the
restaurant in time to get to the eleven o'clock writer's panel.
A few minutes later he was able to down the last of his coffee and head for
the escalators. As he was descending, Cade heard a soft swear word as something
ripped behind him. He turned to find a woman kneeling to try to pick up the
contents of her purse.
The seam of her tight skirt had opened all the way up to her ass and she was
scrabbling to pick stuff up before the escalator step reached the bottom.
Cade helped her, of course, and they succeeded, then they stepped to one
side of the escalator and he held her purse and stuff as she tried to do
something about her skirt.
"It's too tight," said Cade. "It'll just open up again. Might as well say to
hell with it and change when you get a chance."
She froze, then gaped irritatedly at him.
"Are you saying I'm fat?"
Cade eyed her ample bosom and the fullness of her thigh -- not an excessive
fullness at all -- and shook his head.
"Nope. I said exactly what I meant. That skirt's too tight. It probably
won't stay fixed."
Her irritated gaze became a glare.
"What the hell do you know..?"
Shoving her purse and stuff at her, Cade interrupted her impending rant
with, "Yeah, right. Forget it, lady. Here. Have fun trying to hold yourself
together," and walked away.
The writer's panel covered nothing that hadn't been covered before. Cade's
main reason for not leaving was that Mandi might come looking for him and it was
one of the places he'd circled on the schedule page he'd left for her.
With three hours to kill before the next panel, Cade went back to his room
by way of the ops room. Mandi hadn't returned, but he learned that his laptop
had been marked for return to him, so he retrieved it and used his room's phone
line to check email and surf the net a bit.
He'd found next to nothing about superwomen the day before. Now there were
dozens of sites. All of them had essentially the same pictures -- cuts from the
news and scans of the flyer Mandi had handed out -- but a few had pictures from
the car-juggling event and the parking lot afterward.
He turned off his laptop and put it in his backpack. Mandi's luggage was
still in his room, but there was nothing about her that he wanted or needed to
know so badly that it would justify opening her bags.
Cade made himself a coffee and flopped on the bed to see what was in the
day's news. Qu