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“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.
