This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (18 page)

“Desperate to be the man to deflower his precious Inje, after years of ripening her for himself, yet convinced by Roxelana that he must not, he angrily refused to arrange a marriage for Inje. Instead he presented her to a king from the Balkans who had come to the sultan to select an official mistress for himself.

“The arrangement was made on the condition that, when the king died, or if the king was displeased, Inje was to be returned to the sultan. The king paid for Inje with a rock-crystal cask with ormolu mounts, filled with fabulous diamonds, of all shapes and sizes, which he presented to the sultan who promptly gave them to Roxelana. The sultan banished Inje from his sight and her name from court because he could not bear another man to take her, secretly determined to bring her back when it was politically possible.”

Mirella had to cover her mouth with her hand to suppress a deep sigh that came from sharp surprise. The cask of diamonds was at this very moment in her possession, part of the three-pronged legacy she inherited. Mirella had actually scooped the diamonds up in her hand and let the gems fall through her open fingers, as if she were playing with pebbles on a beach.

“She was thirteen,” the princess continued. “The king was fifty-one. Six years later, he was dead, and she returned to the seraglio. Within two years of her return, there was a new sultan on the throne who made her his favorite. Roxelana Oujie, the last great concubine of the Ottoman Empire, was dead. The court was dissolving rapidly, a victim of reform after reform imposed to keep the West at bay. And your father, then a young, handsome, and dashing United States diplomat, who had the ear of the sultan and a considerable influence on him, was seduced by Inje.

“Your father’s credentials were impeccable, and it was because of that and his innocence, his loyalty to his country and the sultan, that the lovers were not discovered. By the time rumors became rife in the seraglio, it was too late to give her up. He despised the deceit, the secrecy. He was riddled with guilt, and deeply in love. He believed her to be the same, and she was. Only for Inje it was a love affair that would run
its course, and for your father that course was forever, until death did them part. He would have her as his wife, or die.

“She did everything in her power to make him understand that they were playing a very dangerous game of love and that it had to stop. She was not free. But as far as your father was concerned, she was unmarried and therefore free. He decided to go to the sultan, because, remember, she was his favorite but not his wife, and ask permission to marry Inje. She tried to make him understand that if he did so, she would be dead before he left the palace and he, before he arrived back at the American Embassy. Inje recruited me and my husband, Prince Yorgos, to talk with him, plead with him to give her up. It was useless. The French ambassador and an English admiral stationed at the palace to advise the sultan were friends of your father’s and were asked by my husband to intervene.

“Nothing would change his mind, and when it was evident that he preferred death to a life without the woman he loved, Inje saw no way out but to run away with him, because that was what they would have to do to save their lives. She made one stipulation: no good-byes, no farewells to anyone. Just a rendezvous of two lovers was what those who knew about them must think. Inje trusted no one. And once that was arranged, they must travel in haste from Turkey and not stop until they were safe in the United States.

“They met on a sunny afternoon at my
yali
on the Bosporus. She was three hours late, having had great difficulty getting away, first from the sultan, who was very suspicious. He questioned her endlessly about her recent movements, and later interrogated her eunuchs, one of whom she had to bribe with a diamond necklace he had always coveted.

“She was extremely upset, frightened and barely able to cope. I had never seen her like that. Your father was admirable. From then on he had their escape planned as in a romance. They disguised themselves: both were dressed first as simple Turkish sailors, and boarded my caïque and sailed down the Bosporus past the Golden Horn, directly along the shores of the seraglio and its gardens and trees that meandered down to the water’s edge, the place where Inje was born and had lived out most of her life, and into the Sea of Marmara.

“When night fell, under cover of darkness they changed
their clothes to those of English naval officers and the caïque rendezvoused with an English naval cruiser that took them aboard and to safety.

“That was the last time I ever saw or heard from your mother. Your father was ruined. The sultan realized she was gone when he called for her to his bed and she couldn’t be found anywhere in Topkapi. He extracted all the answers he needed from the eunuch who had the diamond necklace.

“The entire palace was alerted. Troops were scouring Constantinople for the couple. But your mother and father eluded them. House-to-house searches were made everywhere, the waters of the Golden Horn, the Bosporus, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Marmara were plied with every class of boat in the sultan’s command.

“By midday, the sultan was sure they had escaped his city, and were under the protection of one of the foreign governments in Constantinople. He called in the United States ambassador, demanded the return of your father and mother to him for punishment, and required an immediate court martial for the Navy, to whom your father was attached. The scandal was out, and an international incident was created between your country and mine, and Inje closed the book on the life she had led before your father and her arrival in Boston.”

