This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (6 page)

Adam thought about the lure of love. The fact that there was no defense against it. He had always loved women, truly loved them, and consequently knew a great deal about them.
He enjoyed having women in love with him and therefore knew a great deal about that too. There had been women, so many women in his life, and he had loved them all and loved them well … but none as well as Mirella.

The muffled, mournful sound of a foghorn somewhere out on the ocean drew him back to the present. He stared out into the nothingness, that lonely space of no yesterdays and no tomorrows, and wondered about those women, some of whom were still part of his life. The mistresses of his bed and the mothers of his children, and
the
woman, his wife, who brought with her the half of himself he had lost long, long ago. He thought, too, about the incidental women of his life — the prostitutes he had enjoyed paying for, the casual insignificant women he had had sexual affairs with, the exotic mysterious women, and the dangerous women.

Ah, the dangerous women. Marlo sprang to mind. Where was Marlo, he wondered? It never occurred to him that she might not show up for his wedding. His thoughts flashed back ten years, to northern Nigeria and the Id al-Adha festival, after Ramadan, a high point in the Islamic year.

He first saw Marlo at the ancient city, the religious center of Kano, riding a gray stallion whose saddle cloths of silk, velvet, and brocades were magnificently embroidered in gold and inset with diamonds, and whose bridle was of beaten silver. She was riding under a bright new moon at breakneck speed around the perimeter of the town, where stood the remnants of the once regal fabled high walls. She rode surrounded by huge, black-black Muslim men dressed in their famed scarlet robes and turbans. The turbans draped around their heads with majestic style and in the legendary manner of the desert nomads, draped also around their faces and under their chins, some even covered their heads entirely, except for their eyes. They were the emir’s personal bodyguards.

They whooped and they hollered and fired their rifles at the heavens. The air was acrid with gunpowder, because the multitudes of people who had gathered to see the procession and the slaughter of chosen sacrificial animals, and to hear the drumming and the blowing of horns, fired guns, too reloading them to fire repeatedly. Even the most suspect of muskets, no matter what its age or origin, was pressed into service.

Adam, who had just completed crossing the Sahara from north to south on an archaeological reconnaissance expedition,
was, as the emir’s guest of honor, seated behind the mounted musicians, on a fine steed.

He was flanked by the emir and the sultan, resplendent in their Sudan robes of colored cotton and silk, over which the emir wore a heavily embroidered green burnoose, and the sultan, a cape of pure gold. Ivory-and bejeweled-handled scimitars hung from their waists. The rulers were mounted on extremely fine Tawati-bred horses covered for the occasion with cloths of infinite beauty in silver and gold.

The conscious display of wealth and power recalled the splendors of the empire one hundred eighty years before, but it was also a reminder of the power of the Islamic faith in black Africa, of the Fulani nomads, possibly not the most strict of Muslims, part pagan even, whose world is that of the
jihad
, the holy war.

Adam was getting the message loud and clear: the jihad was alive and well and waiting to sweep through Africa when the time was right. The magenta turban fell from Marlo’s head and uncovered her face just as she rode past them. The sultan burst into loud laughter, stood in his saddle and shouted out orders to a dozen of his bodyguards to bring the white woman rider to him, she must be made to ride behind him, not in front of him. Then, smiling at the emir, the sultan had thanked him for the gift, which had made the emir look very unhappy, and Adam concerned for the courageous, foolish adventuress, whose beauty and style had instantly touched his heart. Then the sultan had ordered the start of his procession.

Adam hadn’t thought about that first meeting for years. It surprised him that time had not diminished the sensuous impression made by his first meeting with Marlo. How lovely she had been — a wild beauty, a mysterious woman with a reckless past as the mistress of a famous painter, and the main character in a love triangle that caused the death of a poet laureate when she left him for a beautiful woman. A war photographer with every news agency in the world after her work, Marlo had enough friends in high places to ensure her safety wherever she went.

