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“What do you want to know about them?” he asked.
She inhaled slowly, then let the air out as she concentrated, unaware of the tightening grip on her pen. “What was it about the women in your past that drew your attention? What caught your eye initially?”
Tim took a sip of his scalding hot coffee, wondering why there was a strange sensation in his gut. Looking at the lovely woman with her dark hair and crystal blue eyes, he wasn’t sure why he felt this pain. She was lovely, of course. But Raven wasn’t the kind of woman that he dated.
Hell, no women were the kind that he dated.
“They approached me,” he blurted out. “I don’t think that anything about them caught my eye. One moment, I’m standing in a group of people and the next, an attractive woman is there, smiling up at me.”
Raven blinked and he almost laughed at her stunned expression. “So, the women you’ve dated in the past were just…convenient?”
He didn’t like the way she’d phrased that. “No. Not at all. I’ve dated some very nice women.”
She grinned. “I’m so relieved that you said ‘women’.”
His hand paused, the coffee halfway to his mouth. “What would I have said?”
She grimaced. “Many men, and some women, for that matter, refer to adult females as ‘girls’. It’s offensive and demeaning.”
He lowered his cup of coffee back down to the table. “Why the hell would you care? It’s still a female. It’s just a word, right?”
She tilted her head and his eyes were immediately drawn to the silky softness of her neck. He wondered where she liked to be kissed. The base of her neck? Or that delightful spot right behind her ear. She wore demure, pearl earrings today. What if he nibbled on her earlobe? Did she like that kind of touch?
“How would you feel if I referred to you as a boy?”
Tim blinked, coming back to the present with a thud. “I haven’t been a boy since…hell, I can’t remember.”
She grinned and he looked at her lips. Soft, full lips, even when she smiled.
“Men have a tendency to infantilize women. I think it helps them feel more powerful and in control when they mentally and verbally refer to a grown woman as a girl. It gives them a feeling of dominance.” She picked up her latte and blew on it. “And yet, when the tables are turned, when men are referred to as boys, they don’t like it.”
He ripped his gaze away from her lips. Would she please stop blowing on that damn coffee? It was distracting.
What had she said? Something about boys and girls and men versus women. “Right,” he mumbled, making a mental note to research the issue later.
“So, the women?” she prompted.
What women? He had to think hard to remember what she’d asked him. She kept blowing on her damn coffee! “Right. The women I’ve dated.” He sighed, feeling very uncomfortable talking about his past lovers with Raven without being able to put his finger on why. “I don’t like talking about them.”
“You don’t have to tell me specifics about the women you’ve dated,” she continued and he wondered why she kept talking about ‘dating’. He didn’t date. He had lovers. When he had a sexual urge, he’d call up the current woman he was…whatever. And if she was in the mood, they’d meet, have sex. Afterwards, they’d both go back to their lives. It was a simple matter of two people coming together to offer mutual sexual release.
“They were tall,” he blurted out, suddenly needing to fill the silence.
“Tall?” she repeated, her voice sounding shocked.
He nodded, relieved that he finally had something concrete to offer. “I’m six feet, four inches tall. And the women in my past have been tall.”
She tilted her head again. His eyes were again drawn to her neck. Damn her, was she doing that on purpose? It was driving him nuts
“So, you prefer tall women.”
Neck. Height? What the hell was she talking about? Tim glanced down at her notebook and saw a couple of words. Thankfully, her notes brought him back to the present and he was able to answer. “Not necessarily,” he countered
“I’m sorry?”
He shrugged. “You asked me about the women in my past. I told you that they were tall. But that’s not necessarily my preference.”
Her lips did that puckering thing and he realized that it was a thoughtful expression. She was trying to make sense of something.
