This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (7 page)

Mirella rested her cheek against his naked back and asked, “Where were you in your thoughts? You seemed light years away.”

“I wasn’t that far, but I was a good distance away, in what seems like another life, because you weren’t with me, because I didn’t even know you then.”

He turned in her arms and kissed her, ran his fingers through her hair, smiled at her, and then kissed her with infinite tenderness and caring again. He licked the back of her ear with his tongue.

“You smell like a flower garden just after the rain,” he said, “and you taste of almonds, and I love you, Mrs. Corey, as I have never loved any other woman.”

“How I like hearing that, Adam. You have no idea how much. When I woke up and I saw you standing here naked and alone, you had the most wonderful look of serenity about you. You looked so beautiful, I don’t mean handsome — beautiful. I called you, but you were lost in another world, the past, I thought. I left you in your past, not wanting to interrupt it, because I would have been a stranger there, and the last thing I want is to be a stranger in any part of your life.”

He put his arm around her waist and together they walked through the bedroom, turning on lamps as they went.

“I wasn’t lost in another world. I was thinking of all the other women in my life before you, and how I had loved them the best that I could, and love some of them now the best that I can. But I have never loved any of them as completely as I do you. It’s important that you know and understand that, Mirella, my darling, my dearest.”

5

M
ost of the nine hundred-odd guests were milling around the public rooms of Oceanside when Mirella and Adam arrived for the ball. Turhan, Adam’s manservant and bodyguard, followed closely behind, and Moses was in evidence as well. Although she had once considered the idea of a bodyguard — or minder, as she preferred to call such a servant — to be a paranoia of the rich, she had changed her mind, learning not only to accept but to enjoy the monumental convenience of having a constant attendant.

Only three months before she had been determined not to let a legacy from a notorious great-grandmother she had never known change her life. She burst out laughing now. She could afford to laugh at herself: the legacy had made her not only one of the wealthiest women in the world, but a woman with considerable power in Turkey, the origin of her legacy and her maternal ancestors. Her corporate holdings in industry, communications, agriculture, strategic land and water were vast. Combined with her equally large liquid monetary reserves, her enormous wealth ensured that her power spread east across Asia Minor and into several of the Gulf States. It had also brought her love, real love, and an exceptional husband.

They were standing on the grand staircase that curved gracefully down from the mezzanine to the ground floor. Josh, who was at their side, began to introduce Adam and Mirella to a group of his friends.

“How about sharing your laughter with us?” Adam asked, putting an arm around her waist.

“I was just laughing at myself,” she answered, a blithe spirit in her voice. “It’s hard to believe that here stands a woman — correction, not just
a
woman, but one of the happiest of women — who only a few months ago stubbornly clung to her lifestyle and discounted change or intrusion of any form into her life. Look at me now!” And with that she did a childish little two-step, spun around and posed with her arms open. “I’m a star.”

Adam, Josh, and the circle of friends around them on the stairs were touched by her enchantment. They laughed with her. Deena watched her from the bottom of the staircase and thought she had never seen Mirella look so happy, so full of life, so sexy and enticing.

In direct contrast to the white of the gown she had worn for the wedding ceremony and breakfast, she wore now a strapless black satin gown with a long slit from the hem up to the middle of one thigh that opened when she walked, allowing a seductive glimpse of thigh. The Galanos creation hung just loose enough to ripple ever so slightly over her body, highlighting every sensuous curve — a yet more provocative look than a clinging gown could ever achieve. She wore no stockings over her long shapely legs, while on her feet were a pair of very high-heeled sandals of crisscrossed narrow strips of black satin. It appeared to be just a slip of a dress, but it was hardly that. It was one of those deadly expensive works of art where every cut was a masterful one, and every stitch in it invisible. A whisper of a dress that shouted out, “This is elegance and sensuous beauty. This is female.” And, of course, the message cut and sewn into the dress exactly matched Mirella’s feelings.

She wore her shoulder-length, silky black hair loose and casual, brushed back off her face. Her large seductive violet eyes sparkled like the narrow ribbon of diamonds high up around her neck that was clipped to one side in a small bow of diamond baguettes, cut and faceted in a manner that made each of the fifty two-carat stones in the platinum bow setting a gem, and the necklace a unique treasure.

When Adam gave it to her while they were dressing for the ball, he had said, “This is my wedding gift to you, with all my love, and in memory of the first time I touched you, on the evening we met. Remember how I came to your rescue when you were on the verge of fainting from shock? Learning you were about to become the world’s newest millionairess was more than you could take. I loosened the little red and white polka-dot silk bow tied on the side of your throat, remember? I slipped it slowly from around your neck. And how fetchingly you wore the little scarf. It enchanted me then, it enchants me now.
You
enchanted me then, and I am still under your spell.”

