Oil, watercolor, and compu artists hawked their wares on corners and in storefronts, competing with food vendors who promised hybrid fruits, iced yogurts, or vegetable purees uncontaminated by preservatives.

Members of the Pure Sect, a Soho staple, glided in their snowy, street-dusting gowns, their eyes glowing and their heads shaved. Eve gave one particularly devout-looking supplicant a few tokens and was rewarded with a beatific smile and a glossy pebble.

"Pure love," the devotee offered her. "Pure joy."

"Yeah, right," Eve murmured and sidestepped.

She had to backtrack to find Leonardo's. The up-and-coming designer had a third-floor loft. The window that faced the street was crammed with fashions, blots and flows of color and form that had Eve swallowing nervously. Her taste leaned toward the plain – the drab, according to Mavis.

It didn't appear, as she took the people glide up to get a closer look, that Leonardo leaned toward either.

The clutching in her stomach came back with a vengeance as she stared at the window display with its feathers and beads and dyed rubber unisuits. However much pleasure she would get from making Roarke wince, she wasn't getting married in neon rubber.

There was more, a great deal more. It seemed Leonardo believed in advertising in a big way. His centerpiece, a ghostly white faceless model, was draped in a collection of transparent scarves that shimmered so dramatically that the material seemed alive.

Eve could all but feel it crawling over her skin.

Uh-uh, she thought. No way in heaven or hell. She turned, thinking only of escape, and rapped straight into Mavis.

"His stuff is so frigid." Mavis slipped a friendly, restraining arm around Eve's waist and gazed dreamily into the window.