White Moon Black Sea (11 page)

She had no idea at what point the erotic turned into a night of sexual depravity for her, because the last thing she could remember upon waking in the arms of her lover, Rashid, was standing with him in the dark of the bedroom looking through the glass wall at his private swimming pool, lit only by the moon and dozens of fat white church candles glowing from hurricane lamps. The scene she saw of Sabrina naked in the pool, her skin glowing like satin, being ravaged by three huge men as they spun her around and around in the water, and the acts of lust by which the men had wrung screams of ecstasy from her while Cynthia herself was being taken mercilessly by Rashid from behind,
seared her mind. Only fragmented memories of what more had happened to her with Rashid kept slipping in and out of her memory, and she knew that she was blocking them out, fearful to be reminded how willingly she had acceded to his every demand.

She watched him as he slept and wondered how a man could be so beautiful, so sensual and seductive even in his sleep. He was the devil in the skin of a handsome prince, and she wished that she could find a wooden stake to drive through his heart, to destroy him forever, as that night with him had destroyed her for any other man. She would love him for the rest of her life, exactly what he had warned her against.

His eyes fluttered open. Their gazes met, and he smiled. It would have been bearable for her if his wakening smile had been a morning-after smile, had been a smarmy smirk, a sneaky know-it-all kind of smile, even an I-told-you-so smile. But it was none of those, it was more of a lover’s smile, tender, generous, and gentle. And that she found impossible to cope with.

“Good morning,” he said, stroking her hair and kissing her on the cheek.

“Hello,” she answered, wishing she could have said something more clever than that, something that would give her the courage to thank him and leave his bed with a degree of dignity. Not a word more could she muster.

“You were a delight last night, wonderful. Thank you for being such a lovely and sexy lady.”

Then Rashid took her with before-breakfast sex; but Cynthia made love. Afterward they swam in the pool and had breakfast together under the sun: rich, ripe strawberries dipped in fresh, pure Vermont maple syrup, crisp bacon and shirred eggs, blueberry muffins straight from the oven, and many cups of hot black coffee.

They returned to the bedroom and lay together once more on the bed. Rashid opened the red Pratesi beach robe she wore and began to fondle her. She slid her hand under his robe and returned his caresses. As she felt him once again hard in her hand, he slipped out of his robe.

“Stay with me while I make my morning phone calls.
I’m not ready to let you join the others. Let me be selfish and keep you to myself for just a little longer.”

All the right words a woman wants to hear after she has allowed a man to use and abuse her, devour and enslave her to him. But where was the passion in his voice to match what she felt? Where was the tenderness and loving and caring, the need that she felt for him in every pore of her body? They weren’t there. Oh, the words were right, the charm and the suave manners, but where were the feelings?

Of course she stayed. Stayed and took him in her mouth and slowly sucked and licked and caressed with her hands, helpless to walk away from him and the stream of orgasms his fingers brought from teasing her clitoris and probing deep inside her soft, moist vagina.

Lost yet again in her sexual madness for Rashid, she was unaware of how little what they were doing meant to him until she heard him. It was more the tone of his voice, the love instilled in every word he spoke that shocked her. She listened as if he were far away and his words had nothing to do with the joy of the sexual foreplay they were sharing. She wished she were deaf and could not hear what he was saying. But she wasn’t deaf, nor was he far off, and she heard him clearly saying, “Good morning, Mirella, my dearest heart. Are you alone?”

He paused and listened, “Oh good, then I can tell you how much I miss you. How exciting it was to make love to you and feel the baby inside you move at the same time. How can you ever know what a joy that is for a man?”

He listened while Mirella Wingfield Corey, his mistress, spoke. Then he answered her. “Of course it doesn’t matter to me that the child you carry is your husband’s. Do you think I enjoyed it any the less, or that I love you any the less because it’s not mine. Stop thinking this child is going to change our lives. Our love will never change, no matter what any of us do, you, Adam, or I.”

It finally struck Cynthia, heavily, what a humiliating position she was in. Suddenly she felt like a sex object, wallowing in loveless ecstasy. Whoever that woman on the telephone was, she had Rashid Lala Mustapha as Cynthia would never have him, and it was too painful to hear it.
She tried to pull herself away, but Rashid would have none of that, he was too close to coming. He held her tightly by the back of her neck — she almost gagged, so far down her throat was he. She heard nothing more of what was spoken. His voice suddenly sounded far off again, and the next moment she felt the hard thrust of a jade phallus fucking her while she serviced Rashid with her mouth. He exploded with great force, calling Mirella’s name over and over again, and followed through by ramming Cynthia with the jade dildo until she begged for mercy because she was so exhausted.

