This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to me.
    “Oceanside was my dream castle, my play castle. It represented gaiety and was exciting and dramatic, even mysterious, and always full of beautiful wealthy people wearing the latest clothes. People I equated with romance, intrigue, love, who, when they were not here were traveling to far and exotic places, doing glamorous heroic things. Oh, how I wanted to be one of them.
    “Because we live so closely by, during the season Oceanside was my second home. My family were the ‘day people,’ who used it like a country club, and my dream was to be a guest, a resident, to sleep a whole night here and have breakfast in bed.
    “From the age of five, I used to play ‘let’s pretend’ games about Oceanside. As an adolescent I played romantic ‘let’s-pretend’ games and wished that we were not the cash-poor, property-rich, intellectual, eccentric arm of the family. I longed for lots of new pretty ball gowns, to replace the elegant family hand-me-downs I was obliged to wear. I believed that if I had them they would make me beautiful, and the prince who lived in the dream castle would come and take me to the ball. But it never happened, and he never came, andso I abandoned my dreams, wiped them out of my mind, and settled for those that were possible.”
    Adam placed his arm around her shoulder and together they walked slowly toward the wide, curved wooden steps leading to the open veranda and the entrance. They were followed by their wedding attendants, Rashid, Deena, and Brindley, who were walking arm in arm together, amid the ringing of their own laughter.
    “How strange the mind is,” Mirella continued, “I’d forgotten those fantasies for so many years, and they have come back to me, just when at last I am going into Oceanside to a grand reception, a ball, in honor of us, with all my dreams fulfilled, and much more.”
    Adam was extremely touched by what she told him. It was the sweetness, the innocence of Mirella the child, and her fantasies: the confession that she longed so passionately for them to come true, and that, when they hadn’t, she gave them up and began making compromises, something he had never done. Aware of the nostalgic ache in her voice during the telling of her little story, he was now pained by it. He hurt for all the years they had not found each other, and he had not set her free. Now he would spend the remainder of his life loving her and giving her the world.
    Mirella took her last awed look at the fairy-tale-castle façade of Oceanside with the eyes of a child, and then turned to her husband. Adam felt he was seeing the anguish of past unfulfilled dreams slip from her face, and the happy, passionate woman he knew so well come to the fore.
    He gathered her in his arms, crushed her hard against him, and kissed her lustily. He could feel her fire, imagine her body under the white lace wedding gown dissolve like molten gold into his, feel her passion explode into the familiar tremors of ecstasy, and hear an almost imperceptible whimper of release.
    The sound of the sea, and the distant music of Artie Shaw’s sweet clarinet over his newest big band, and the voice of Peggy Lee singing “As Time Goes By” mingled with the applause, laughter, and teasing from those above on the balconies. Mirella opened her eyes. She was still in Adam’s arms, and from over his shoulder she could see Rashid watching her. Despite the deep and profound love and ruttishness she felt for her husband, something within her silently, invisibly reached out. She sensed a mad desire totouch Rashid, to be sexually enslaved once again by the dark devilish man. She blinked and it passed, but her mind and heart recorded for the first time that she and Rashid shared a kind of love that she was far from rid of.

3
    S ince the day it had opened in the summer of 1893, Oceanside had beguiled all who had been privileged to enter. Its mellow luxury, reminiscent of Edwardian society at its most elegant and genteel, was modified