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

Theirs was unresolved love, the kind that bites deep and lasts forever; the kind of love that — combined with the unique unacceptable sort derived from pushing through every door of sex and debauchery and emerging with neither a scar of guilt nor the mark of the devil, with
joie de vivre
— creates a bond between two people which cannot be broken.

Mirella felt as if she were floating down the aisle on a cushion of air rather than walking. She looked neither left nor right, but straight at the man who was about to become her husband. She felt Rashid’s old magnetism warming and exciting her, pulling her to him with every step she took, as he led her to marriage with the great love of her life.

How much she owed to Rashid, she mused. He had sought her out at the time when she was most vulnerable, when her superbly organized existence, including an important career as assistant director of translations at the United Nations in New York, and a long-time love affair, had been disrupted by an amazing inheritance, of the Oujie estate.

This mysterious Turkish legacy had been lost to the rightful heirs for generations. It was made up of huge landownings, oil, gas, and mineral rights, houses, vineyards, a racing stable and farms, businesses of all kinds, even banks in England and France, art treasures and jewels. It produced an annual income in the area of forty million dollars. With it had come the discovery of a host of remarkable ancestors, including her benefactor, her maternal great-grandmother. And that had been only the first of the disruptions in her complacent and
well-set life. They had brought with them another disruption: her brief encounter with Adam Corey that produced a taste of real love, which, by her own stupidity, she had managed to lose.

Against her own will, it was she who created the third cataclysmic disruption of the neat personal world she had spent years creating. She dissolved her fifteen-year liaison with her lover Paul, as a result of her encounter with Adam.

Alone, one life a shambles except for work, another she had no idea of how to cope with looming before her, the cautious, one-time impoverished Massachusetts aristocrat Mirella Wingfield was a sleeping beauty. Raven haired and violet eyed, she hid her sensuality and voluptuous self under gray-flannel suits and a hugely successful career until Rashid barged suavely into her life and gathered her up.

As one life crumbled for Mirella, Rashid had assembled the pieces and helped her to mold them into the other Mirella — the beautiful, sensuous, exciting woman she had been before she hid behind the façade of that vastly successful career and a part-time lover who evoked what she imagined to be love. Overnight she became one of the wealthiest, most powerful women in the world and Rashid’s sublime mistress.

For him it had been a game, the same game he played with all women: sexual seduction, until the woman was mastered, and then sadistic abandonment of her. Only with Mirella there had been an added interest: the Oujie legacy.

For Mirella, it had been a most extravagant, carefree sexual affair with a disturbingly exotic, depraved man who pampered her at just the moment in her life when she needed it. The affair was even more wonderful by virtue of the fact that she saw it for what it was, never fantasizing about it, and kept control over it. In the end her erotic sojourn with Rashid served as the catalyst that brought her back to Adam Corey and to where she stood right now. Oh, yes, the bond between her and Rashid was very strong indeed.

Rashid offered Mirella’s hand to Adam who received it and stepped to her side, and smiled at her.

“My life,” Adam whispered just before he lowered his head and placed his lips gently on her hand.

Rigid with envy, and anger, in the first row of pews close to the altar, Ralph Werfel heard Adam’s words, “My life.” He
repeated them over and over to himself while he reflected on his years as Adam’s friend and confidant, as a figure crucial to Adam’s megamillion-dollar family business, the Corey Trust. And he savored rejection of those roles. His mind spat the words he wished he could speak right there and then. Again he wiped the corners of his mouth with his hand, as if he were salivating. A smile ruffled his lips and lit up his oddly attractive face.

The minister cleared his throat and brought the couple back to attention. Rashid took his place in the front pew next to the Princess Eirene, resplendent in a champagne-colored silk dress and a small matching hat jauntily angled on her forehead, its more or less transparent, stiff mesh-silk net seductively veiling her eyes.

The flautist played his last notes almost imperceptibly, softer, softer, until they were gone, and with a mastery that left an echo of them interwoven with the murmured rites of the ceremony.

Adam slipped the wedding band on Mirella’s finger and for a moment the bride and groom were mesmerized by the wide rock-crystal band inset with long rectangular diamond baguettes, and by awe at what they had done. Finally Adam lifted her hand to his lips, squeezed it lovingly, and kissed her fingers with such deep emotion that she trembled. He then took her in his arms, and tilting her head up, he murmured, “Thank you for marrying me. I promise to love you more profoundly than any woman ever dreamed possible.”

