For four nights they experimented on each other. The first she spent in his arms, listening to the auklets’ voices in the darkness as she learned exactly what sort of kisses made him moan with pleasure. She never did stop shaking that night.
By the second, she’d grown more accustomed to his caresses and she calmed somewhat, even become so bold as to run her fingers over the corded muscles of chest and down to the front of his linen trousers. Her curiosity was driving her crazy, but that second night she could do no more than feel him through the fabric, firm and waiting as her fingers traced the shape of him.
In the lamplight, she saw her every probing touch written in his face. With his eyes shut loosely, he turned his head away from her, and his body slowly and sensually writhed beneath her hand. She thought she was torturing him. Paul was quick to reassure her it was a torment he enjoyed, savoring every stage of it as he was. They’d only have this moment once, he said; he could easily wait for the final act.
By the third night, she was getting more comfortable with the whole thing. She’d explored the curves of his hips, the soft, wet recesses of his mouth. She’d showered him with kisses from the back of his sturdy neck all the way down his satiny chest, so that when his fingers moved from her breasts to the buttons of her shirt, she wasn’t alarmed.
He was laughing about something, Dillon’s endowments or some other silly thing, when she felt the cool night air against her skin. She didn’t even think about it then. She drew him closer as his hands slid over her, warming her, fondling her with a sleek caress until she found herself moving to meet his touch. He fell silent, and it was only a moment more when she felt the heat of his tongue across her nipples, the pleasant jolts of craving that shot through her body when he buried his face against her breasts.
Stroking her, holding her to him, at last Paul drew himself up and smothered her mouth with a penetrating kiss. “How’s that?” he asked, an impish grin on his handsome face.
She skimmed her fingers over the contours of that smile, taking in the endearing light of lust in his eyes. Then she slipped her hands in his hair. “Lower,” she murmured, pushing him down.
Soon she felt her trousers being undone, the trail of his chin down her belly as he covered her with wet and searing kisses. She lay back and shivered beneath his lips, and when he was finished, she would have done anything he asked.
But he didn’t ask. Gathering her up in his arms, he held her snugly for the rest of the night, whispering in her ear about his childhood in Dublin, about the life he’d led in the chill stone rooms of Swallowhill, about Aidan. Listening to him, Ravenna fell asleep and dreamed of those Dublin streets. Again and again she saw the seventeen-year-old face of the boy she’d known in Disneyland, his punkish haircut, his ungainly walk and those vulnerable, sensitive eyes.