“Your body was made for me too,” he said, hand brushing exposed skin before his mouth followed it. “The little hollow in your throat that moves when you laugh. Your breasts. I wanted this.”
He lowered his head to run lips and tongue against the places he’d only touched with his hands, and my breath stuttered at the sharp, unexpected delight of his mouth on my breasts. I made a small noise of surprise when his teeth grazed the peak, startling at the jolt it sent to my core, and he looked up only long enough to shoot me a devilish grin and begin again.
“I didn’t know,” I said, lip trembling over my lower teeth. If I’d known it felt like this, I would have been braver. Another cry caught in my throat as Taran moved his head to the side and the cool air of the room hit the wet, sensitive skin he’d left exposed.
His mouth felt like worship, something that awoke power. He coaxed more noises from me as his lips moved to the lower curves of my breasts and then trailed down farther, to my navel. He rolled his nose against the small mound of my stomach and made my breath catch when he gave me a melting, secretive look from his position nearly between my knees.
“I thought about this too,” he said, leaning forward so that my thighs parted infinitesimally wider.
I nodded solemnly. I’d memorized twenty diagrams. I expected him to touch me again like he had outside his tent, lift his fingers from where they gripped my knees and stroke them between my thighs, but even if he didn’t, my body was already buzzing with desire. I’d welcome him anyway.
He slowly pushed my knees apart. “I thought about putting my mouth on this rosebud. Imagined the noises you’d make.”
Puzzling that sentence through took me past his next movement—my head was swimming and maiden-priests didn’t deal in euphemism—but I got it just before he lifted one knee over his shoulder.
“You’re sure?” I whispered when he lowered his head enough to drag his wet lower lip over my core.
“No diagrams of this?” he asked with an amused sparkle in his eyes. “That scroll sounds very outdated.”
“Is this new, then?” I said, words almost a gasp as nervous anticipation twisted in my stomach.
“I can’t remember, so maybe I just invented it for us,” he said, laughing softly. He settled himself between my thighs, pressing a kiss to the inside of my knee before leaning back in to spread me with his thumbs for his hot, worshipful mouth.
My hips lifted off the mattress at the first pass of his tongue, and I instinctively laced my hands across my mouth to stifle a cry before I remembered what he’d said about hearing me. Cheeks blazing, I grabbed the coverlet instead as his lips worked little whimpers out of my throat.
I knew the course of every muscle and sinew in my body, the tracery of nerves that connected them, the path from my heart to my fingers and toes, but the sensation that spun through my body seemed to follow none of them. It was more like a fiery, winged creature had awoken in my body and found a new sky to soar in, leaving hot sparks behind as it spun high in my heart and low in my core. I felt too small to contain it, twisting and bowing my back as Taran’s mouth stroked my most secret spaces.
“Good,” he said when I moaned, and I hadn’t been aware of doing anything at all, but when I glanced at a stomach that was beginning to bead with sweat, he was looking up at me with fierce appreciation. I swept his hair away from his forehead, mostly to feel the silky strands between my fingers instead of just against my trembling thighs. I loved that too, the contrast between his soft hair and his rough cheek and the hot, wet pressure of his mouth. Every sensation was new, every part of me felt new—and made for this, just like he’d said.
I writhed as the heated tension in my stomach caught and pulled. I felt suspended even as my hands reached for something to cling to. I must have said something, pleaded out loud, because when that tension finally broke and let me fall through my ownbody, free from all constraints, I found I was gripping Taran’s hand like it was the only thing anchoring me to the world.
I panted like I’d run a long distance, my body gathering solidity where it had just felt light enough to float to the ceiling and dissolve like a soap bubble. And Taran kissed the curve of my inner thigh. He kissed the jut of my hip. He kissed the rise of my stomach and the valley between my breasts. It was so gentle and so sweet, and yet when I finally opened my eyes, the slow, careful press of his mouth was entirely contradicted by the need written across his face.
His lips were swollen and red in the lamplight, and I caught a flash of white as he rubbed his teeth across them as though feeling the change. I thought about how they’d gotten that way and had a flash of amazed self-consciousness. I couldn’t believe we’d just done that.
“I imagined what you’d sound like. What you’d taste like. But it was even better,” he said when I pulled him over me and tried to hide my face in his shoulder. “No, Iona, don’t hide. You were obviously made for this too.”
He sounded so full of masculine pride that I relented, tipping my head back so that he could see my pink cheeks and how they curved when I let out the shy grin I’d been holding in. His voice was conspiratorial, like we’d stolen some guarded treasure through cleverness and guile.
Though hadn’t we? Wasn’t this unlikely? The Allmother hadn’t helped us—every god had hindered us! So many vows and oceans and deaths had nearly stood between us and this moment, where my bare body nestled against his, and his last layer of clothing did little to conceal his desire.
Taran hummed in appreciation when I cupped him through the material of his trousers and used my palm to boldly explore a shape I’d only caught the vaguest sense of before. A hard press against mystomach or thigh whenever I let my restraint slip and kissed him like I wanted to had been a precious reassurance that he felt the way I did. This time I didn’t stop, didn’t tell myselflater.
“Like this?” I asked, running a hand from his base up to his waistband. I didn’t know how hard to touch him. He’d been gentle with me, but his body was so much larger and firmer than mine.
“You can touch me however you want to,” he said in a rumbling voice, lying back and folding his arms behind his head. The slits of his eyes and the tension in his stomach contradicted his casual invitation though, and I decided I would like to see a little of that control slip.
“Like this, then?” I asked, letting my hand drift up, onto his chest. I climbed into a kneeling position, letting my hair fall over one shoulder and partially obscure my breasts.
Taran eyed my bare chest, almost but not quite out of his reach.
“If you like,” he said with feigned diffidence as my hand explored the planes of his chest and stomach but didn’t follow back down past his waistband. He was hard muscle and soft skin down his sides, rough hair on his stomach and quick heartbeats over his pulse points. I reveled in the chance to explore him at my leisure, drink in the perfection of his features while they were glowing with desire. I bent to kiss the dip of his collarbones, and he lifted a hand, nearly unconsciously, to cup my breast.
“Just like this?” I asked again, laying an open-mouthed kiss at the base of his jaw and following it with the scrape of my teeth. My hand rested chastely over his heart.
He chuckled at how transparent I was being. “I like this,” he said, his thumb circling around my nipple. “I’ll never tell you to stop.”
“Is there anything else you like?”