The night before her wedding, when Adam was banned
from seeing her until the ceremony the next morning, she and Rashid, who had dined with her immediate family, were walking alone together through Wingfield Park when he had presented her with a wedding gift: the pair of twenty-carat square-cut diamonds that now twinkled on her ears. The wedding gifts from her husband and her lover set off her Galanos gown more than admirably.

Looking down to the floor below, Mirella smiled and waved to Deena, then turned and said to Adam and all those standing with them, “What an amazing ball! For years I have sidestepped grand occasions such as this for all sorts of inverted snobbish reasons — until I met Rashid, who swept me into the fast lane of glamorous international society, and taught me what fun an occasional bash like this can be.”

“If that’s the case, then surely I have the right to claim the first dance,” said Rashid, who had made his way to Mirella and Adam through the throngs of beautiful people dressed in evening jackets and the dazzlingly pretty and extravagant collection of ballgowns and jewels.

Adam smiled, and the mischievous glint in his eye did not go unnoticed by Mirella as he said, “We Coreys always pay our debts, don’t we, darling?”

Before Mirella could answer, Rashid took her by the hand and moved quickly down the stairs, trailing her behind him. Mirella missed what happened next because she was still looking back at Adam, who had already been distracted by someone Mirella didn’t know. But she did see Josh dash down the stairs behind them, felt him quite roughly grab her hand from Rashid’s, and declare, rudely, half aggressively, “Not so fast, Rashid. We Coreys do pay our debts, but we don’t overpay them. If my father is going to share his bride this evening, you will, old boy, have to get in line after me.”

And he almost ran down the remainder of the stairs with her in tow.

Mirella wanted to ask Josh why he was being so rude to Rashid and what made dancing with Rashid overpaying her debt to him? She held back, though, not wanting to make an issue of Josh’s strange behavior, and was encouraged not to by remembering the glint in Adam’s eye, which she did not quite understand.

She looked up over her shoulder at Rashid, who was still standing on the stairs, and shrugged an “I’m sorry.” He stood
out from the other guests moving up and down the staircase. He was handsome, debonair, and unruffled by the little scene, and Mirella’s relief was edged with concern when she saw Rashid’s expression slip for a second into coldness as he snapped his fingers and signaled to his man Daoud.

Mirella was quite used to being watched over by Rashid’s bodyguards, but she was taken aback to see that it was still going on. Had it not, then, ceased when she had run away from Rashid to Adam, and he accepted her choice. And was not Adam the one responsible for her safety now?

But all thoughts about that quickly faded when, at the entrance to the ballroom, they were handed beautiful black silk eye masks encrusted with faceted jet beads and edged with rhinestones. The stunning Venetian masks were mounted on long slender rods wrapped in black satin and culminating at the base in streamers tipped with more rhinestones.

Both Mirella and Josh were overwhelmed by what they saw. From the thirty-five-foot dome of the circular ballroom hung dozens of crystal candelabras on ropes of white garden roses, their white candles filling the room with sensuous light; the wooden walls were encrusted with sconces holding hundreds of white candles all aglow as well. Couples dancing to the music of Artie Shaw, their twinkling masks twisting and turning around the room, lent an air of mystery and seduction, wantonness even, to the scene.

Mirella and her stepson held their masks up to their faces and danced onto the ballroom floor where instantly they became one with the swirling maskers. But not for long. There were barely half a dozen couples left dancing when Mirella realized that the others had gyrated gently one by one to the sidelines, relinquishing the floor to them.

Mirella began to lower her mask and Josh stopped her.

“No. Please! With your mask in place I can pretend you’re all mine for a few minutes more. Without it, you’re my stepmother, my father’s wife.”

Mirella tightened a fraction at her stepson’s boldness. She responded by lowering her mask again. Rashid and Deena, masks in place, danced past them, and Rashid adeptly whisked first Josh’s mask and then Mirella’s from their hands, and danced to the edge of the floor where they joined all the other guests, who unmasked and gave the waltzing couple an ovation.

“This is all wrong somehow,” said Mirella, blushing furiously. “I should have had this dance with your father, and would have, had I known this was going to happen.”

Mirella could feel the blood rising in Josh, but he cut his anger short with, “That fucking Rashid. He’s a cunning bastard.” And they danced on to the applause until the music stopped. When it began again with another song, Josh’s young arms claimed her and they danced toward Adam, who was standing on the fringe of the crowd as it formed into couples who were now eagerly filling the dance floor.

