Page 37 of The Dom

Damn. That sound always made me wet.

“I have other plans for you tonight.”

I shivered. “What plans?”

He smiled and released me. “Get your purse. When we get to the restaurant, I’ll tell you all about the little game you and I are going to play.”

I half-expected him to tease me in the car, fingers straying to places he couldn’t touch in public, but he simply held my hand, his demeanor more at ease than I’d ever seen him. It was nice, sitting like this. I enjoyed the sexual part of who we were, but I didn’t want us to only be about the physical. His previous relationships had been so focused on sex that I sometimes worried he wouldn’t be interested in anything else.

I was pleased to see I was wrong.

“How’s your mom?” he asked suddenly.

“Good.” I smiled, warmth spreading through me at his question. He wouldn’t have asked if he hadn’t sincerely wanted to know. “More than good, actually. She’s been asked to research the Quaker movement, and it’s not one she knows much about, so she’s really excited about learning new things.”

“It must’ve been nice when you were in school, having a historian for a mom. I’ll bet homework was a breeze.”

I shook my head, laughing. “Not at all. If anything, she made it worse. No help, but she always insisted on checking things over. She’d mark whatever I got wrong and tell me to do it again but wouldn’t help me find the right answers.”

He whistled between his teeth. “Yikes.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Were you good in school?”

He held up a hand and wiggled it back and forth. “I could’ve gotten better grades if I’d applied myself to school half as much as I had to making money.” He grinned at me. “I was determined to be one of those people who made my first million before college.”

“If I remember correctly, you graduated from NYU.”

“I did, but just like in high school, I spent more time trying to come up with get-rich-quick schemes than caring about my grades. I paid attention in the ones that I thought would help me make money, but in everything else, I just made sure I passed.”

I tried to mesh the picture he was painting with the hard-working man I knew now, and it was hard to do. Though I supposed he hadn’t really changed. He’d just streamlined his life to only focus on the things he cared about. Anything he thought of as useless went by the wayside, and he determined what percentage of his attention he gave to everything else.

“Does all that hard work mean you weren’t a fraternity guy?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes, and I laughed.

“No. I didn’t belong to a fraternity. I also wasn’t a jock in college. I didn’t even really go to many parties.”

I found that a little hard to believe, and he must’ve read that on my face because he held up his hand in a Boy Scout salute.

“Scout’s honor.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“I was a Boy Scout,” after a moment, he added, his face perfectly sincere, “for three weeks.”

“You quit?”

“I was ‘asked to leave.’” He made the air quotes with his fingers. “My scoutmaster didn’t take kindly to me taking bets on how long it took various scouts to earn their badges.”

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”

We pulled up in front of a restaurant, and Nate got out of the car, walking around just as Angus opened the door. Nate helped me from the car, and we hurried inside, wanting to get away from the drizzle as quickly as possible.

As much as I hated the scorching summer heat, the back and forth of seasons in New York drove me crazy. Pick a temperature and go with it.

We were led to a private table without the hostess asking for Nate’s name. What would it be like, I wondered, to be remembered pretty much everywhere you went? I’d always been the easily forgettable sort. People I’d gone to school with rarely placed me in their memories. Some of it was because I’d spent a lot of time taking care of Mom when I was in high school, but a bigger part was because I wasn’t someone who stuck out in people’s minds. Quiet, unassuming, shy – those were words used to describe me, and they’d applied even more back then than they did now.

“Is something wrong?” Nate asked.

---