He'd looked straight at her, with a mischievous glint in his eyes. "How do you know I'm not passionately in love with my grandmother?" he'd said.

"If you were you wouldn't still be looking for someone," she'd replied, quick as silver.

"And what makes you think I am?"

Now it was she who smiled. "I read the magazines," she said.

"They never tell the truth," he replied. "I live the life of a monk. I swear." She said nothing to this, thinking she'd probably said far too much already: lost the sale, lost her job too, if Erickson had overheard the exchange. "I'll take the star," he said. "Thank you for the advice."

He made the purchase and left, taking his charm, his presence, and the glint in his eye away with him. She'd felt strangely cheated when he'd gone, as though he'd also taken something that belonged to her, absurd though that was. As he strode away from the store Noelle came in with the coffees.

"Was that who I think it was?" she said, her eyes wide.

Rachel nodded.

"He's even more gorgeous in the flesh, isn't he?" Noelle remarked. Rachel nodded. "You're drooling."

Rachel laughed. "He is handsome."

"Was he on his own?" Noelle said. She looked back out into the street as the limo was pulling away. "Was she with him?"

"Who's she?"

"Natasha Morley. The model. The anorexic one."

"They're all anorexic."

"They're not happy," Noelle remarked with unperturb-able certainty. "You can't be that thin and be happy."

"She wasn't with him. He was buying something for his grandmother."

"Oh that bitch," Noelle sniped. "The one who always dresses in white."

"Loretta."

"That's right. Loretta. She's his grandfather's second wife." Noelle was chatting as though the Geary family were next door neighbors. "I read something in People where they said she basically runs the family. Controls everybody."

"I can't imagine anybody controlling him," Rachel said, still staring out into the street.

"But wouldn't you love the opportunity?" Noelle replied.

Erickson appeared from the back office at this juncture, in a foul temper. Despite the rapidly worsening storm they had been instructed to keep the store open until eight-thirty. This was a minor reprieve: two days before Christmas they were usually open till ten at night, to catch what Erickson called "guilty spouse business." The more expensive the present, Erickson always said, the more acts of adultery the customer had committed during the preceding year. When in a particularly waspish mood, he wasn't above quoting a number as the door slammed.

So they dutifully stayed in the store, and the snow, as predicted, got worse. There was a smattering of business, but nothing substantial.

And then, just as Erickson was starting to take the displays out of the window for the night, a man came in with an envelope for Rachel.

"Mr. Geary says he's sorry, he didn't get your name," the messenger told her.

"My name's Rachel."

"I'll tell him. I'm his driver and his bodyguard, by the way. I'm Ralph."

"Hello, Ralph."

Ralph-who was six foot six if he was an inch, and looked as though he'd had a distinguished career as a punching bag-grinned. "Hello, Rachel," he said. "I'm pleased to meet you." He pulled off his leather glove and shook Rachel's hand. "Well, goodnight folks." He trudged back to the door. "Avoid the Tobin Bridge, by the way. There was a wreck and it's all snarled up."

Rachel had no wish to open the envelope in front of Noelle or Erickson, but nor could she stand the idea of waiting another nineteen minutes until the store was closed, and she was out on the street alone. So she opened it. Inside was a short, scrawled note from Mitchell Geary, inviting her to the Algonquin Club for drinks the following evening, which was Christmas Eve.

Three and a half weeks later, in a restaurant in New York, he gave her the diamond butterfly brooch, and told her he was falling in love.

This is as good a place as any to attempt a brief sketch of the Geary family. It's a long, long drop from the topmost branch, where Rachel Pallenberg was poised the moment she became the wife of Mitchell Geary, to the roots of the family; and those roots are buried so deep into the earth I'm not sure I'm quite ready to disinter them. So instead allow me to concern myself-at least for now-with that part of the family tree that's readily visible: the part that appears in the books about the rise and influence of the Geary engine.

It quickly becomes apparent, even in a casual skimming of these volumes, that for several generations the Gearys have behaved (and have been treated) like a form of American royalty. Like royalty, they've always acted as though they were above the common law; this in both their private and their corporate dealings. Over the years several members of the dynasty have behaved in ways that would have guaranteed incarceration if they hadn't been who they were: everything from driving in a highly intoxicated state to wife-beating. Like royalty, there has often been a grandeur to both their passions and to their failures which galvanized the rest of us, whose lives are by necessity confined. Even the people that they'd abused over the years-either in their personal lives or in their corporate machinations-were entranced by them; ready to forgive and forget if the gaze of the Gearys would only be turned their way again. And, like royalty, they had their feet in blood. No throne was ever won or held without violence; and though the Gearys were not blessed by the same king-making gods who'd crowned the royal heads of Europe, or the emperors of China or Japan, there was a dark, bloody spirit in their collective soul, a Geary daemon if you will, who invested them with an authority out of all proportion to their secular rights. It made them fierce in love, and fierce still in hatred, it made them iron-willed and long-lived; it made them casually cruel and just as casually charismatic.

Most of the time, it was as though they didn't even know what they were doing, good, bad or indifferent. They lived in a kind of trance of self-absorption, as though the rest of the world was simply a mirror held up to their, faces, and they passed through life seeing only themselves.

In some ways love was the ultimate manifestation of the Geary daemon; because love was the way that the family increased itself, enriched itself.

For the males it was almost a point of pride that they be adulterous, and that the world know it, even if the subject wasn't talked about above a whisper. This dubious tradition had been initiated by Mitch's great-grandfather, Laurence Grainger Geary, who'd been a cocksman of legendary stamina, and had fathered, according to one estimate, at least two dozen bastards. His taste in mistresses had been broad. Upon his death two black women in Kentucky, sisters no less, claimed to have his children; a very well respected Jewish philanthropist in upstate New York, who had served with old man Geary on a committee for the Rehabilitation of Public Morals, had attempted suicide, and revealed in her farewell letter the true paternity of her three daughters, while the madam of a bordello in New Mexico had showed her son to the local press, pointing out how very like a Geary child he looked.

Laurence's wife Verna had made no public response to these claims. But they took their toll on the unhappy woman. A year later she was committed to the same institution that had housed Mary Lincoln in her last years. There Verna Geary survived for a little over a decade, before making a pitiful exit from the world.

Only one of her four children (she'd lost another three in their infancy) was at all attentive to her in her failing years: her eldest daughter, Eleanor. The old woman did not care for Eleanor's constant kindness, however. She loved only one of her children enough to beg his presence, in letter after letter, through the period of her incarceration: that was her beloved son Cadmus. The object of her affections was unresponsive. He visited her once, and never came again. Arguably Verna was the author of her own son's cruelty. She'd taught him from his earliest childhood that he was an exceptional soul, and one of the manifestations of this specialness was the fact that he never had to set eyes on any sight that didn't please him. So now, when he was faced with such a sight-his mother in a state of mental disarray-he simply averted his eyes.