“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.”
“But last night…”