She did not like having her picture taken.

Now he was on her doorstep. She supposed she wouldn’t get much sympathy from her friends: they’d warned her about having her name, address and phone number listed in the Boston white pages. You’re rich, they told her. You have to act rich.

But that wasn’t Ashley’s style.

The little worm was grinning at her. “Next time you could smile, you know.”

She opened the car door wide. Dressed in a raw silk suit and a tissue linen shell, she looked the model female executive—except for her eyes, which were too large and too bright and too vivid a shade of blue. Her face had strong angular features, and she was slim through the hips, and at five six, not tall. People said she had a striking personality: once met, she wasn’t easily forgotten.

“Next time,” she said, “I could smash your camera over your head.”

“I could write that down.”

“Go ahead.” Since his photographs of her had yet to appear in any periodical she knew of, she had decided he was little more than a desperate pest, looking for his first big break. Well, it wouldn’t be her.

He shifted his weight onto one leg. “Quite the ice princess, huh?”

“I’m not a princess, Mr.—” She wished she could get his name.

But he didn’t introduce himself. “Then what are you? You know, you had a photographer from the Post believing you discovered treasure on a sunken Spanish galleon.”

So he knew about that. Ashley was surprised. That had been one of her many indiscretions, long regretted, but preferable to the truth. People always wanted to know where she came from. What difference did it make? “I’m just a hardworking woman.”

“Yeah. Right.”

She climbed into the car, tucked her loose hairs back into her twist and turned the key in the ignition. The photographer patted the hood. “Don’t drive too fast,” he said.

It was her pleasure to screech out into Chestnut Street and watch him scamper back onto the sidewalk, out of her way.

After Ashley Wakefield buzzed off in her sporty Jaguar, Rob Gazelle walked on back to his hotel at Copley Place, one of the new high-class urban malls sprouting up in city after city. He immediately called Sybil Morgenstern. It was almost six o’clock on a sweaty Tuesday, but he knew Sybil would be in her sleek Madison Avenue office, puffing away on one of the skinny brown cigarettes she smoked by the dozen. Rob never touched the things. Sybil was the editor in chief of You magazine, and scores of Rob’s ill-gotten photographs had graced her covers. It was a glossy national weekly that catered to the public’s insatiable curiosity about celebrities. No one topped Sybil for being able to ferret out the latest juicy tidbits about the rich and the famous, but she wasn’t satisfied with stopping there.

Sybil Morgenstern had to create celebrities.

She answered the phone herself. Rob stretched out on his bed. “Hey, Syb, how you doing?”