was dim and suggestive. There were seats grouped together in intimate little clusters, taking advantage of the deep shadows. Unearthly Icelandic music played while various configurations of hotel guests talked. Flirted. And maybe did more than that under the stout wooden tables where no one could see.

  Stop seeing sex everywhere, she ordered herself. Margot ordered a drink from the friendly bartender and carried a gratifyingly large glass of wine to a little booth facing the windows on the far side of the bar, where she couldn’t begin to figure out the relationships on display at all the other tables even if she wanted to. Instead, she had a front-row seat to the storm wreaking havoc outside.

  Every now and again she saw glimpses of the surging sea far below, pounding against the obsidian volcanic rock the way it had done forever on this remote, northern island. But everything else was the snow. The wind rattled the windows, but it wasn’t threatening now that she was sunk deep into a comfortable seat, safe and warm.

  And yet a kind of threat seemed to roll over her anyway, making her skin prickle.

  “Excuse me, I—”

  Margot stiffened. She lifted a hand without looking up, stopping whatever was happening before it started.

  “Thank you,” she said coolly. “But I’d prefer to be alone.”

  “You are trapped in an isolated hotel in the middle of a blizzard,” came the amused, decidedly male voice again, English spoken with an Icelandic accent that kicked its way down her spine like another caress. “It would be difficult to find more solitude than that.”

  “I understand that this is a sex hotel,” she said crisply. She turned as she spoke, twisting around in her seat. And then looked up. And up further. And then still further, until she found the face of the man towering over her like a Viking god of old. “But I’m afraid I’m not a sex tourist. I’m just an accidental visitor.”

  The man standing beside her seat laughed. Loudly and deeply, as if he might break the windows in another moment if he let himself go. And Margaret was surprised to discover that his laughter seemed to move in her, too. It washed down her back, then spiraled even lower, settling like a fierce heat between her legs.

  “This isn’t a brothel,” he said, all that laughter a kind of honey in his voice, and pooling in her, too. It made her feel almost…sticky. It made her very nearly wish that she really was a guest like everyone else. Like him. “What dark tales have you been reading?”

  “The reputation of the Hotel Viking speaks for itself.”

  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 tab
le 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—