This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (4 page)

Sheer nectar, Adam thought, as he touched his glass to Mirella’s and drank. Every morsel of food so far had been sheer ambrosia as well. He touched Mirella on the shoulder, then caressed her back, raised her hand and kissed it.

He wanted her, more than ever now that she was his, now that he was hers. He became aroused at the very thought of their first coupling as man and wife. He bent forward and tucked his head under the brim of her hat and kissed her on the lips, bit her, none too lightly, wanting her to feel the pain of his desire. Then he kissed her mouth again with a tenderness that was as sweet as the nectar he imagined he drank.

There was an unmistakable air of sensuality in the dining room; no one could possibly ignore it. It was everywhere, like the scent of an exotic perfume, and growing stronger, more exciting, as the breakfast continued. Rashid had done to perfection what he liked to do best — enchant, seduce, corrupt the senses, with beauty and pleasure. He was a master at it.
No one in the room would dispute that. Every wedding guest was under his spell, and, methodically, as the afternoon wore on, he dazzled them with the joy of the occasion.

Mirella and Adam rose from their chairs and together cut a slice of the wedding cake in front of them with a Queen Anne silver cake slicer. On its handle was a bunch of lilies of the valley tied with narrow white satin and lace ribbons in pretty bows with long streamers. Their guests gave a seated ovation, Adam handed the dessert plate with the first slice of the cake to Mirella and put his arm around her shoulder. He picked up his dessert fork, cut into the mousse and fed it to her.

It was delectable. The rich chocolate mousse, with its tang of orange and Cointreau, covered with thick white whipped cream, was as light as air. The sensuous texture filled Mirella’s mouth, its succulent flavors teasing her taste buds before it dissolved in her tongue, and she felt the crunch of a sugar-icing lily of the valley blossom.

Sheer ambrosia, yet again, Mirella thought. It was a sweet conjured by the angels, a wedding cake like no other. She took up the fork from the plate, sliced into the delicacy, and fed it to Adam. “Perfection,” was all he said.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Mirella and Adam turned and presented their slice of wedding confection to Rashid, who had been sitting on Mirella’s right. He stood up, clasped Adam’s hand, hugged him affectionately, and kissed Mirella as she handed it to him. The couple watched him convey some of the cake-pudding to his mouth, and saw in his eyes the delight the rich chocolate afforded him, satisfying even his notorious craving for sweets, most especially chocolate. And they saw him savor the gesture of sharing their slice of wedding cake with him.

At that moment, without any manipulation or calculation on anyone’s part, their instinctual beings came to the fore, and a pattern, along with an unspoken set of rules were laid down for this extraordinary love triangle, without their fully knowing it.

Without ever discussing their situation, they would treat one another with discretion, friendship, caring, mutual respect. This and much more was tacitly established as the three shared the symbolic first slice of wedding cake. Each scarcely sensed the pact thus silently, solemnly ratified.

Mirella and Adam stepped away from their places at the
table. Two waiters trailed them, serving the cake Mirella and Adam had just cut to guests close on either side of the sublime confection. The couple moved to the next cake and cut it, talking and laughing with their guests, then kissing before moving on.

The erotic tension between Mirella and Adam was building as they progressed around the room. And now, they had cut the last of the wedding cakes and had kissed, and Mirella could think only of being naked and in his arms, of his marking every inch of her with his tongue; of his filling her again and again with his rich copious seed. She felt her face go very warm, and was embarrassed for the rush of ecstasy she was unable to hold back. Adam laughed.

“Mirella Corey,” he whispered in her ear, “you are a lewd, carnal woman.” And he kissed her, this time on the side of her ear, and bit it very hard. She cringed from the pain and, flushing even more, whispered back, “So what?”

“So, thank God for that. Upstairs, our suite, four o’clock, and don’t be late. I’ll be there waiting.” He took her hand and they started to return to their original places.

What joy, what bliss, she thought, but forced her voice to sound casual as she quipped, “It’s a date.”

