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“Oh,” Maeve Surana said. “Oh my.”
Zevran preened, that was really the only word for it, and well he might: as he sprawled amid the bedding, the glow of the firelight turned his skin to bronze and his hair to gold, and his tattoos…
“I know you said they were for aesthetic effect,” she said, “to enhance musculature and the like, but I had no idea.”
“It is an art much practiced in Antiva,” he said, stretching. Deliberately, she was sure, as the motion made the lines stretch and twine across his skin.
She’d long been familiar with the curves decorating his face, of course, and this wasn’t even the first time they’d been this intimate. But sex in a tent at camp tended to be muffled, discreet, and in rather more darkness than this. This trip to Denerim was the first chance they’d had to steal away to a rented room, and the first chance she’d had to see him, all of him, in the light. The graceful curves adorning his face were mirrored by the lines arching along the swell of his strong thighs, and his back, turned to her when she first came into the room, had sweeping marks along the shoulders and spine. But most dramatic was the curve that wrapped around his torso from back to chest, arcing along the ribs before swinging down in an S-curve that found its root at the base of his cock. The tattoos were drawn with such elegance and grace that it seemed not at all crude or obvious, but rather one of the most enticing things she had ever seen.
“How intriguing,” she said, letting the last of her own clothing fall to the floor. “Yours must have been a master.” She and a few fellow apprentices had gathered one night to mark their own faces, with ink and magic and the assistance of one long-suffering senior apprentice. She wore hers proudly enough, but they’d hardly known what they were doing, and it seemed crude now by contrast.
Zevran laughed. “He was tolerably good at his art.” His eyes followed her as she sauntered toward the bed, exaggerating the sway of her hips.
“And if I were to come to Antiva?” she asked. “Should I have myself inked, as well?”
“Mm, perhaps. What design would you have, my lovely Warden?”
She leaned close and kissed him, sliding an arm behind his neck, enjoying the warmth of lips and tongue. “What would you suggest?” she murmured.
“Hmm, it would take a master indeed to enhance beauty like yours,” he said. “Perhaps one might draw here—” and his thumb traced a curve that started at her collarbone and wound down to circle around her breast before tweaking her nipple.
“Mm,” she said, breath quickening. “What about my back?”
“Ah, that would be a fine canvas indeed. You have such lovely skin, my dear.”
She smiled, for next to Zevran, she often felt entirely too milky-pale, having spent far too much of her life inside the tower. “We shall have to think on it, when we go to Antiva,” she said.
Whatever Zevran was about to say was lost in a hiss of pleasure as she bent her head to trace over his tattoos with her tongue, and nothing more was said for some time.