“She’s not a princess,” Sayed remarked as he went in search of the pain reliever. “Her father is a very influential sheikh, but he is not a king. And now she is merely a Mrs. Palace Aid.”

Which would not afford her any of the prestige or benefits life as his wife would have done.

“You’re a little bitter there.”

Coming back out of the bathroom with two pills and a glass of water, he shrugged. “She chose her life, now she will live it.”

And he did not think the pampered daughter of a powerful sheikh would enjoy her newly humbled circumstances as much as Tahira clearly believed she would.

“Love makes up for a lot of deprivation.”

“That is a sweet sentiment, but not very realistic.” He handed Aaliyah the pills and water.

She frowned up at him. “My mother and I went without many luxuries you probably take for granted as necessities, but I never doubted her love and that made up for everything.”

“She was no doubt an amazing woman,” he said with sincerity.

Ms. Amari had raised Aaliyah, after all.

“She was.” With a look of sadness, Aaliyah looked away as she swallowed the pills.

When she tried to hand him back the glass, he shook his head. “Drink it all. It will help.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Sip it.”

She sighed. “It wasn’t the alcohol, was it? You really are this bossy all of the time.”

“It comes with the job.” He smiled, the urge to laugh again not easy to stifle, but he did not think she would appreciate it.

She finished the glass of water and put it down.

“Good. Now, go take your shower.” If he timed it right, Yusuf would arrive while she was in the bathroom.

Sayed didn’t understand this need he had to protect her, but he had no doubts it would embarrass Aaliyah greatly to face Sayed’s security staff the morning after.

She seemed discombobulated enough by her one-night lover’s presence.

She took a tighter grip on the sheet, her expression mutinous. “I’ll wait.”

“I am not accustomed to having my instructions disregarded,” he told her, lacing his tone heavily with censure.

“Poor you.” She appeared anything but sympathetic. “I’m sure you will survive it.”

“You were not this stubbornly shy last night.”

She glared up at him. “I was drunk.”

“You told me you were not.”

“I wanted you to make love to me.”

“So, you knew enough to make the choice,” he said with some relief.

“Of course. I’m not a child.”

He tugged on the sheet. “Are you sure?”

Affront was written all over her lovely face.

He shrugged, lifting one brow. “Only, your refusal to get out of the bed seems a bit childish to me. After last night.”

Color stained her cheeks, but determination firmed her chin. “Fine. Get me one of the hotel robes from closet.”

“I assure you, I saw everything last night.” He did not know why he was teasing her, but couldn’t seem to help himself.

“It’s not the same.”

“No. You are right. We do not have the luxury of time to do anything about our nudity and the inevitable reaction to it this morning.” He indicated his semierect sex with a small wave of his hand.

“Sayed!”

“What? You will not pretend you did not enjoy our lovemaking.”

“Stop talking about it!”

“But why?” he asked in genuine confusion. “I do not mind telling you, it was amazing.”

Yanking the sheet with her, she jumped up from the bed and wrapped herself in it before he got much more than a glimpse of honey skin and a couple of well-placed love bites he had very fond memories of giving her.

His breath expelled in a telling but unstoppable whoosh. “You are quite beautiful.”

The rose of her cheeks turned crimson and she scooted around him to storm across the room to the closet. Aaliyah pulled one of the aforementioned robes off its hanger and then stalked into the bathroom, attitude in every line of her body.

He watched her lovely form until it disappeared behind the firmly closed and―yes, he’d heard the snick―locked door.

His pang at the knowledge no woman in his life would react like she did was as inexplicable as it was undeniable.

A knock sounded on the door to the suite. Sayed donned the other robe from the closet, surprised when he realized that not only was it a man’s robe with the dark blue hotel crest on the left breast, but it was his size.

Had the hotel anticipated him visiting his fiancée in the suite? The brand-new box of condoms in the bedside table would indicate a resounding yes.

Sayed let Yusuf in. “Leave my clothes in the other room and the agreement on the desk over there. She’s agreed to sign it.”

Subtle tension released from Yusuf’s shoulders. “That is good.”

“She did not balk at all.”

“It would appear Miss Amari is a woman of principle.”

“As I told you.”

Yusuf disappeared into the other room as Sayed found himself gathering Aaliyah’s clothing.

Considering her blushing reticence this morning, he did not think she would like to see their clothes strewn around the sitting room. They’d so clearly been yanked off their bodies in passion and with little finesse.

Yusuf cursed in the other room, a word usually reserved for serious screwups, which Sayed never indulged in.

The other man came storming back into the room. “Tell me the condoms are in the bathroom trash.”

“What?” Sayed was used to the intrusiveness of constant security, but this was pushing the bounds of propriety. Yes, the condoms were in the bathroom trash bin.

That was something that Yusuf should take for granted. Sayed was not an idiot. “You forget yourself, Yusuf.”

“No, Emir. That would be you.”

“What are you talking about?” But even as he asked, Sayed’s memory of the night before began to nag at him.

The final time they’d made love had been like waking from a dream. In fact, he was pretty sure that’s how it had started. Bodies moving together in the dark before waking to an unhurried joining and slipping back into slumber.

Sayed’s insides tightened with realization.

It hadn’t been a dream and they hadn’t used a condom.