It was sunset when she woke up. She was alone. On the pillow next to her were a jeweler’s box and a note. She read,

Cynthia sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed and began to cry. She was hopelessly infatuated with Rashid. She opened the Cartier leather box. There on the black velvet lay a twisted rope of several strands of angel-skin coral beads entwined with strands of black and white seed pearls and a strand of small diamonds, clasped by an oval of black coral surrounded by diamonds.

The last thing Cynthia Cohen did before she left the room was to also put a note on the pillow.

It sounded more cynical than she was able to feel. Bitterly she made her way from Southampton, fighting back her tears for paradise lost.

6

T
he summer was coming to its natural end. Much too quickly, thought Mirella. And then, on the other hand, not quickly enough. Indecisively was the way she was feeling about everything these days. It had been the kind of summer that dreams are made of. Or so she was constantly being told by everyone in East Hampton. Not least the Corey clan: All Adam’s children and their respective mothers, who kept drifting in and out of the house until Adam sent them all back to Istanbul, with the exception of Joshua, whom Mirella and Adam spent a great deal of time with.

She sat on the sidelines of the tennis tournaments, the golf games and pitiful cricket matches, the picturesque and amusing races up and down the beach on Corey thoroughbreds in the dawn hours or at sunset. She described herself as a beached whale sending out dolphin signals. Days on end she lay on the beach in the sun or swam in the sea, unable to come to terms with carrying a child fathered by Adam, and the changes having a child was going to make in her life. Picnics and dinners were planned solely to whet her appetite for food, which in the last few weeks, after their return from the gala in Paris, she had lost almost completely. Being social or reclusive, she felt fragmented. Little pieces of her seemed always to be somewhere other than where she was.

The whole clan, Rashid included, had sailed to Newport and lost in the races. They had gone on to Martha’s Vineyard and won the around-the-island race there. Mirella had stayed at home and had just been pregnant. Together with Brindley Ribblesdale, her English solicitor, she plotted and planned how to fight Rashid and win back what he had stolen from her legacy. Rashid gave three grand parties. Only close friends — and an endless stream of
pretty girls — were invited. They flew in from everywhere. Extra security had to be arranged when the president of France graced one of them. Mirella attended them all.

On several occasions during the summer, Mirella and Adam disappeared for a few days at a time. Twice they flew into the city and stayed at the Fifth Avenue house, where the doctors examined Mirella and made tests. They reassured her that all was well with her pregnancy and her baby. There had been concern.

In Paris, as short a time ago as the night of the gala, she had still been so small hardly anyone would have guessed she was in her ninth month of pregnancy. Then suddenly she began to show and rapidly grew heavy with child. That and the coming event of giving birth had alarmed her. What few maternal instincts she had suddenly offended her. Yet, when she stood naked in front of the mirror, she caressed the swell of her belly and found her body not unattractive. She often placed her hands between the bottom of her belly and the curve of her mound and enjoyed feeling the weight of her pregnancy.

And she enjoyed enormously the sex she had with her husband and her lover. If possible, even more in these last few weeks than ever before. It had to do with the men and their erotic adoration of her in her pregnant state, the caring and imaginative sexual intercourse they loved her with, especially Rashid. It seemed to keep her even more sexually excited than usual at a time when she had expected not to want sex. That embarrassed her. Hardly an hour went by in which she in fantasy did not take the phallus of Adam or Rashid, full and erect, to probe slowly, deeply inside her. Once she imagined having both their penises, side by side, fucking her. She would be filled with them, and baby, to the bursting point. There would be pain, but there would be extraordinary physical and psychological pleasure as well when they all three came and bathed her and her child in their exquisite orgasms. Mirella felt woozy, overcome by lust and her erotic imagination. But she was not deluded; she understood well her anxieties about becoming a mother. They centered on losing her lust for love and an erotic life with her two men. Or possibly
transferring her feelings for them to her child. Her feelings of maternity vied with her sexual power over these two remarkable men.