No one in the room spoke. Each of the women was lost in her own reactions to the princess’s revelations. The princess leaned back against the cushions and closed her eyes. Softly, almost inaudibly to those in the room, she said, “So many memories, it was all so long ago, yet it is all present to my mind as I recall every detail of that day for you, as if it were only yesterday.”

Hyacinth approached the princess, stood in back of the settee where the princess sat, and carefully, concernedly adjusted the cushions behind her. Muhsine rose from where she had been sitting at the feet of the princess and fetched her a crystal goblet filled with clear, sparkling Perrier.

The bright sunlight in the room had long since gone and was now replaced by long shadows of afternoon light. Lili sat silent and pensive, staring straight ahead at the Princess Eirene Bibescu. Very slowly, almost unconsciously, she reached out across the empty space on the settee between Mirella and
herself and offered her hand to her daughter. She felt their fingers lock, the warmth of their hands as they clasped, and Lili Wingfield felt a closeness with her daughter that she had never known.

11

R
ashid and Adam stood at the entrance of the living room, watching the women for some seconds before they entered. Adam’s enchantment with the room and his wife never wavered from the first time he saw them. But today, with the addition of the others who were reflected again and again in the mirrors around the paneled walls, he sensed more than enchantment. A depth, a sensual richness of events past and in the making shimmered in the shadows.

Rashid, too, seemed aware of it. When Adam walked to the nearest lamp and switched it on, he broke into the silence and the thoughts of the women who had been so lost in them and the Princess Eirene’s story they had been unaware of the men’s presence.

The women came alive with the light, and in that second of rebirth, Rashid could feel a passion, yet another small degree of submission, vibrate across the room to him from Mirella. Their eyes met, and he knew his patient waiting for Mirella to return to his bed was over. Their suspended erotic life together was about to begin again. He smiled at her, a smile filled with erotic promise and calculated to excite her, which it did.

Though it was not outwardly evident, Mirella felt flustered, but only for a moment. She switched her gaze to Adam, and with different eyes, eyes brimming with love, their hearts met. She wanted him, as she always wanted him when he walked into a room, and she warmed to his very being, and was inflamed by his ready and rugged sexiness. Only for the moment she wanted sex with Rashid more.

For the first time since she was aware of loving and wanting both men, Mirella felt no conflict about it.

She at last understood that fate had stepped in and had dealt her a magnificent hand. A new life, vastly changed from
anything she had ever known, which included two men who were offering her different kinds of love, and who made it quite clear by their actions, rather than words, that they both understood and accepted not only her fate, but theirs as well.

She would do as the princess had implied the princess had done, as Inje, Mirella’s grandmother, had done, and as Roxelana Oujie, her great-grandmother, had done: seized their fate with both hands, and run with it. Mirella made up her mind to do the same.

Rashid went to the princess and kissed her hand, then to Lili, and repeated the gesture. He felt Lili stiffen when he touched her, and was not displeased at her reaction to him. He sat down between Lili and Mirella, and raised Mirella’s hand and met it with his lips, then kissed her briefly on the cheek as old friends do.

Rashid could actually feel that old familiar sexual need she had for him pulling him like a magnet to her. They looked briefly at each other, and his mind exulted upon their sexual bliss, and upon the paths he would guide her through to arrive there, before the day was out.

How, where, he had little idea, but he knew it would happen. She was ripe for him, ready to fall. Oh, how Rashid loved women when they needed to confirm their erotic natures with him. The upper hand with women was always thrilling; dominating their bliss, even more so. To tease and torture as foreplay. An apéritif to thrilling.

“Have you had a long, amusing gossip over wine and coffee this afternoon, ladies?” Adam asked as he greeted the princess with a friendly kiss on the cheek, touched Lili’s shoulder in a kindly greeting, and smiled warmly at Muhsine before seating himself on the arm of the settee next to his wife.

Tilting her chin up, he kissed her lips. Warm, luscious lips, which neither parted sensually nor suggested the sexual excitement gnawing at Mirella at that moment, there only for Rashid. They were, however, loving lips, which satisfied Adam. Having confirmed their sexual joy and excess with one another during the past two-day tryst together at the Plaza, he had no need for more.

