22
Spencer
Spencer Carson wandered the Convention Hall aimlessly.
He’d arrived early, but when he learned that Katie’s signings didn’t begin until late morning he went to the cafe downstairs and had a good breakfast and a couple of energy drinks before heading back up.
He was surprised not to have heard from her after she received his gift. He’d waited up late, sure that he would get a phone call. She would go on and on pretending that she didn’t want him in her home or that she wanted him to leave her alone, secretly getting off on the excuse to talk to him.
But she hadn’t called. She hadn’t even texted. And she hadn’t called the police, as far as he knew.
What had she done?
There were a million possible scenarios.
He might have enjoyed thinking about them if the private investigator hadn’t told him the big goofy bodyguard had spent the night.
That narrowed it down to only a few scenarios.
And none of them involved Katie stripping off her clothes and rolling around naked in Spencer’s roses, fantasizing that it was him all over her body.
A lesser man might have thought that his attentions had pushed the bodyguard into her bed.
But Spencer Carson knew better.
This was just one more way for the little whore to play hard to get. Nothing got her off more than torturing him and pretending not to care.
Well, two could play at that game.
He stayed away from the Suspended in Space table and instead wandered the hall, looking for someone to flaunt in front of her.
There were plenty of Katie Bly cosplayers, but they were all cows up close compared to the real thing. Besides, that wouldn’t feel like ignoring her. That would be the opposite. He needed to let her know she was the last thing on his mind. He racked his brain for a way to make that clear.
He found a pretty hot Wonder Woman, but she spurned his advances. She was probably a lesbian. Spencer was pretty sure that when you put that many women on an island without men the writing was on the wall, so he didn’t take it personally.
He was rounding a corner in hot pursuit of a serviceable Harley Quinn when he saw something interesting.
The bodyguard, Kate’s freaking bodyguard, was leaning on the counter of one of the booths, women fawning all over him.
The guy ignored the flirtation, like he was a teacher or a cop or something, which only increased Spencer’s irritation.
But he stayed anyway to watch the guy for a minute. It would be good to get in his head, figure him out. Hell, maybe Spencer could even get to the bottom of what the brute had done to him last time they crossed paths.
No matter how many times he went over it in his head, Spencer just couldn’t see how the bodyguard had lifted him up so easily. Clearly he was a big dude, but so was Spencer. It just didn’t seem possible.
And then there was that business of not being able to move afterward. It was just… impossible.
The clues had to be here though.
Spencer examined the man from afar.
He was very tall, dark hair, gray eyes. He wasn’t wearing any kind of patches or pins that would indicate he was into martial arts.
He was super good-looking, almost suspiciously so. He looked more like he was a model or a soap star, not a bodyguard.
Spencer’s eye kept getting drawn to the sign over the guy’s head. He was at that dumb What-Would-You-Look-Like-As-An-Alien? booth, and he was standing directly under the third panel of the sign, so there were giant letters over his head that said:
An ALIEN?
It was super distracting. Spencer wished the guy would walk away from it so he could stop accidentally reading the sign every time he tried to figure out what was up with the dude.
Stop, Spencer, he told himself. Think.
Those were the words his impulse control coach had taught him to repeat to himself whenever he got rammy. The guy was a real nut-job. His mom had hired him, and almost nothing he said made a bit of sense to Spencer. But the stop-think advice was handy now and then.
Spencer stopped and looked at the bodyguard and tried to think clearly.
His eyes went back to the sign.
An ALIEN?
He wrenched his eyes back to the man.
The man was enormous, unusually attractive, and had some kind of weird fighting skills…
An ALIEN?
Something incredible occurred to Spencer.
This guy looked a lot like those big dudes from another planet that had been all over the news lately.
Spencer was pretty sure the whole thing was a hoax, but the rest of the world seemed to think it was legit.
He looked back at the guy, assessing him.
Maybe he had used crazy alien superpowers in their fight. That was the only way to explain him getting the best of someone as experienced as Spencer.
His heart began to pound with excitement. He had figured it out, for sure. And without any outside help.
He spun on his heel and half-jogged out of the crowded hall. He needed to get somewhere where it wasn’t so crowded. Then he’d be able to think.
He headed up the first set of stairs he found.
He had made an unbelievable discovery. That much was for sure.
And having this piece of secret information would definitely be advantageous to him.
It was only a matter of how advantageous.
He found himself in a quiet space, where a baby grand piano sat overlooking the west entrance and the lobby below. He approached the piano bench and sat. On TV, smart characters sometimes played music to help them think. Spencer couldn’t play any instruments. But the view was nice.
He was watching the people milling about in the lobby below when the real truth of the situation hit him.
Katie was seeing an alien. She was sleeping with a real, godforsaken alien.
And it wasn’t Prazgar.
Spencer took a deep breath and willed himself not to let the rage consume him.
Stop. Think.
He wondered why the alien was pretending not to be an alien. If Spencer were an alien, he’d be strutting his stuff for the press. But these aliens were kind of private, from what he’d been able to pick up.
As a matter of fact, it occurred to him that according to GQ, there were only three aliens on Earth in the first place. And they were in some dinky little rural town. They weren’t supposed to be in the city.
And they had all gotten married, so one of them definitely shouldn’t be sleeping with Katie Henderson.
Spencer was so thunderstruck he froze in place, causing a woman behind him to smash into his back and spray him with some kind of coffee concoction.
“Oh geez, I’m so sorry,” she quavered.
“Watch it, loser,” he roared. “I’m trying to think.”
She scurried away as he tried to wipe the whipped cream off his shirt.
So Katie was sleeping with an alien and keeping it a secret because he was married to someone else.
That was information he could use.
As far as Spencer saw it, the info could help him in one of two ways. Either he could tell Kate that he knew everything and use that leverage to get what he wanted from her…
Or he could blow the doors off the thing in revenge, and watch from the sidelines as it all blew up in her face.
Then, when her chips were down, Spencer would have the pleasure of swooping in to pick up the pieces of her broken life.
Like taking candy from a baby.