Sheikh's Scandal(25)

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 idea that she could be following in her mother’s footsteps after a single night’s indiscretion both terrified and dismayed her.

“Could we stop talking about this now?”

“You’re acting very repressed,” Sayed said, censure in his tone.

Ding. Ding. Ding. Give that man a prize. “Because I don’t want to talk about this!”

“Last night’s transgressions cannot be ignored.”

Any fleeting sense of romance still lingering in her wary emotions from the night before dissipated then. “I don’t talk about sex.”

“Never?” Sayed’s disbelief was palpable.

“No.”

“But you are twenty-six and your mother died only recently.”

“So?” Where did he think she got her discomfort with the subject from?

“What about friends?” he pressed, like it mattered for some reason she could not fathom.

“I was a scholarship student surrounded by peers who drove Beemers and wore designer jewelry with their school uniforms. I had very few friends, none I would have talked about regarding such a taboo subject.”

Sayed was now looking at her strangely. “Sex is taboo?”

“Yes, which is why I wish we could stop talking about it right now.”