They stopped so that Adam could exchange a few words with her father, Maxim. Mirella looked away from the men and across the room; her idle glance jolted to an abrupt halt at the entranceway on the far end of the dining room. There she was, leaning against the doorjamb, casting an observant eye at the banquet and at Adam in particular. She was tall, deeply tanned, and had a handsome face with perfect bone structure. She wore no makeup, and her long, messy chestnut-colored hair looked mightily attractive, though dirty. She wore an old, stained Burberry raincoat that seemed to have had a long-time acquaintance with mud. She held the raincoat back with one hand that also held a tan, battered rain hat. A pair of ill-fitting, very wrinkled men’s tan trousers was cinched tight above her bony hips with some man’s beige and brown old school tie whose ends dangled down her right side. She wore a beige silk man’s shirt, open at the neck, and one could tell it was new by the crispness of its creases where it had been folded and never pressed out. A pair of grubby, worn-out, once-white sneakers were on her feet below bare ankles.

On the floor next to her was a battered leather duffel bag.
She was a mess … but a stunningly beautiful mess. Mirella wondered how long she had been standing in the doorway. Odd how right the woman looked against the magnificent oak paneling, Mirella thought. Undoubtedly that accounted for why no one had taken notice of her.

And Mirella could not take her eyes off the woman. She kept thinking it was a young Katharine Hepburn, who had come for the tennis, or the golf, and had found Oceanside closed to the public for this wedding. But Mirella knew better. The sudden pit she felt in her stomach told her she could only be one person: Marlo Channing.

The two women’s gazes met across the room. They stared at one another. It would have been so easy for Mirella to draw Adam’s attention to the woman in the doorway, but something stopped her. Finally it was Adam putting his arm around her waist to walk with her to their seats that broke her gaze. When Mirella was seated and looked up again to the entrance, the woman had vanished like a legendary apparition that breaks the good feast.

When she had begun to plan the wedding for her daughter with Rashid, Lili Wingfield had resented him and the lavish style with which he did everything. The vast sums of money he was able to spend so unconcernedly on airplanes was far beyond her conception of hospitality. He chartered a Concorde to fly the foreign guests in for the wedding, and a fleet of small jets to ferry them and others from New York to Oceanside.

Booking the entire hotel, so that the wedding guests might change their clothes there for the ball in the evening, or remain for a few nights to relax after the nuptial festivities, was an extravagance perpetrated by Rashid without Lili’s blessing. The only positive point about that extravagance as far as she was concerned was the solution it provided her to the problem of what to do with all the foreigners and Mirella’s new family. Lili found the so-called clan not only embarrassing but ridiculous.

Rashid’s total disregard of what the wedding was costing made Lili belligerent, bitter, and reminded her of all her years of pinching pennies because her husband had an income incommensurate with his vast inheritance of treasures that he refused to sell and they could ill afford to maintain.

Again and again Rashid had cajoled, dazzled, teased Lili into giving in to his plans. She had never approved of his notion that the wedding should go on and on: the breakfast for intimate family and friends; the tea dance to amuse the guests who remained for the evening festivities, and for those who were to arrive late in the day for the grand ball and buffet in the evening.

The grand ball and buffet indeed! How she fought Rashid over that. She fought over his allowing all Adam’s children to invite their friends. She was furious at the number of people he was flying in, some of whom were the world’s most acute minds, philosophers, writers, physicists, a group of Maxim’s old friends who had been a part of Mirella’s childhood and watched her grow up. The bride’s friends, the groom’s friends, anybody’s friends, and family — Adam’s family, Maxim’s family. Too much, all too much for Lili.

It was the
grande bouffe
, as Rashid insisted on calling the food to be served at the ball, that finally made Lili stop fighting Rashid and his party plans. She had listened to Rashid and his fleet of famous French chefs discuss the menu:
oeufs en gelée;
huge birds’ nests filled with quails’ eggs, gulls’ eggs, plovers’ eggs; seven chefs preparing individual omelettes for the guests in silver chafing dishes, before their very eyes; fresh Périgord pâté de foie gras with truffles; chicken livers and mushrooms in sherry; pink grapefruit sorbet, elderflower sorbet, peach sorbet, lemon and lime sorbet; sides of Scottish smoked salmon cut paper-thin;
gravlax
, salmon prepared in Swedish style: marinated with dill and cut in thicker slices and served with a hot mustard sauce. There was also to be fresh Alaskan poached salmon, served cold with a cream and horseradish sauce, Russian blini with beluga caviar,
coquilles Saint-Jacques
, lobster thermidor, lobster salad, duck in aspic, cold grilled duck with brandied oranges, duck pâté with plum sauce, galantine of goose, layered pheasant terrine on a bed of corn kernels and served with a
sauce verte
, boned stuffed turkey in a Madeira sauce, spiced kumquats, mango, banana, and lime chutneys, nine different green salads with vinaigrette dressings, the food for nine hundred people. Lili had listened in horror, numbed and deaf, to the list of the desserts and selection of vintage champagnes.

