"Terrified."

"Good. Now we're even." Delighted to be on level footing, she leaned in and kissed him. "Now you can worry about what I'll be wearing on the big day for the next few weeks. Gotta go." She patted his cheek. "I'm meeting her in twenty minutes."

"Eve." Roarke grabbed for her hand. "You wouldn't do something ridiculous?''

She tugged her way free. "I'm getting married, aren't I? What could be more ridiculous?"

She hoped he stewed over it all day. The idea of marriage was daunting enough, but a wedding – clothes, flowers, music, people. It was horrifying.

She zipped downtown on Lex, braking hard and muttering curses at a sidewalk vendor who encroached on the lane with his smoking glide cart. The traffic violation was bad enough, but the scent of overcooked soydogs hit her nervous stomach like lead.

The Rapid cab behind her broke the intercity noise pollution code by blasting his horn and shouting curses through his speaker. A group, obviously tourists, loaded down with palm cams, compumaps, and binoks gaped stupidly at the whizzing traffic. Eve shook her head as a quick-fingered street thief elbowed through them.

When they got back to their hotel, they were going to find themselves several credits poorer. If she'd had the time and a place to pull over, she might have given the thief a chase. But he was lost in the crowd and a block across town on his air skates before she could blink.

That was New York, she thought with a faint smile. Take it at your own risk.

She loved the crowds, the noise, the constant frantic rush of it. You were rarely alone, but never intimate. That's why she'd come here so many years ago.

No, she wasn't a social animal, but too much space and too much solitude made her nervous.

She'd come to New York to be a cop, because she believed in order, needed it to survive. Her miserable and abusive childhood with all its blank spaces and dark corners couldn't be changed. But she had changed. She had taken control, had made herself into the person some anonymous social worker had named Eve Dallas.