Her mother, Lily, had been of no help to Mirella during her pregnancy. Lily had been made to come to terms with her daughter as heiress to a fortune she felt should have gone to herself if to anyone at all. Then Mirella had married Adam. For a while, Lily had behaved better toward her daughter than she had since Mirella had been a child. Though her new attitude toward Mirella had not come easily. In fact, it had been forced upon her when Princess Eirene, a close friend to Adam, Rashid, and Mirella, had made revelations to Lily about herself and her own mother. Rashid, too, had warned her to change toward Mirella or bear the consequences, which he assured Lily would ruin her life forever.

Lily recognized the evil streak in Rashid’s nature and trembled before it. If she had had any doubts as to how far he would go to see that Lily behaved properly with Mirella, they were quelled when he consummated his psychological seduction of Lily with sex. It became the chain that bound her as it bound so many other women to Rashid. On Lily’s chain there was an extra link: He blackmailed her with the threat to reveal their sexual dalliance, not only to Mirella but to the world. The gossip columnists would be able to ruin all their lives.

The improved relationship between mother and daughter became strained once again when Mirella announced she was going to have a baby. The news threw Lily into a fit of anguish. She was obsessed with Rashid. She feared the baby might be his. That she could not endure. Her jealousy burned. She said nothing of her fears to Mirella. How could she, having no proof that Mirella and Rashid were having a sexual life together? Since rumors were not enough, she tried another tack. She simply suggested to Mirella that she abort her pregnancy, playing to Mirella’s feelings of being too old, that she wasn’t the maternal type or capable of handling motherhood. Wasn’t she a career woman with no room for motherhood? Mightn’t she lose the adoration of her husband and Rashid? What of the sheer
indignity of giving birth, the pain, the mess? Lily went on about motherhood and mother-love and what traps they were. She created a whole line of monstrous mothers in the family, trying to genetically prove her point. Mirella responded finally by allowing Lily close contact with her only when either Adam or Rashid was around. At those times Lily was an angel purveying positive thoughts for Mirella.

During the last few months of her pregnancy, more and more Mirella’s thoughts kept drifting back to her maternal great-grandmother, Roxelana Oujie, her benefactress. This notorious beauty, at one time the most powerful woman in the Ottoman court, had ruled the sultan with her magnificent looks and clever mind, and her sexual prowess. His children she loved and cared for in a ruthless way, so that they always added to her life, her power, and her wealth. And her maternal grandmother, Inje, one of the last women to be born in and live, as her childhood friend the Princess Eirene had, in the harem of the Palace of Topkapi. It took her pregnancy to make Mirella finally accept how much unlike her own mother she was, and how like Inje and Roxelana she had become. Through years of sleuthing, Brindley Ribblesdale had established her as the heiress to the Oujie legacy. Because of him she had discovered her remarkable ancestors. Because of him, too, she had been seduced by Rashid and married Adam. It had been hard to come to terms with the erotic and free-spirited side of her nature, the wealthy, opulent, and exotic life she was living. After all, she had been brought up in New England under the influence of her father’s family, the Wingfields, and her maternal grandfather’s family, puritanical, high-society, New England WASPs.

Adam understood everything she was going through. She knew that instinctively, and she appreciated that he did not force her to speak about her anxieties, but rather waited for her to work them out and approach him with actions rather than words. In this way he let her confirm her ability to rise admirably to the changes in her life and her work. Miraculously her moves always enriched their
love for each other. He had been less understanding when, on her return from Paris after the gala, while approaching touchdown at Kennedy Airport, she had announced that Rashid had robbed her. She had explained how, and when, and why he had done it. Adam acquiesced in her wishes that he stay out of the affair and behave as if the crime did not exist, that he treat Rashid exactly as he always had until she had determined her strategy to his latest treachery. He knew from past experience that what Mirella finally decided would be the right thing for all of them. Adam had no illusions about their
ménage à trois
and how important it was to his wife and to their happiness.