She hated it all, but gave in, always yielding to Rashid’s plans, because he charmed her with his male beauty and
sexuality, found her vulnerable point — vanity and pathological narcissism — and played on it, until she succumbed to all his wishes. But her resentment never wavered.

Now Rashid picked up her hand and kissed it.

“I think we have done ourselves proud this day, Lili. Who will ever forget this wedding breakfast, this room, the heavenly scent of an orchard of lilacs, the sound of such regal music? You have been wonderful in your selections. Have you forgiven me for all my extravagances, the spats we had working together for this day?”

Lili searched the charismatic Rashid’s face for some indication that the wooing of Lili had been for more than Mirella’s wedding, more than just another of Rashid’s pragmatic seductions. There was none. She had been used. She knew it very well, having been the seducer enough times and of enough men in getting what
she
wanted.

The chief barker, dressed in a red jacket, appeared, a sign for the musicians to close their concert of chamber music. The last strains gone, the barker struck the silver gong for silence and attention in the room, then announced, “Thank you, my lords, ladies, and gentlemen. Coffee is being served on the veranda, if you please.”

Mirella and Adam rose from their chairs and led the way.

“I don’t forgive easily,” Lili said to Rashid as one of the waiters standing behind her chair drew it back so she could rise. And, standing up, she continued, “Your self-indulgence in this wedding has appalled me almost as much as the changes in Mirella since she inherited my family’s estate. What’s worse is that I have nearly as much loathing for myself, because I have been seduced by your charm and excesses, and have accepted them, enjoyed them even. You have not missed a thing, not a trick; you are the ultimate host, the ultimate seducer. Much as I hate to say it, you have teased us all into enjoying every minute of your extravaganza.

“Forgive you our ‘little spats,’ as you call them? Never! Do you really want to know how I feel? No, don’t bother to answer that. I’ll tell you; as if I am being led to the guillotine in the greatest of style. Not, I am sure, unlike most every woman you are involved with, the obvious exception being my daughter.”

Rashid could only laugh at Lili. They stepped onto the veranda and took demitasse cups of espresso from a waiter’s
heavy baroque silver tray. Lili turned her back on Rashid and started to move away. He subtly but firmly grasped her by the arm, and whispered in her ear, “You are a bitch, Lili,” and walked her over to the wooden railings of the porch.

They stood together in silence for a few minutes. Up and down the timbered veranda guests sat in old-fashioned wooden rockers or stood, casually leaning on the porch railings, drinking coffee. They watched some of the guests walk down to the water’s edge, coffee cups in hand; others looked incongruous in their elegant clothes, seated on the sand under the bright afternoon sun, watching the heavy blue waves crash onto the beach.

“A jealous bitch, Lili,” Rashid murmured. “You’re angry and jealous and it’s not over me or my self-indulgence. You’re envious of your own daughter, because she had eclipsed you, because she has got it all: riches, monetary wealth, real hard currency, all her own. That makes her financially independent, a powerful woman, able to indulge herself in any way she pleases — something you have never had, or been able to do. I don’t know what is most difficult for you. Her inheritance? Her success as one of the world’s top executives, which she has achieved through a superior intelligence and sheer hard work? Or is it that she gave up hiding her sensuality, suppressing her needs and desires, allowed her sexuality to break out of the closet, and it brought her the one thing missing in her life, love? The one thing you have always beaten her at was a one-to-one love relationship with a remarkable man. Now she has even eclipsed you in that, because she has won, forever, the hearts of two remarkable men.