“Sorry about that, Papa. It was thoughtless of me. I guess you should have opened the ball with Mirella, not me.”

“Don’t think twice about it, Josh. It doesn’t matter who opened the ball. But if you feel you have to make an apology, maybe it should go to Rashid. He is, after all, the one you snatched Mirella from.” And putting an arm around Mirella, Adam kissed her lightly on the lips.

“That won’t be necessary, Josh,” said Rashid, who had walked up to them at that moment and handed Mirella and Josh their masks. He gave Adam’s son an affectionate pat on the back, and there passed between Rashid and Adam a very private look of total understanding. “Boys sometimes do strange and foolish things when they run up against overwhelming odds and beauty. And besides, it still leaves the Tango Room and its Latin American band, and the Beach Pavilion disco with the Bee Gees for your stepmother and I to conquer.”

Adam raised his arm from around Mirella’s waist and with his hand discreetly caressed the side of the voluptuous swell of her breast. Then he stroked her cheek and kissed her again lightly on her lips, wanting secretly to reassure her that he understood he had to share her, even on this his wedding night, that he, as well as she, could handle it. And handle it they would — admirably. He knew that “secretly” was the operative word, for the three of them would never confront their relationship out in the open. Not unless it was over for them.

Adam knew, too, that when Rashid said “Boys sometimes do strange and foolish things when they run up against overwhelming odds and beauty,” he was indicating not only to Josh but to Adam and Mirella that anyone but Adam who
ever tried to snatch Mirella from him would be exposed and eliminated as neatly as Josh had been.

“Perfect! Great timing for me, Rashid. While you are conquering the dance floor with the bride, I will, yet again, stake my claim on the groom,” said a huskily teasing voice belonging to someone behind Mirella.

Mirella turned around to see who it was, but the way her heart leapt at the mocking words, she knew it could only be Marlo Channing. The two women’s eyes met. Before anyone could say a word, Marlo took over.

“The bride, Adam’s wife, and flanked by her husband and her —” Marlo broke off deliberately, tilted her head to one side, and raised an eyebrow a fraction of an inch, giving the three of them an arch look. Then her expression suddenly changed. Two mischievous eyes, and a personality exuding vitality and a vivid beauty replaced the look of hard, clean, sharp-edged bitchiness. She smiled at Mirella.

“Oh, hell and damnation, the clan failed to tell me you were such a beauty. I’m Marlo. Welcome to the family.” She stepped close up to Mirella and, putting her hands on Mirella’s bare shoulders, kissed her on the lips.

The kiss was calculated to rattle Mirella. Only once before had a woman kissed her on the lips. That was during one of Rashid’s amazing erotic nights in Istanbul. She had found it very strange, disturbing, yet not unexciting. But that had been a sexual interlude and in private. This was in public, from a stranger, most certainly a rival of sorts, and quite possibly an enemy. Mirella’s instinct was to wipe the kiss from her lips; it was distasteful to her. Lili, her own mother, had never kissed her like that. Nor had Deena, her closest friend. Nor had her beloved grandmother, Lili’s mother, who loved and adored Mirella.

But Mirella controlled herself, knowing very well that to reveal her repugnance would not only be to hand the scene to Marlo but to leave herself upstaged. It would be, too, a subtle declaration of war with one of the clan — a dangerous indulgence for Mirella.

She tried to gather her poise again, by rationalizing the kiss and why she should not broadcast the revulsion she felt at being kissed intimately in public by a woman, the way a male lover would embrace her. They were, after all, two women, sisters under the skin. A quick summoning of feminist logic
told her that she should accept it. According the kiss no response, she avoided the tawdry little scene that might have been.

Marlo’s determination to control her first meeting with Mirella was awesome, however, and Mirella watched her with fascination. She was clever, sharp, and bright, in every way a woman who rode her own temperament like a white stallion into battle, and deployed all her various tactics with great style and always as her own audacious self.

“Adam a groom! You do surprise me, darling,” she said. Slowly, seductively slipping her arms around Adam’s neck, she kissed him on the lips as she had kissed Mirella.

Unlike Mirella, Adam accepted Marlo’s kiss and enjoyed it, and the feel of her long-legged, slim body pressed against him. Now his joy was complete: all the clan were there sharing this day with him and Mirella. He placed his hands around her waist and skillfully lifted the smiling Marlo six inches off the floor and returned her kiss. Then setting her back down on her feet he stepped back and took a long view of her.