This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) by Roberta Latow Read Free Book Online

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