“Yes, I guess you could call it that,” answered Lili, who stood up and declared that, much as she would like to stay on, she was most anxious to take the next train home to Boston. Everyone in the room politely stood up to say good-bye.

There was a distinct softness in Lili’s manner, a degree of humility, which surprised the two men and made them aware that something profound had happened to Lili Wingfield in the few hours the women were left alone. But if they were surprised by her manner, they were doubly surprised by her when she thanked the princess for an afternoon she would never forget, and declared, “I am very sorry I have not had the privilege of knowing you all my life. I hope we will meet one day again.”

Where Adam sensed a profound change and sadness in Lili, Rashid sensed nothing of the sort, believing that a woman like Lili, with her self-centeredness, pathological narcissism, and bitterness, never changed.

“Please stay for tea, and take a later train, Mother,” Mirella offered. But Lili was determined to leave.

Adam insisted on escorting her to Grand Central Station to see her onto the train. And at the front door, before Lili left the house, mother and daughter kissed each other good-bye, a closeness and peace between them that delighted them both.

Watching her mother walk down the stairs and away from her, Mirella had the strange feeling that though they belonged to each other and loved each other, and peace and contentment now governed their interactions, it would always be a cautious relationship.

Having been set free by all she had learned from Rashid and Adam about love at once sexual and real, Mirella found that the contrast between tentative love with her own mother and her natural inclinations to love freely and spontaneously, with passion and self-indulgence, felt not only unnatural but sad and wasteful. The Princess Eirene’s afternoon revelations of the fiery blood of her ancestors and the lives they led were only an added lesson to Mirella, to live honestly, with her own code of morals, not anyone else’s.

Adam’s Rolls was pulling away from the curb. Mirella waved farewell and was about to close the door, when Adam called her name. The car stopped and he bounded out of it and up the stairs, leaving the car door open, and the chauffeur and Lili waiting. He placed his arm around her waist and stepped into the front hall with her, leaving the front door wide open, and maneuvered her behind it. Adam placed his hand on her breast, delighted to feel the weight, the soft curve of it in his hand, and rubbed his thumb across her nipple under the
sensuous silk of her bodice. Looking down at her, he said, “Would you mind terribly if I sent you along with Rashid and the princess on his plane to Athens this evening? I have some unfinished business, an obligation to locate some people and thank them for their help and consideration in a business venture. If we were to change our arrangements slightly, I might just catch them in Geneva, and be with you in time for dinner tomorrow evening on the yacht.”

Mirella was clearly flummoxed by his suggestion. It offered the way for her to be alone with Rashid, but was more than she had hoped for. And the surprise, the shock even, of his suddenly, without warning, leaving her, even for one day, took its toll on her feelings. Her heart pounded at the thought of a sexual encounter with her lover. Her nipples grew rigid under Adam’s caressing thumb. She placed a hand to her forehead as if confused.

“Wouldn’t you rather I went with you to Geneva so that we could go together to meet Rashid?” she asked.

“No, honestly, I think it best if I travel with Josh, who can be of help to me, since he is already involved. We can go at our own pace, and I won’t be concerned about your being bored waiting around. If you agree, then I’ll dash upstairs and tell Rashid, who I am sure will be delighted to have you alone to himself for a change. I can say good-bye to Eirene, give some instructions to Turhan, and tell Muhsine what to pack for me. Don’t look so worried, I’m not deserting you. I promise you Josh and I will fly out sometime late this evening.”

“Well, it seems as if you have it all worked out. All right, of course, if that’s what you want.”

He looked at the shape of her erect nipples showing through the silk, and he pinched one between his fingers then lowered his lips to it and kissed the nipple through the silk material. He tilted her chin up, kissed her on the tip of her nose, and said, “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

Mirella watched him mount the stairs three at a time, and tried to take stock of what was happening. In the last few days she had come to realize that Adam was a fast mover, and it amazed her how clever he was at getting everyone to move with him or be left behind — not as if abandoned, but simply left standing because they couldn’t keep up, and Adam waited for no one. But she knew that from experience. Had he not
left her twice because she didn’t recognize his love for her fast enough?

She stood with her back to the door, looking up the empty staircase and waited patiently for him to reappear. When he did it was with Rashid by his side. She watched the two men talk no more than a minute, but enough to remind her how very different they were.

For Adam, sex was not the most important thing in the world. Loving her was more important. Work was more important. A sense of life as somehow holy, no matter how abstract, was more important. Responsibility and loyalty were more important. The sexual life was some way down his list of priorities, but, once its turn arrived, of the greatest importance.

