Book excerpt: Inside New York's Elite Society, Fiona and John Briggs are royalty. Fiona is young, beautiful and famous for her watercolors of the Chesapeake marshes. John is the Wall Street kingpin who is brilliant, distinguished and has a flair of life. He is the sole heir to the Briggs fortune and he and his mother, Lenny, New York socialite extraordinaire, have been waiting ten years for Fiona to produce the one possession they want to more than anything- a child to carry on their legacy. Fiona has endured their endless emotional assaults about a child that can never be and in her attempt to escape from John's endless love affairs and horrendous fits of rage she has met and fallen hopelessly in love with another man.