In all their years together she had been a bewitching, sensual creature whom men and women alike fell hopelessly in love with. Theirs had been a volatile relationship because Marlo insisted she wanted a domestic life with Adam, which was not at all true. They both understood her restless energy,
but in her perversity she both loved and hated Adam for his understanding.

In the end Adam had given her the most wonderful domestic life, one that suited her perfectly. A home of her own shared with his other mistresses and his children, which he visited whenever he chose. It suited the lesbian side of her nature as well as her infinitesimal maternal yearnings. When she wanted a child, Adam’s child, she was thrilled for a month and then resented every further minute of her pregnancy; she despised the pain, messiness, and loss of dignity she experienced giving birth. Yet, when Alice was born, delivered, at her insistance, by Adam and a midwife in the yali, on the Bosporus, she loved her.

Marlo loved her child and all Adam’s other children, all the women in his life, and the yali where they all lived, because they shared the burden of being a mother, domesticity, and Adam their lover and man of the house. Her capricious behavior was never tamed: everyone loved her too much to try. Her many affairs were accepted and enjoyed by them all. Only war, that fast-moving and unpredictable adventure of pain and destruction, thoroughly excited her. She used Adam, Alice, and domesticity as others would use aspirin, for the relief of the pain as a soldier would use R and R — rest and recreation. And then her questing nature would drive her on to the next experience, and the next.

She was one of the mainstays in the Corey clan. Adam had no doubts that she would love Mirella just as much as the rest of the clan did, but thought it very mischievous of her not to be at Oceanside for the wedding festivities. And Marlo could be very mischievous.

Standing naked and alone in the swirls of fog now drifting past him into the bedroom, he enjoyed his cigar and had to admit to himself that, love women as he might have, might still, he had never loved them as he did Mirella. He had never delivered himself up to any of them demand-free and asking for nothing more than their company, as he now did with her, and indeed as she did with him.

He could see now that both he and the women of his past had always asked questions of love. There had always been some degree of measuring, testing, probing, and saving it. And those were always the reasons it was cut short. No
matter how subtle, there had always been the demand of love from one’s partner.

Lost in memories, Adam had allowed his cigar to die. He snapped open the old faithful Zippo and relit it. He thought about that — the demands that kill love — and Beverley came to mind.

Beverley: mother of his first two children. How young, how naïve he had been when he was trapped into marriage by her. Twenty-two years old and determined to do the right thing by her, he had married her and endured the most unpleasant years of his life. That marriage was the first and last time he made a concession where his life and happiness were concerned. There had been nothing subtle about Beverley Winter’s demands of love before he married her, and even less after she had become Beverley Corey. Yet he did love her, only not the way she wanted him to.

Until his marriage to her, Adam had never known deceit, had never understood envy and hatred, which were what she had had for him. Beverley was bourgeoise, adored mediocrity, and, though attracted to Adam sexually, resented everything else about him: his social position, his family, his intellectual and business acumen, his wealth, and most of all his large and loving heart. She had been unable to come to terms with Adam and his twin sister, Jane, who had been molded by a happy privileged childhood and loving parents, and finely honed by their father, who became both parents to them after their mother’s hideous death in a fire when the twins were sixteen.

Poor Beverley, Adam thought. It was beyond her to understand what he had always known — that if both partners in a relationship are to remain happy, sentimentality must never enter, and the partners must never make a claim on the life and freedom of each other. That was not something Adam learned from experience; it was something he had understood instinctively from childhood, as did his twin sister, Jane. The Corey twins often had been cited as hard and ruthless in their personal relationships. Their lovers especially were always amazed at what romantics the pair were, given the philosophy of love they believed in. The Corey twins had been loved all their lives, but rarely understood.

