He believed Sayed had been duped in a con as old as time, by a virgin.
* * *
Liyah took longer in the shower than she usually did, blushing as she washed the traces of blood from between her thighs. Even though there was no one else to see it.
She could not believe how abandoned she’d been with Sayed the night before. She’d brazenly initiated intimacy, even going so far as to touch him to wakefulness that last time.
She didn’t regret it. She couldn’t. It had been the most amazing experience of her life.
Even so, she was astonished at how she’d responded to Sayed. Yes, the whiskey she’d drunk had helped lower her inhibitions, but most of it was Sayed the man.
Not the emir.
She sighed. Her first waking moments had brought home very clearly that she no longer shared her bed with Sayed the man, but Sheikh Sayed bin Falah al Zeena, emir of his country.
Realizing she couldn’t hide in the shower forever, she got out and dried off.
Bracing herself for another encounter with the emir, she wrapped her hair in a towel and donned the robe again. Liyah pulled the door open and came face-to-face with two men, not one.
Sayed’s face wore a wary expression she didn’t understand.
The other man was Yusuf, the same personal bodyguard that had been on the elevator with Sayed. And he was scowling. At her.
“I’m sorry I took so long.” Embarrassment crawled up her insides. She hadn’t meant to keep the emir from his shower. “You did insist I bathe first.”
“Aaliyah, do you need Yusuf to get supplies for you?” Sayed asked.
“Supplies?” Had she skipped a page in the book?
“For your monthly.”
Make that a whole chapter. Why would he offer such a thing? “No.”
“Do not be embarrassed, Miss Amari,” Yusuf assured her. “It is no trouble to procure what you need.”
“I’m not even due for two more weeks,” she blurted out, extremely uncomfortable.
She didn’t know if Sayed’s other lovers were just really open, or what, but Liyah found it very disconcerting talking about such a personal matter with him, much less in front of a virtual stranger. And she really didn’t understand why it was coming up now.
Sayed made a sound that had her turning her attention to him. “You were a virgin,” he accused, like it was a major crime.
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?”
“A mistake. On both our parts,” she emphasized, speaking to Sayed, though it was his bodyguard casting the slurs.
“A very convenient mistake,” Yusuf opined.
She glared at him, but whatever she’d been going to say was preempted by Sayed.
“That is enough, Yusuf. You will apologize to Miss Amari for making that kind of accusation, as will I for allowing it. As she said, the mistake was mutual, though more my own than hers, considering Liyah’s undeniable lack of experience.”
Both men apologized with a surprising sincerity that allayed Liyah’s anger, but did nothing to help her acute embarrassment.
“I accept your apologies. Now, can I sign that nondisclosure agreement? Only, I’d like to leave.” She wanted out of this hotel suite and away from the emir and his bodyguard in the worst way.
Even if it meant saying her final goodbye to Sayed.
“Unfortunately, it is no longer that simple.” Regret laced Sayed’s every word.
“Why not?”
“You might be pregnant,” he said, as if spelling it out for a small child, and not sounding at all pleased by the prospect.
She frowned. “I’m not stupid, but isn’t that very unlikely?”
“Considering where you are at in your cycle, no.”
“But...” She really didn’t know what to say to that. She wanted to deny his assertion, but she couldn’t.
Women had sex all the time without getting pregnant. Couldn’t she be one of them?
The