Then he kissed her long and passionately, in front of the minister, but hidden from the view of the wedding guests by her lovely large hat. The minister gently reclaimed their attention, Mirella and Adam smiled as they parted, and Adam shook the minister’s hand.

There was a faint rippling of strings. And again, softly. Then, once more, just a bit louder. The notes of the enchanting flute mingled with the plucked strings of the angelic harp, and eighteenth-century music once more showered the church with gold and silver sound.

2

T
he warm June breeze rippled Mirella’s train as she stood with Adam on the steps greeting the people filing out of the church. The guests walked into the brilliant sunshine and mingled on a carpet of strewn peony petals in front of the church. The occasional strong breeze lifted Mirella’s diaphanous silk train up off the steps and into the air, creating a sensual aura around the couple as the silk danced on the soft current.

Two of Adam’s friends, Helmut Newton and Norman Parkinson, dressed like Adam and the other male guests in gray morning coats, surrendered to the unthinkable and took wedding photographs. And what wedding photographs! Taking them had to be more like creating exotic ikons, so romantic, rich, and opulent were their subjects, so perfectly American was the Puritan New England setting on this bright morning.

The occasion itself was pure enchantment — a wedding between two beautiful, adventurous public figures, and the romantic, intriguing story of the Oujie legacy that brought them together and into the world’s limelight. It was alluring material, irresistible to the two photographers — not least because of the underlying sensual charisma projected by the bride and groom, the international playboy Rashid Lala Mustapha, the famed courtesan Princess Eirene, and several other guests.

The subtle undercurrent of illicit passion and power tantalized Helmut. It was exciting, thrilling. He would ferret it out, and record the beauty of it in the powerful erotic portraits he was famous for, much the same way Parkinson would reach down to the very soul of the women present and record what he saw and wanted to evoke for others. He would add these perfect romantic beauties to his gallery of the most beautiful women in the world.

There wasn’t the slightest possibility that anyone might believe this was just another wedding of two people in love. The presence of Massachusetts State Troopers patroling the
barriers that kept the world’s press just out of sight of the church, and the ban on all air traffic within a ten-mile radius of it, with the exception of the wedding party’s helicopters and airplanes, broadcast that this was no ordinary event. And so did the obvious effect the couple’s wedding had on their guests. They were touched deeply by it, reminded that true love and marriage could still happen to middle-aged voluptuaries with exciting careers and a penchant for freedom and adventure. It made them feel more courageous, more alive, instilled in them an energy to go forward and risk reaching yet again for the excitement of total love, commitment, and marriage.

Most of them were well aware of the love affairs, romantic and scandalous, previously indulged in by the couple and their best man, Rashid. None of them believed Rashid would give Mirella up. They expected a
ménage à trois
, or something more bizarre, between these extraordinary people until they saw and heard Adam and Mirella take their vows. Now they were not so sure. The couple’s love was so obvious and powerful it embarrassed them for the doubts they had, and served to give them hope, raise their passion, and to make them sense again the joy of love.

Princess Eirene felt that way. She had been an intimate friend and sometime lover for nearly thirty years to both men. She was Mirella’s friend from the time Mirella had been brought to the princess’s
yali
, a wooden palace on the banks of the Bosporus in Istanbul, little more than a month before.

So did Deena Weaver, Mirella’s best friend since their Vassar days. And so did Brindley Ribblesdale, the young, handsome English attorney who discovered, after years of investigation, that Mirella was the rightful heiress to the Oujie legacy. It had been Brindley who introduced Adam Corey to her, thus unwittingly changing her life. He was thinking about that when Deena placed her hand on his arm.

“Why do I think this is the most wonderful day of my life, Brindley?” Deena asked. “I know that it’s the most wonderful day in Mirella’s life, and what we are seeing here is the Cinderella story emerge from the fairy tale to burst into real life. And it makes me so happy! Happy, I can understand. The most wonderful day of my life I can’t.”

The pair were watching Mirella, enchantingly beautiful, walk down the church steps, Rashid on one side, Adam on the
other, the three laughing and with arms linked, a puff of warm air billowing her misty silk train so as to nearly engulf them with it.

“Because that’s the effect weddings have on you?” Brindley asked.

