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Liyah stumbled back from his inexplicable but palpable anger. She ran into the jamb, her gaze skittering back to Yusuf only to find his scowl had grown darker.
“Why does it matter?” She could understand if he’d been disappointed in the sex, but his reactions last night made that unlikely. “I didn’t lie about anything.”
“You implied you were sexually active.”
“When?” And again, why would it matter?
“When I told you about my fast. You said you hadn’t been on one.”
“You can’t fast from something you’ve never had,” she said with some exasperation.
Things started making sense, though. They were men from Zeena Sahra, the country that had spawned the attitude of Liyah’s Amari relatives and her mother’s own self-castigation.
Well, they could just get over themselves. Liyah wasn’t her mother and her virginity, or current lack thereof, was her business, no one else’s.
She drew herself up, pulling cool dignity into every pore. She would not be bullied. “My choice to give my virginity was and is my business.”
“Are you saying you had plans to lose your virginity?” Sayed demanded.
“Of course not.” What was the matter with him this morning? She was the one with the hangover. “You’re the one who came to the suite while I was drinking,” she reminded him. “I didn’t have some great assignation planned.”
“I came for some time on my own.”
“And you found me.” She challenged him with a look. “You didn’t seem to mind that last night.”
“That is not the issue here,” he said frigidly.
“No? Well, my virginity is off the table of discussion.”
“Miss Amari?” Yusuf asked, sounding slightly thawed.
Maybe he realized policing her morals wasn’t his job.
She wasn’t feeling the defrost, however. “Yes?” she asked, her tone the one she reserved for her peers who had thought their parents’ money made them better than her.
“Are you on birth control?”
“No.” Why would she be? She’d been a virgin.
Yusuf’s scowl was back. “And yet you initiated sex without a condom.”
Liyah wasn’t sure if even last night’s pleasure had been worth this kind of embarrassment. “We used condoms.”
“Not the last time,” Sayed said.
She stared at him. “What? No, that’s not right. You always put a condom on before…”
Her discomfort at this type of discussion was only growing the longer it lasted.
“You woke me, it felt like a dream.” He said it like he blamed her for that.
“This conversation is extremely uncomfortable for me. I do not know how it is in your families, but my mother discouraged talking about this kind of thing.”
“By ‘this kind of thing’ do you mean sex, or the classic mantrap?” Yusuf asked with derision.
Liyah stared first at the bodyguard and then at Sayed. “Mantrap?” she asked, fury overcoming her embarrassment.
“What would you call it?”