It had not been easy for Adam to keep quiet and take no action against Rashid. But he did as she asked. Then there had been Joshua to convince to do the same. Her stepson adored her, was in love with her, wanted her for his own. Having come to terms with his intimate feelings for her, and his love for his father, he had won his painful battle with lust for Mirella. He had accepted that he could never have her except as a loving friend, his father’s wife, family. Joshua took the position that, if he could not have Mirella as a lover, no man but his father would. Joshua therefore resented Rashid’s involvement in Adam and Mirella’s life. Rashid’s attention and devotion to Mirella infuriated him. Obsessively. Whenever he could discredit Rashid in Mirella’s eyes, he did it. In fact, Joshua was the only real threat to happiness in this
ménage à trois
. This trying to banish Rashid from his parents’ lives disturbed the poise of love and respect on which the threesome balanced its survival.

Mirella wondered if she could just say nothing about her losses to Joshua. But she knew that would be a mistake; he was certain to hear about it. As usual Adam had come to her rescue. Together they told Joshua the news and convinced him that it was Mirella’s business and he must obey her in this. He reluctantly agreed but declared that he wanted Rashid banned from their lives forever. His father’s response shocked him.

“Okay, Joshua, Rashid has a streak of bad in him. It’s pathological. He has to make everything and everyone conform to his will. That’s his way of life, the dark side of
him. Mirella and I know that. We don’t need you to be forever targeting his defects for us. But, in his own way, he loves us. As much as he can love anyone. And he has become a part of our lives, and I suppose it’ll always be that way. So keep out. And I mean that. I never want to discuss this again, ever. Do I make myself clear?”

Adam had evidently successfully impressed this on Joshua because, from then on, it was as if the offense did not exist. When Rashid appeared, Joshua became elaborately civilized, downright charming to Rashid, as he had usually been before Mirella came into their lives. So much so that Mirella suspected Joshua had either accepted the situation or blanked it out of his mind. Joshua’s change of attitude was a decided relief to them all. The constraint on the relationship had been removed.

Mirella and Adam were on their way back to East Hampton, and their turn-of-the-century, weatherworn, gray-shingled summer mansion, after seeing the city doctors.

Adam gave the controls to his pilot, Sam. He sat with Mirella behind Sam, holding her hand. The helicopter veered off at a right angle from its pad on the edge of the East River near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. They whirled their way toward the city’s summer havens. Adam squeezed her hand.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded and returned his squeeze.

“You don’t look all right. You look very pale. Are you upset by what the doctor told you?”

“Not so much upset as annoyed with myself, because it’s probably true what he said.”

“I think he was a bit harsh with you. I don’t believe he quite picked up what you feel about having this baby.”

“I don’t either, Adam.” She smiled at her husband and kissed him on the cheek as if to reassure him. But she knew that the doctor had been absolutely right in what he said. She could still hear his words, “Mirella, your baby is due next week, but are you going to carry on as you have been through this entire pregnancy? Delighted to be pregnant, yes, but so preoccupied with everyone, everything in your
life that you hardly have time to prepare yourself for the birth of your child. Go on that way and you will carry your baby for maybe two, even three weeks before you give birth. You’re a strong-willed woman and your determination not to let this pregnancy interfere with your life had made you hold back. An attitude like yours could be affecting your baby. It just might not want to be born either. It’s time to let go, Mirella, feel rotten, bloated, nervous, and touchy. Cry, be unhappy, be miserable. Or marvelous, or whatever. But relax and give in, let your baby be born. Become a mother.”

Even as his words went through her mind, she was thinking of anything but the birth of her child. Rashid dominated her thoughts. She had no doubt that Rashid loved her in his way as much as Adam did. But he lived so determinedly to the full on his own terms that even the taste of Mirella’s real love was absorbed into himself. He lived for his involvement with women. And she now knew his obsession to restore to himself the power and wealth the Lala Mustapha family once wielded. How was merely she ever likely to change all this? He was going to die as he lived — in the thrall of sexual oblivion with women, tempered by a touch of love.

Mirella was preoccupied with the idea that the day was coming soon when she would confront Rashid, and together they would both uncover that flaw in him, the inherent streak of evil that had stopped Mirella from submitting totally to him. She and Rashid had faced that flaw in him once before, learned to accept and live with the darkest side of his nature, and to love each other in spite of it. Their all-consuming sexual love evolved into a love that reached deeper than either of them ever expected or wanted. It was bound to happen again if she confronted him with his latest act of disloyalty. The time before it had caused tension within the dangerous emotional triangle of Mirella, Adam, and Rashid. For the moment Mirella felt that she could not afford either the tension or the possible consequences of such a confrontation. At least, not until the baby was safely born.