This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2)
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Authors: Roberta Latow
Tags: #Mirella, #Rashid and Adam
This Stream of Dreams
Roberta Latow
Copyright © 1987 by Roberta Latow
For
old friends
Adele and George and Senoe
and loyal helpers
Colin and Anita
The joy and essence of my life is the memory of the hours when I found and sustained sensual delight as I desired it. The joy and essence of my life for me, who abhorred every enjoyment of routine loves
.
—
CAVAFY
S
tanding at the altar, his best man at his side, Adam Corey waited for Mirella Wingfield to walk down the aisle on the arm of her lover. Stark terror, an emotion Adam Corey had never before experienced, held him in thrall.
Tall and handsome, the forty-eight-year-old American multimillionaire was an adventurer, famous as an archaeologist and corporate executive. He had been a much sought-after bachelor, a man of the world who divided his exotic life between the West and his white marble palace on the shores of the Bosporus in Turkey. But more, he was a winner … habitually. And he was his own man, remaining at all times loyal to himself, come what might.
How, then, was it possible for this man, this outsider, this nonconformist, this individualist suddenly to take such fright? Adam was mystified by his terror.
Outside there was warmth after rain. Sun splashed through the bright leaves of maple trees lining the deserted dirt road that ended at the white clapboard church set on a patch of green velvet grass against a clear blue sky. The short but proud steeple of the church was home for a single bronze bell that had arrived with the first of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Inside every pew was taken. The pristine white interior was more like a meeting hall for the Puritan worthies who had arrived on the Mayflower than a place of Christian worship. Spartan with no cross, no pious statue or sacrificial candles or golden gifts, the church’s austerity contrasted greatly with the opulent clothes and jewels of the wedding guests.
The guests were a cross section of celebrities that included high society and power players in the world of corporate finance and politics. Dazzlingly beautiful, chic women and magnificently self-possessed men mingled with a smattering of the less celebrated, the occasional academic, a few exotic dark-skinned foreign guests. For the most part, they were family, close friends, and others who had played significant roles in the lives of the bride and groom before they met and fell deeply in love.
Deeply in love Adam most certainly was. And terrified. He did not fear that Mirella might change her mind at the last minute and choose Rashid Lala Mustapha, who was giving her away in marriage to him before God and the world. This was simply a gesture that had grown from the deep regard that still bound the three of them together, despite the rivalry in love of the two men for Mirella. Nor did his terror arise from his intuition that, although Mirella had chosen Adam to love, marry, and share her life, Rashid would remain her lover for as long as they lived. He was sure that for the time being Mirella was unaware of the possibility. He guessed that if she knew the prospect was there, it was buried deep in her subconscious, so that, of course, she had not yet come to terms with it. Adam was secure enough to accept that a
ménage à trois
was a distinct possibility and might suit the three of them admirably. It was implicit in their characters and the lives they had led in the past. Confidence such as Adam’s could never be shaken. He knew there was nothing in heaven or on earth that could change the deep love and ecstasy he shared with Mirella.
Was it then the act of getting married, the commitment to Mirella that suffused him with this profoundly unsettling emotion? Hardly. He wanted to marry her, commit himself to her from the moment they met. He had walked away from her once, only to return. He had left her a second time, but only to wait for her to realize and to accept that theirs was the real, the rare, the true love. She had been the one to return then.
Estrangement had brought Adam no moment of terror, no fear of loss. Not when she had inherited the Oujie legacy which overnight made her one of the wealthiest, most powerful women in the world, nor when she became notorious for her much publicized affair with Rashid. He had always known Mirella was committed to him, and only him, forever. Their passion for each other had been and still was a
fait accompli
. They both knew it then, and so did Rashid. The three of them knew it now.
Adam caught the angelic sound of a harp and a flute weaving their baroque harmonies through the building from the small gallery above the entrance. Because the musicians were hidden from view, the quivering chords of this exquisite
music drifted down over the guests, soft and warm, drenching them in the sounds of romance and love.