Rashid’s priorities were quite different. His joy of life was completely dependent on his sexual mastery and manipulation of women and situations. All else in his life revolved around that. How could she be so frivolous as to love him for his sexual prowess, allow herself to succumb to a man who in some respects was no more than a sexual slave master, be inebriated by the sexual charisma and erotic charm he distilled around her? She didn’t understand how, and didn’t want to. She allowed it, and that seemed to be enough for her, and her submission to him completely natural.

The two men shook hands, and Adam hurried down the stairs toward her. Rashid disappeared again behind the living room doors.

Adam placed his arm around her shoulder and said, as they walked down the front stairs to the waiting car, “It’s all set. Rashid is delighted to take care of you. We’ll be together for dinner somewhere on the Aegean Sea tomorrow night.”

As they stepped off the curb Mirella began to ask a question. “Adam, why are you pushi —”

But he cut off her words with a luscious long kiss on the lips, then moved his lips caressingly along her cheek to her ear.

“We must all of us have our secret moments,” he whispered, “and sex must always be a very private thing between two people, like yours and mine is. Privacy is quintessential, don’t you agree?”

Then he moved his lips away from her ear and they looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and a smile crept across the face
of each. She nodded agreement, and fought back tears of overwhelming gratitude for the love and understanding he was showing her.

“I love you,” she said.

“Yes, I know. And I love you, and nothing either of us could ever do could disturb that.”

Mirella threw her arms around his neck and they kissed again, and this time lips parted and tongues met for a second to seal their kiss. One moment they were lost in their love and a kiss, and the next she was closing the car door and saying good-bye again to her mother. Then the Rolls slipped away from her into the center of the road and sped down East Sixty-fifth Street.

She sighed, feeling a rush of happiness, and hurried from the street up the front stairs into her house and to her lover.

Rashid put the key in the lock and turned it. He pushed the door to his suite in the Carlyle open and stepped back gallantly, allowing Mirella to enter first. She heard the door close behind her, and the click of the double lock. It made her heart leap.

Mirella stood in the center of the all-white living room, as if frozen in time and space. She fluctuated between a sense of desperate sexual desire, and a devastating fear of Rashid and of submitting to his erotic demands — demands she had found ecstasy in, had learned to yearn for, once they became part of her sexual life.

Sex with Rashid was total intimacy with Rashid, and only lasted as long as the sexual experience and his desire for more. Therefore, sex with Rashid and the real Rashid were one and the same. Depraved sex, debauchery with Rashid was thrilling. Ecstasy and more than ecstasy. Heroin to the addict. Only love, love with Adam, had saved her from addiction. That and her fear of complete submission to Rashid’s sexual extremes, and of being enslaved by them, and consequently to him.

They had weathered all that. She had fought him masterfully to remain her own woman, while submitting, always submitting, to his erotic demands and their mutual sexual bliss. And that had won her to his heart forever.

She felt a shiver of excitement pass through her body as he stepped up in back of her. Where would he take her now? To
what heights? On what paths would they climb in their sexual quest? He was a sorcerer: at the click of a lock he became a different man, she became a different woman. Only Eros was their god and could rule over them.

Rashid placed his hands on her shoulders. She jumped, so tense was she. He caressed them and then slipped his hands down her arms and around her waist, pulled her roughly back against him, and buried his face in the silky hair at the nape of her neck.

There comes that time for two people when sexual chemistry takes over and no amount of plotting and planning, loving or game-playing, is of any significance. All thought disappears, and the sensual elements mix and meld, interchange and take command. That was how it was at that moment for Rashid.

His passion, their passion, inflamed and burned them, seared their flesh. They clung together, tongues silent, bodies screaming.

Mirella tried to cool the fire by distracting herself with the details of the room, but that was impossible because the whites were all texture: silk and velvet, suede and alligator and pigskin, deep white wool underfoot, and ermine-colored wood, and white marble, tactile instruments to caress and excite the naked flesh.

A virginal-white chamber, with a huge Steuben crystal vase filled with eight dozen long-stemmed deep red roses on a table in the center of the room. The red roses, an aggressive and stunning blow to the purity of the room, were a sacrificial bowl of blood, to be drunk from, to be marked by. A sinister, sensual touch, extravagantly erotic and beautiful. A room calculated to tease the senses. The room was so much like a woman and the slash of red was the cunt, the heart of it.