Jane was the woman Adam loved next after his mother. He and Jane had loved each other always, since the cradle, and
would do so until the grave. His sister, his best friend, his confidante, especially in those years just after the death of their mother. He smiled to himself when he remembered how he used to rush home to the Peramabahçe Palace where they were living with their father, and tell Jane about the beautiful older woman he was in love with and who was teaching him the wonders of sexual pleasure and the erotic life. He and the Princess Eirene had found the right man to do the same for Jane and she shared her experiences with him as generously as he had with her.

His smile faded when he remembered Jane, Zhara in her arms, Josh by the hand, as she burst into his office having saved the children from the blazing fire Beverley had set to their house. Never until he died would he ever forget her words.

“Adam, our hell is over.”

And it was. Beverley survived the fire, and he and the children never saw her again. She was committed to a private mental institution, where she was to this day living out her life in a twilight world between spurts of murderous violence. He no longer felt the pain of that episode in his life. It was long, long ago.

Jane, wonderful, eccentric Jane who fluctuated between being an earth mother and the grand patron of the arts, who was regrettably not with him on this day because she was where she had been for the last four months: up the Amazon, no one knew precisely where, collecting rare endangered orchids, which she propagated for posterity.

The first thing Mirella saw, when she opened her eyes and waded out from under the blanket of deep sleep into which she had slipped, was the small red glow of Adam’s cigar in the dark. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she was able to make out Adam’s naked silhouette framed by the balcony doorway. When he took a puff of his cigar, a rosy light lit up a portion of the side of his face and Mirella was quite taken aback by the serene beauty she saw in it.

She had always been wildly attracted to Adam’s handsome virile good looks. They held a fatal charm for most women, that combination of big rough-and-tumble, and the classical beauty of a Michelangelo sculpture. She even remembered telling Deena, “he’s madly attractive, part Michelangelo’s David and part John Wayne. His vigorous good looks remind
me of America and every handsome movie hero who crossed the great plains on the screen to the wild West.”

Suddenly, lamps down on the beach were turned on and they cast a milky white light, because of the fog, that allowed Mirella to see Adam clearly, naked and rampant framed against the light with an extraordinarily beautiful serenity in the long lines of his body, the way he held his head. She had never seen him so serene. Not for the first time, on this her wedding day, was she made aware of what a rare man she had married.

There were moments when she found the reality — not the idea — of being married to Adam daunting, and wondered if she was capable of being a wife to him, or any other man for that matter. Thirty-nine years of living on her own without a permanent live-in mate was a good basis for insecurity, she believed. But those moments were fleeting, made so by the power of Adam’s love for her. Mirella had learned during the hours of the lust they shared that afternoon that she had not been the only partner in their relationship to have totally submitted herself for the first time to aphrodisia and another human being. Adam had done the same.

She sat up in the bed and called his name, but he didn’t hear her. He appeared to be far, far away in his thoughts. Mirella called again just a little bit louder, and again there was no response. She stood up and was about to go to him, but she sensed it was not the moment, and stopped, ever cautious not to impinge on his space or interrupt what appeared to be a special private time for Adam.

Instead she walked across the room and went into the bathroom and very quietly closed the door. She ran the water into the rub and sprinkled half a bottle of Barynia into it and the scent of a wild and wonderful flower garden burst into the room. Then she climbed into the deep old-fashioned bath.

Mirella was surprised when, after her bath, wrapped in a full-length scarlet terrycloth robe, she opened the bathroom door and found the bedroom still in darkness, Adam standing exactly where she had left him. She could hear the faint sound of music drifting up from the Tango Room and knew that the first private hours of her married life with Adam were over. It was time for Mr. and Mrs. Corey to dress and receive their guests at the ball.

She walked through the path of light spilling out from the
bathroom and across the hooked rug of the bedroom floor and halted behind Adam. The scent of her perfume penetrated his thoughts and brought him back to the present, just as she slid her arms around his waist and up to his chest and caressed him.

“Remember me? I’m Mrs. Corey,” she said, planting a kiss in the middle of his back, then another up on his shoulder blade. He covered her hands with his and pulled her tighter up against him.