His gaze swept across the sea of faces in the front pews. The expressions on those faces revealed how deeply lost to the music, how exquisitely rapt by the romance of the occasion they were. The lone exception was an odd figure of a man, long in the torso and short in the leg, whose gray morning coat was impeccably tailored. He clenched a top hat and gloves in one hand. He was a handsome but pasty-faced man with thinning, steel-gray hair. His shiny forehead protruded like a slightly sinister child’s, and he kept wiping the corners of his mouth with a crooked finger.
The man was restless, his pale goatlike eyes darted nervously around the room. He fidgeted where he stood, looking over his shoulder on occasion, or out through the church windows, as if he were waiting for some disaster. No, not waiting,
willing
some intrusion upon this moment of bliss.
For a fleeting moment Adam sensed the negative chord vibrating from the man. It bothered him not in the least. “It won’t happen,” Adam thought. And at the moment he dismissed the man from his mind and his sight he knew what terrified him. It was not what any man on earth could do to him or his family. It was the naked power of a love that was real, generated by the one woman who could do so, that filled him with terror.
The doors into the church opened suddenly. In the sunlight spilling down the white-carpeted aisle appeared Deena Weaver, Mirella’s best friend and her maid of honor. Deena’s long, amber-colored, curly hair was loosely drawn and pinned by small yellow diamonds up and away from her face in tier upon tier to the top of her head, forming a soft crown of curls and jewels. From there it tumbled down her back like glistening splashes of honey.
She wore a gown narrowly cut, made of silk satin with long voluminous, transparent silk-organza puffed sleeves. It was finished tight to the wrists in a narrow band of the same dress silk, which Yves Saint Laurent had ordained should be dyed to match the color of her hair. It clung to her body enough to show her figure but not enough to be provocative. When she walked she shimmered in the sunlight like an angel and blended with the voluptuous yet heavenly music of the golden harp and the silver flute.
She smiled at Adam and the man standing next to him, then gave an ever-so-slight curtsey to the seemingly ancient and frail Wingfield family minister. He stood at the altar, a handsome representative of God, dressed in elegant black robes and flanked by a pair of tall white azalea trees. Pruned in a luscious cascade from the top of their five-inch-thick trunks like a great waterfall, they seemed to be weeping with joy at their own beauty. Deena took her place next to the best man, Brindley Ribblesdale, Mirella’s English solicitor.
And then Adam almost gasped. She was there. His bride. Mirella. Standing alone, the sun from the open church doors pouring an aura of light behind her, Mirella’s magnificence inspired the sighs of admiration that rippled through the congregation. Deena had been a honey-gold angel heralding the arrival of a goddess.
Saint Laurent had chosen to gown her in heavy white lace that followed every contour of her body. From below the hips it miraculously and subtly flared into a bias-cut skirt that touched the floor. Its boat-shaped neckline lay just below the collarbone in the front, and low to the waist in the back, and it was worn over a natural-colored body stocking. Mirella’s veil was not draped over her face but over her breasts and across her shoulders, and was tied high up on the back of her neck. A hundred yards of the finest silk chiffon, mistily transparent, trailed down to veil her naked back and cascade in folds onto the church floor where it spread out into a train nearly thirty feet long.
She carried no flowers. The long sleeves of her gown ended in lace points deep on the backs of her hands, and she merely placed the tips of her fingers together in front of her. Her head, under a semisoft, wide-brimmed, nearly transparent white horsehair hat with a cluster of fresh magnolias pinned to the side of the crown, was lowered in a shy, almost demure manner.
A pear-shaped diamond sparkled on her finger. It was an enormous gem even by Harry Winston’s standards. Adam had given it to her when for the first time they had taken each other, wholly and without reservation, on the banks of the Euphrates. At her throat gleamed the diamond bumblebee in the center of the
collier
of magnificently lustrous, hazelnut-sized oriental pearls that Rashid had given her. A pair of matching diamond chokers flanked the
collier
above and
below. These were extraordinary for the size and flawless brilliance of each matching round stone.
