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Aaliyah blinked at him owlishly. “You’re probably wondering why I am.”
“It would appear you needed a drink and a private place to have it.”
Her expression went slack. “How did you know?”
He shrugged.
“Have you been speaking to my father?” She leaned forward, her expression turning nothing short of surly.
The woman had to be inebriated already if she thought the emir of Zeena Sahra had taken it upon himself to converse with her parent. “If I have seen Mr. Amari, I am unaware of that fact.”
Her lush lips parted, but the only sound that came out was a cross between a sigh and a hiccup.
He almost laughed. “You are drunk.”
“I don’t think so.” Her lovely arched brows drew together in an adorable expression of thought. “I’ve only had three glasses. Is that enough to get drunk?”
“You’ve had three glasses?” he asked, shocked anew.
“Not full. I know how to pour a drink, even if I don’t usually imbibe. I only poured to here.” She indicated a level that would be the equivalent to a double.
“You’ve had six shots of whiskey.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “Is that bad?”
“It depends.”
“On?”
“Why you’re drinking.”
“I learned someone I thought would never lie to me had done it my whole life, that I believed things that were no more than a fairy tale.”
That sounded all too familiar. “I am sorry to hear that.”
It was her turn to shrug, but in doing so she nearly dropped her mostly empty glass. “She said my father wasn’t a bad man.”
“She?” he heard himself prompting.
“My mom.”
“You didn’t know your father?” His life had not been the easy endeavor so many assumed of a man born to royalty, but he’d had his father.
A good man, Falah al Zeena might be melech to his people, but for Sayed, the older man wasn’t just his king. He was and had always been Sayed’s loving father—papa to a small boy and his closest confidant now.
“Not until recently.” Aaliyah’s bow-shaped lips turned down. “I think Mom was wrong.”
“He is a bad man?” Sayed asked, the surreal conversation seeming to fit with the unbelievable day he’d already had.
Aaliyah sighed, the sound somehow endearing. “Not really, but he’s not very nice.”
“I think many might say the same about me.”
“Probably.”
He laughed. “You are supposed to disagree. Do you not realize that?”
“Oh, why? I think’s it’s the truth. You’re too arrogant and imperious to be considered nice.”