“Since I doubt very sincerely you have suddenly developed an interest in rough sex, the blood on the sheets can only mean one thing. Miss Amari was a virgin.”

What was Yusuf going on about? “What blood?” Sayed’s annoyance with himself made his tone harsher than it needed to be.

“The smears in a single strategic spot on the bottom sheet of the bed,” Yusuf said, each word an emphasized bullet.

Ignoring for a moment the other reality for this new one, Sayed rushed into the bedroom, his gaze falling on the telltale streaks almost instantly.

How had he missed them this morning? Oh, yes, because he’d been so busy watching Aaliyah. Nothing else in the room had registered.

“She must have started.” That would explain her over-the-top shyness about exposing her body to him this morning.

One of the things Sayed had enjoyed the most about the night before had been Aaliyah’s lack of inhibition.

“Her period?” Yusuf asked giving the bloodstain a jaundiced look.

“What else?”

“What else indeed?”

“Anyway, we used condoms thoughtfully provided by the hotel.” Except that one time, which he had no choice but to disclose.

“How could you be that careless?” Yusuf demanded, not unfairly.

Sayed could barely believe his own lack of control. “I woke from a dream that wasn’t a dream.”

“She was touching you?” Yusuf asked, his expression unreadable.

Another man might be able to refuse to answer such intimate questions, but Sayed had responsibilities that required a level of truthfulness with Yusuf he would never have offered even the close friend he was.

“Yes.”

Yusuf did not comment. He did not need to. It was all written on the bodyguard’s face.

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 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...”

“Alcohol is apparently very effective at lowering my inhibitions.”

“And in college?” Yusuf asked, still harping right along with his emir on the whole who-had-she-talked-about-sex-to thing.

“What part of ‘taboo subject’ are you not getting?” she demanded with asperity.

He shook his head, his expression pitying.

Which she would not accept. She’d never allowed anyone to pity her and Liyah wasn’t about to start now. “I have hardly been deprived.”

She’d had things a lot more important than sex, or a romantic relationship, to think about. Namely, making Hena proud and proving Liyah’s value as a student and later employee.

“Condoms are not infallible as birth control.” Yusuf’s frown was for both her and Sayed.

Sayed winced in acknowledgment and faced Liyah, his expression too serious. “The fact is, the nondisclosure agreement is the least of our worries right now, habibti.”

“Don’t call me that.” It brought the night before into today where it had no place.

Yusuf sighed and looked very tired all of a sudden. “Miss Amari, you have to face reality. You may well be pregnant with the next heir of Zeena Sahra.”

“No,” she cried before panic had her spinning back into the bathroom and locking the door behind her.

Nausea twisted her stomach, chills rushing up and down Liyah’s arms and legs. She could not be pregnant.

She was not her mother. Liyah had worked so hard to build a life her mother would be proud of. Hena Amari would be devastated by this turn of events.

The knowledge her mother was no longer around to witness Liyah’s fall from grace was no comfort.

The fact she had no one to turn to for advice, for support, even for a good lecture, sliced open the wound of her mother’s death that had barely begun to heal.

This could not be happening. Liyah would not allow it to happen.

She charged back into the room. Yusuf and Sayed stopped talking and faced her, wearing twin expressions of surprise.

“I am not pregnant. Do you hear me? I will not be pregnant.”

Sayed’s dark eyes widened, his features moving into lines of unwelcome sympathy. “It is not something you can will away, Aaliyah, nor do I believe you truly wish to.”

“I was not setting some sort of mantrap,” she all but shouted.

“I believe you. That is not what I referred to.”

“What, then?” she demanded belligerently

“Would you will our child out of existence if you could?”

She staggered back a step, her earlier nausea returning. How could she answer that?

Of course she would never will a child out of existence. She’d spent a lifetime believing her father didn’t want her, no matter what Hena had tried to convince Liyah. She could never visit that lack of acceptance on her own child.

Not even in the womb.

But there was another truth she could not ignore. “I do not want to be pregnant.”

And she didn’t care if those two attitudes seemed to be at odds. In her mind, one had nothing to do with the other.

If she were pregnant, she would make the best of it, but Liyah categorically did not want to be pregnant.

“Why did she have to die?” she asked of no one in particular, knowing only that she wanted to talk to Hena one last time with a pain that was tearing at her.

Sayed laid his hand on her arm. “I know you miss her, but your mother didn’t leave you on purpose, ya ghazal.”

Liyah jumped, not having realized he’d moved so close. She looked up at Sayed, unsure why his words, his very presence, was so comforting. It shouldn’t be. “Everything has been so hard since she left. Everything.”

“It will be okay.”

Confusion, grief and pain a maelstrom of emotion inside her, Liyah shook her head. “No. It can’t be. The Amaris will know they were right to reject me. They’ll want to take my baby away, too. She’ll grow up without her father like I did.”

Liyah’s thoughts spun with dizzying speed, no chance for her to take hold of one.

“But don’t you ever accuse her of blackmailing you,” Liyah demanded fiercely. “Don’t you dare pretend you don’t remember me. You don’t have to acknowledge her, but you won’t treat her like that, like she’s garbage under your shoe. Do you understand?”

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The Chatsfield Collection Books 1-8

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