Slowly she raised her head, and a current of admiring sighs once again swept through the congregation. No such expression of admiration softened the clenched tight lips of the oddly shaped, cold-hearted man, Ralph Werfel, who resisted the beauty and the passion of the moment affecting every other person in the church. But the sighs of delight swept over him and absorbed his resentment in a single wave of love and affection that added another dimension to the music and atmosphere — one that retrieved the occasion from the cool realm of the angels and gave it back to warm reality.
Adam, outwardly calm and in control, savored each lovely nuance of the luscious Mirella, and the power of beauty and love she radiated. But he remained inwardly terrified. And then, as she slowly raised her eyes and looked down the aisle directly into his, Adam understood his terror.
Mirella was the woman through whom he was at last able to make contact with feelings that until now had eluded him. Because of her he was able to identify and cherish something new within the very core of his being, and to see it as no longer dangerous and threatening. She completed his life, gave him greater value to himself, because she had brought him to yet another part of himself. His bride was the catalyst of his every feeling of identification, even to the feminine part of Adam Corey — that part all men fear so much, thinking it dangerous and threatening to their manhood. For Adam it had just become something beautiful and precious. It was Mirella who had plucked it from the very depths of his being, kissed it and handed it to him: a gift from a woman, a goddess, that completed his life.
Adam’s terror dissolved forever when, simultaneously across the church and for all there assembled to see, a smile of profound sweetness and light surfaced and broke forth from each of them to the other. It was at that very instant that he realized he was marrying Mirella Wingfield because she was always going to be for him
the one
, the perfect woman. The woman to whom he could expose himself totally and not lose his identity. In her he would find forever the profound intimacy that would allow him to abandon himself to her in the name of love and still remain his own man. She would
never devour him, only love him the more for his open, raw vulnerability.
The irrational, unconscious fear that such a powerful love relationship as theirs threatened to annihilate him disappeared, leaving only an ever more prodigious love for Mirella, for himself, and for the marriage they were about to enter into.
The sound of the harp grew softer, then drifted slowly away, and the flute took over hauntingly. In every note there was a quivering beauty that penetrated the heart with a silvery sweetness.
Rashid appeared and took his place at Mirella’s side. She slipped her arm through his and smiled. He raised up her hand and gently disengaged it from his arm where it rested lightly. He lowered his head and kissed it. Still holding her hand, he curled his fingers around hers and drew her arm forward, as if to take the first step of a minuet. But there was no minuet to dance, just a long, white-carpeted aisle for them to traverse. There was only the path ahead through the glittering group boxed in the church pews for the occasion, whose eyes and smiles were responding to their every move and gesture, down which Rashid would lead Mirella to the altar and give her away to the man for whom she left him: Adam Corey.
They looked at each other for a moment before they took the first step together — Mirella, smiling and radiant, Rashid appearing more dark and handsome, more mysterious and exotic, more magnetically sensual than ever she or anyone else in the church had seen him. He squeezed her hand lightly and said in a whisper for her ears only, “Once more, my dear heart, I remind you that you may be marrying Adam, but you will have walked down the aisle with both of us this day. You have won Adam and me for life.” He smiled as he led her by the outstretched hand. They took their first step together into a new life neither one had ever envisaged for themselves.
Rashid was smitten with his role in the life of Mirella and Adam, amused by the edge their marriage gave to an affair with Mirella that he had every intention of continuing, no matter how emphatic she was that it was over and they should be good friends only. There was absolutely no doubt in Rashid’s mind that she could not give him up for anyone or anything.
Rashid, too, was swept away by the romantic mood that permeated the church. In that, he was no different from the
guests and everyone in the wedding party. He was filled with a sense of joy and happiness and not the least disturbed that he appeared to have lost Mirella to Adam and marriage. Rashid Lala Mustapha — handsome millionaire Turkish playboy, hedonist, master of oriental eroticism, who captivated women with his seductive charm, behind which lay the menace of debauchery and sexual enslavement — was bound to Mirella. Their bond was strong because she was the only woman he had ever captivated who had not allowed him to destroy her. She alone had matched his lust for adventurous, sensual, sexual delights. She alone had allowed him to sexually enslave her, yet managed to get away and, astonishingly, with his blessing. She kept him as one of her closest friends, instilling in him a kind of love that they both knew would never be allowed to die.