I don’t even realize the words are out of my mouth—“God, you smell good. You always smell sooo good”—until I feel the rumble of his chuckle inside his chest.
“Oh yeah?” he prompts, kissing my cheek with the corner of his lips, since my face is still buried in the crook of his neck.
In this peaceful level of consciousness, I don’t even blush. I’m not embarrassed by what he heard me say. “Yep.” I pop the P. “Whenever you leave the library, there’s always this faint little hint of it left behind, and it always makes me wet.”
His naked cock beneath my thighs jerks, and I smile when he growls a startled, “Fuck.” It doesn’t make me flinch this time. I don’t think anything would make me flinch right now, not in this hazy state of bliss I’m still in. “Guess I’ll be buying stock in Aqua de Fuckboy next time I speak to my financial advisor.”
That makes me giggle. “You have a financial advisor? What’s an eighteen-year-old need with a financial advisor?”
“When I turned eighteen, all my trust funds hit. I’m not one to just… hit the lottery and go buy mansions around the world and cars to fill a warehouse. That would be fucking stupid,” he says quietly, and for some reason, that brings me back to reality a little more, but in a good way. It makes me admire him even more, this man I knew was brilliant at school, but now know he’s also smart when it comes to real life.
I pull my face out of his neck and meet his eyes. “I did the same when my parents died,” I confess, and his eyes soften, but not with pity. I can see clearly the softness comes from me divulging something about my personal life to him he didn’t know.
“My parents are still alive. My trusts came from older generations,” he explains, and I sink back against him.
I peek over his shoulder to see the water is only halfway done, the one bad thing about having such a big tub—it takes forever to fill. But I’m enjoying getting to know more about Nate. There seems to be so much more to him than the man who’s intimidated the hell out of me since the day I met him.
“What are your parents like? I don’t think I’ve ever met them at school before,” I ask, and he starts back up rubbing my back.
“I got lucky. My parents are actually cool as fuck. My mom is sweet and one of those Pinterest moms, even though she could just pay someone to do everything for her. She wants to do it herself. My dad works a lot, but when he’s home, he’s actually present. He’s a great dad. Like I said, lucky,” he tells me, and it surprises me. I always pictured the parents of Nathaniel Black IV to be the uptight snobbish type, the stereotypical people always portrayed in movies and shows who own things like towns and freaking private academies.
He must sense my shock, because he chuckles again. “Right? I think my dad was just hellbent on being nothing like the Black men before him. And he married for love, not status like the generations before him.”
That makes me smile. “That’s… interesting. I imagined…. I don’t know. It surprised me more, because of… how you are,” I say gently.
“My OCD, you mean?” he asks, but there’s no defensiveness in his tone.
“Yeah.”
“Mine is the hereditary kind, not trauma-induced,” he replies, and I meet his eyes once more. “Yeah, I’ve been diagnosed. I’ve seen therapists and psychiatrists about it.”
My brow furrows. “Then… why—”
“Don’t I have it under control with medication?” he finishes my question, and I nod. “Same as you, little mouse. Never found the right cocktail, and the ones that did help, I didn’t like the way they made my body feel. I felt like I was putting poison in my body, and I don’t know if you noticed, but I take a little bit of pride in this body.” He grins.
“Oh, I noticed,” I murmur, looking down at his deliciously masculine chest before biting my bottom lip, and I can’t help but giggle when his cock twitches beneath me again.
“God, that giggle. I swear, when I heard it the first time when I was listening to you at the club—”
“Spying on me, you mean?” I lift a brow.
“Tomatoes, to-mah-toes.” He winks. “I swear the sound of it did something to my chest. Like it tightened and loosened at the same time. It made me feel guilty that I’d spent all these months picking on you instead of trying to make you laugh.”
The confession comes so easily from his lips that I don’t even know how to respond, so I stay quiet, and soon he leans us over to turn off the water, and I hear him splash a little to test the temperature.