The Con Artist (A Michael Jackson fanfiction) (Completed)

Fourteen

Nathan

Alexa stroked my hair. Her fingers combed through the strands on my head and twisted pieces of my hair, almost as if to win my heart over.

She did this every night with me, and I with her. She treated me kindly; she gave me the best of the very best, refused to let me down, and always-always-kept her promises. Alexa was a tall woman-taller than Stella by a few inches-and had cold, gray eyes. Her hair was black and soft and was always combed in the same style-the same I had seen on her for three years now. She was, by all means, the most attractive person I had come to meet.

But it'd be an absolute lie to say I was even remotely attracted to her.

We sat in bed together, me in my suit and her in her nightgown, sitting at the edge of the mattress. My head was in her lap; she was busy looking at files strewn across the bedspread. Tonight was a good night.

"Do you want anything, babe?" she crooned, pulling the papers away from herself to look at me, "Food? Something to-?"

"I'm okay," I replied hastily. "I ate earlier."

My tone would never have implied uneasiness, but I was completely mortified by her and what she could do.

"Nathan...nice name," Alexa remarked three years ago. We were standing with her guards in the men's bathroom at the Convention Center. She had placed a cleaning sign on the entrance to the bathroom itself to ensure we had the utmost privacy at the classiest meeting place he could find.

Alexa Chandler, CEO of Phoenix Industries, and I talked previously on the phone about a business deal: Stella and I would work for her in exchange for the use of Phoenix's safe houses across the continents. It was getting tiresome and pricey to jump from hotel to hotel. Alexa was dressed in an expensive suit and looked very much like the woman I had pictured in my head, although much younger than I had intended-perhaps a year or two younger than I was- and I wondered how such a successful person could be so youthful; I was a con artist but she had a business of her own.

"Don't flirt with me, Chandler," I scoffed. "I need this job and I need two positions: one for me and one for my girlfriend."

"Girlfriend?" she raised an eyebrow, "Who might the lucky girl be?"

"That's none of your business. I can assure you that our quality of work is the best of the best-"

"You said you specialized in fieldwork-conning, am I correct?"

"Yes. I also speak French, Spanish, and Russian, I'm good at negotiating-"

"What about computers? How well can you operate them?"

"My partner does that. She's cracked the CIA a number of times without so much as cramps in her fingers from typing so quickly. We're a team; you're not going to get one without the other."

"What's her name?"

"Stella Brooks. Middle name-"

"I won't need that," she stated, pulling the information out from inside her suit jacket and waiting a bit before her eyes widened at the words. I assume this is her first look at it in her possession. She showed me a picture of her and asked, "This her?"

I nodded at the picture of the woman I loved-the same woman that I denied but still cared about greatly. Her dark hair, recently dyed and straightened for the con in Modesto, framed her face nicely and gave way to the color in her eyes. Again, I could only assume Alexa covered her bases ahead of time.

A bit unsettling how easily she could produce that information so quickly.

One of her guards, getting off the phone, comes to whisper in her ear.