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

concession where his life and happiness were concerned. There had been nothing subtle about Beverley Winter’s demands of love before he married her, and even less after she had become Beverley Corey. Yet he did love her, only not the way she wanted him to.
    Until his marriage to her, Adam had never known deceit, had never understood envy and hatred, which were what she had had for him. Beverley was bourgeoise, adored mediocrity, and, though attracted to Adam sexually, resented everything else about him: his social position, his family, his intellectual and business acumen, his wealth, and most of all his large and loving heart. She had been unable to come to terms with Adam and his twin sister, Jane, who had been molded by a happy privileged childhood and loving parents, and finely honed by their father, who became both parents to them after their mother’s hideous death in a fire when the twins were sixteen.
    Poor Beverley, Adam thought. It was beyond her to understand what he had always known — that if both partners in a relationship are to remain happy, sentimentality must never enter, and the partners must never make a claim on the life and freedom of each other. That was not something Adam learned from experience; it was something he had understood instinctively from childhood, as did his twin sister, Jane. The Corey twins often had been cited as hard and ruthless in their personal relationships. Their lovers especially were always amazed at what romantics the pair were, given the philosophy of love they believed in. The Corey twins had been loved all their lives, but rarely understood.
    Jane was the woman Adam loved next after his mother. He and Jane had loved each other always, since the cradle, andwould do so until the grave. His sister, his best friend, his confidante, especially in those years just after the death of their mother. He smiled to himself when he remembered how he used to rush home to the Peramabahçe Palace where they were living with their father, and tell Jane about the beautiful older woman he was in love with and who was teaching him the wonders of sexual pleasure and the erotic life. He and the Princess Eirene had found the right man to do the same for Jane and she shared her experiences with him as generously as he had with her.
    His smile faded when he remembered Jane, Zhara in her arms, Josh by the hand, as she burst into his office having saved the children from the blazing fire Beverley had set to their house. Never until he died would he ever forget her words.
    “Adam, our hell is over.”
    And it was. Beverley survived the fire, and he and the children never saw her again. She was committed to a private mental institution, where she was to this day living out her life in a twilight world between spurts of murderous violence. He no longer felt the pain of that episode in his life. It was long, long ago.
    Jane, wonderful, eccentric Jane who fluctuated between being an earth mother and the grand patron of the arts, who was regrettably not with him on this day because she was where she had been for the last four months: up the Amazon, no one knew precisely where, collecting rare endangered orchids, which she propagated for posterity.
    The first thing Mirella saw, when she opened her eyes and waded out from under the blanket of deep sleep into which she had slipped, was the small red glow of Adam’s cigar in the dark. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she was able to make out Adam’s naked silhouette framed by the balcony doorway. When he took a puff of his cigar, a rosy light lit up a portion of the side of his face and Mirella was quite taken aback by the serene beauty she saw in it.
    She had always been wildly attracted to Adam’s handsome virile good looks. They held a fatal charm for most women, that combination of big rough-and-tumble, and the classical beauty of a Michelangelo sculpture. She even remembered telling Deena, “he’s madly attractive, part Michelangelo’s