“No, I’ve been always the bridesmaid never the bride enough times to know it’s not just being a participant in my best friend’s wedding that is affecting me. Try again, Brindley.”

“Then it has to be Mirella and Adam and the energy they have to change their lives. It’s infectious.”

“And thrilling, and wonderful,” she added. “You call it energy. I call it love, real love, and if it is, as you say, infectious then maybe I’ve caught it — or a touch of it. No, it has to be something more than a smattering or a touch of anything. I’ve caught something from Mirella and Adam, and whatever it is, it’s a full dose of wonderful. Brindley, I think I may have been infected by their capability for real love. Do you think that could be it?”

“Sounds too dramatic and fanciful for me. But, that being said, how would I know? I am an Englishman and we English, unlike you Americans, don’t analyze our feelings to death. Nor do we have to rationalize what we do and how we feel — another of your Americanisms that is alien to us.”

Then, instead of becoming defensive as was usual for Deena whenever anyone attacked or criticized the supposed ways of Americans, she smiled and spontaneously stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “Maybe you should analyze your feelings,” she said.

There was a tenderness in the kiss that surprised them both, and caught them off guard. Brindley reached out and touched one of her silky ringlets.

“Yes,” he said, “maybe we should, but we don’t have to. We have a built-in arrogance about who we are and what we are, a big history behind us that saves us from that sort of painful introspection. Since I have met Adam, Mirella, and even Rashid, I have been affected in subtle ways and changed by the experience. It would be unthinkable for me to question or label it. Dare I suggest you simply enjoy feeling wonderful?”

“That may be easy for you. You’re not an American overachiever. Nor are you Jewish, nor first-generation New
York Jewish at that. ‘Simply enjoy’ are not words in our vocabulary. Now, ‘simply enjoy’ hyphenated with guilt is certainly in our vocabulary.”

Then Deena began to laugh at herself, which was one of her many endearing charms. Brindley laughed with her.

Someone jostled them and Deena fell against Brindley, who reached out and caught her by the shoulders. He felt the firm flesh of her arms through the fine silk organza of the sleeves of her gown, her breasts against him. The feel of her skin, scent of her body mixed with the perfume of Egyptian jasmine, bluebells, wild thyme, lemon, and garden roses, lit a passion in him.

It was at that moment the church bell tolled deep and rich. Brindley released Deena, their eyes met and silently the expression in his begged her to say nothing. Miraculously Deena understood, obeyed, and smiled. What might have been an awkward moment for them was interrupted by Moses, Mirella’s houseman, who spirited her away on an errand.

Brindley watched Deena make her way through the crowd of wedding guests milling around him, remembering the few times he had met her. Once he had been able to put aside the trendy, successful New York career-woman image she was constantly projecting, she had always made him laugh and admire her quick wit. He found her extreme intelligence, and the manner in which she asserted herself, so different from the upper-class English women he was inclined to meet — exciting. Deena Weaver had a feisty sexuality, and that, too, he found new and interesting.

The church bell kept ringing and the party atmosphere began to take over as an effervescent, smiling, and happy Mirella, her long wedding train draped partially over her arm and trailing in the peony petals, wandered among her guests toward Brindley. He watched her and was filled with admiration. He mused to himself at his inability to recognize what an extraordinary, sensual female she was when he had first met her and had been taken in by the liberated, executive façade she hid behind.

Big, black, handsome Moses, dressed in formal jacket and striped trousers, looked every inch the majordomo he was — and more — to Mirella and had been to her great-uncle Hyram from whom she had inherited Moses. Moses approached the
guests, asking if they wanted to walk across the moor to the wedding brunch or wait for the cars to take them.

With the help of his huge Turkish manservant Turhan, who had been with him constantly since he was eighteen years old, Adam was putting the same choice before his Turkish guests. Assisting him and Turhan were Rashid’s bodyguards, a sinister-looking pair of retired professional Turkish wrestlers, Daoud and Fuad. Bull necked, their faces dramatically scarred, they were incongruously dressed in the same manner as Moses.

Muhsine, a very pretty Turkish girl wearing a gold and silver embroidered
salvar
, was one of the young women Adam kept to work and for his own pleasure in his house on the Bosporus. She was attempting to encourage Adam’s common-law wives and his five children to move along to the wedding brunch.

