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

clan, led by Adam and Josh, “and
we
are famished too.” It was followed by bursts of laughter and chatter, and a loving kiss from Adam. The children playfully pushed Adam and Mirella forward to follow Rashid, Deena, and Brindley to breakfast.
    The dining room was enchanting. From the dome plunged great swags of fresh white lilacs entwined with lime-green foliage and fashioned into large bows pinned to the walls ten feet above the floor. Dozens of delicate, clear glass bird cages, filled with white cooing doves, hung on varying lengths of vines braided with white daisies. They filled the ceiling, glistening above the guests like a giant crystal aviary.
    One large table circled the room, forming a ring of snowy damask. The antique French silver, rare Gallé crystal goblets, and Meissen dinner service that had been made especially for one of the more refined of the Baltic kings were all wrested from the store of family treasures at Mirella’s home, Wingfield Park.
    Silver pedestal salvers punctuated the center of the table every ten feet or so. Each salver held a tall slender cone of dark, rich chocolate mousse rising from a bed of fresh lilies of the valley and trailing small white roses with just a hint of pale peach color to them. The cones were covered in whipped cream and decoratively frosted with sugar-icing lilies of the valley, blooming round and round up the sides; lovebirds of blown sugar perched on the tops. The wedding cakes were based on — but were not at all like — the traditional Scandinavian “ring cakes” made by piling up rings, in diminishing circumference, of almond-paste dough, and were related more to the intricate
pièces montées
perfected by the famous and unsurpassed eighteenth-century chef Antonin Carême.
    The small, heavily scented white roses trailed off the salvers prettily and were arranged in abundance, in twists and turns down the table’s center from one silver-pedestaled wedding cake to another and around the table, and hence around the room.
    On a raised circular platform in the center of the ring of table, and directly under the center of the dome and the crystal aviary, sat a musician at a seventeenth-century harpsichord of satinwood decorated with exquisite floral painting. A flautist stood and a viola player sat in front of intricately carved music stands of the same period, decorated with white satin bows and streamers, and bunches of fresh, sweet-scented lilies of the valley.
    The concert of chamber music chosen by Lili was from the court of King Louis XIV of France: François Couperin’s
Air Contrafugue, Concert Royal No. 2
. It was perfection; its grace and sweetness not cloying, but utterly charming.
    They dined, served by an army of liveried French waiters, one waiter standing behind every second high-backed chair, on soufflé amalatta, filled with the finest shiny black beads of beluga caviar; lobster in aspic, dressed in a foamy yellow saffron sauce; lychee sorbet. A perfectly chilled Bâtard-Montrachet1971, a top white burgundy as rich in flavor as a dry white wine can be, accompanied these courses.
    Scotch woodcock, poached in a cream and anchovy sauce and served with spinach croquettes, followed by artichoke and avocado salad, dressed in a lemon and raspberry vinaigrette; mango and lime sorbet (to clear the palate once more); and finally, for dessert, the chocolate mousse wedding cake. The game birds in their cream sauce were served with an outstandingly fine and rare Bordeaux, a treasure of a wine whose bouquet resembled violets and raspberries, and color that of liquid rubies and dark amethysts, the monumental 1945 Château Mouton-Rothschild. No other wines were served with the salad or the dessert: sacrilege to drink anything after the Mouton-Rothschild claret.
    At one point during the meal, Adam looked around the wedding-ring table and his eyes lingered for a moment on Rashid and Lili, who were seated next to each other. They had done Mirella and him proud —