Lili Wingfield, Mirella’s mother, looked stunning in an understated, softly draped dress of pearl gray silk jersey, just the sort of dress its famous designer, Mme. Grès, had been turning out for half a century. Lili wore a small hat on the crown of her head and its exquisite white egret feathers cascaded down the side of her cheek and curled toward the underpart of her chin. She stood with a few of the most senior and socially prominent members of the Wingfield clan. And she was seething, furious. She found it extremely difficult to maintain a civil manner toward Mirella or to feel any enthusiasm for the wedding. She could actually sense the shock and disapproval coming off the Wingfields, could imagine them whispering to the other members of the family about “the opulence and ostentation of the bride … what a vulgar lot the guests were, dressed in expensive French couture, and bejeweled in the morning. And the foreigners. What a lot of foreigners!”

It was the foreigners that really bothered Lili. She knew the Wingfields would equate foreigners with those in her own background that she tried so hard to bury in order to live up to marriage into one of the first of the four hundred families, America’s real and very exclusive aristocracy.

Lili was not stupid. She knew very well that they would overlook Adam Corey’s secret lifestyle and his illegitimate children because he was heir to one of the Midwest’s great families and fortunes. To the Wingfields any person who was
not a close relation or a member of their country club was a foreigner. To them any jewel weighing more than two carats was only to be worn on rare and formal occasions, and never in the daytime, or it was to be kept in the bank vault so as not to pay insurance. And, alas, Lili knew that unless a wedding followed Wingfield tradition, it would be judged a vulgar affair.

But Lili chose to put the blame on Mirella for inheriting a fortune from her side of the family that Lili considered should have been hers; for allowing herself to release her repressed sexuality for all the world to see and comment on; for allowing herself to become a public figure, and one with a good press, at that.

Lili was a woman who had spent her entire life seeking attention as the most beautiful woman concert pianist in the world — something she had never come near achieving. What was infuriating now was that she had spent entire weeks with the charming Rashid planning this extraordinarily elegant and romantic wedding. And now she and her role were being eclipsed by an exciting aura of erotic sensual love emanating from the bride and bridegroom. Moreover, a game that she had reckoned was hers alone in her family she now found was being played by her daughter — bidding for the hearts of men with her sexuality.

In these last few months a sense had crept up on her of being overshadowed by Mirella. She writhed now in terrible inner conflict because when she was able to put aside her self-centeredness, her preoccupation with controlling everything and everyone around her, she loved her daughter.

Mirella and Adam held hands, and with the old Puritan bell still ringing, their friends and family surrounding them, they led the way up the peony-petaled road, away from the church and briefly across the moor to the timbered seaside hotel, Oceanside. The majority of their guests followed on foot.

The staff at the staid, exclusive Massachusetts spa thought that they had seen everything after working for a week with Rashid and the entourage of chefs and waiters flown in from Paris. The party designers they glimpsed were from Rome, the florists from London and New York City, their flowers from every spot on the globe. By the hour, helicopters whirled down from the skies depositing celebrated musicians: an ebullient Spanish tenor and a black empress of a soprano
from Metropolitan, the Bee Gees, and Artie Shaw and his entire orchestra arriving with Peggy Lee. Then they saw the wedding party.

From the balconies facing the moor that stretched three quarters of a mile back to the church, and on either side of the hotel, until it ran into wild scrub bushes of blueberries and pine and then into sand and the Atlantic Ocean, they saw the bride walking along the only road to the century-old landmark of American architecture. Her husband was at her side, their entourage following them. The animated, smiling guests gathered petals and showered the couple with them. And among the party were strolling violinists who filled the air, already laden with the salt perfume of the ocean, midday sunshine, the scent of the moor and wild flowers, with the sound of Hungarian gypsy music. Vintage cars — Bugattis and Rolls-Royces, a Pierce-Arrow, and a Lagonda, a De Dion-Bouton — peeped and hooted their horns as they passed the strolling party, carrying more wedding guests to the reception.

They entered the nineteenth-century pavilion courtyard, created by four circular projections, the Ballroom, the Tango Room, the round-ended Dining Room, and the Sun Parlor, the last two of which were on the sand and faced the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. One of the long low sea breezes whipped Mirella’s diaphanous train up and into the air. Several guests came to her rescue, playfully leaping up to catch it.