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When Strand arrives at the party, it’s in full swing. The orchestra is playing a merry tempo and there’s a line at the bar. All and all, it looks like every other benefit that he’s attended or thrown since his days as a grad student at Yale and he’d worked as a waiter circulating with glasses of watered down drinks or luke warm canapes. Of course if it wasn’t for the fact that Alex was here, Dr. Richard Strand, noted skeptic and generalized scourge of the paranormal community wouldn’t be caught dead at this particular gala.
Well, he’d assumed that he definitely would have been ‘invited’ here once his body was in a crematory plot—Strand doubts that The American Institute for Psychic Research would be able to stop itself from saying that they’d conjured the spirit of their nemesis and noted skeptic Dr. Richard Strand. Strand himself had even gone so far as to make a provision in his will that should the AIPR even attempt to do such a thing, they would incur a licensing fee of a million dollars for using his posthumous likeness. At the time, it had seemed a joke, something to ease his passing for Ruby but now he knows that there is little doubt that these idiots are going to heave one final insult on his person.
After all, it isn’t like Strand actually paid for his ticket into the evening's festivities.
But hearing that Alex was attending from the idle gossip of the interns when he’d arrived at the studio this afternoon had spurned Strand into action—with him even going so far as to dig his tuxedo out of the garment bag from the back of his closet to crash this particular gate.
Finding Alex in the sea of party goers isn’t something that Strand finds particularly difficult even if she’s currently looking far different than she normally does. For longer than Richard would care to admit, he’s always been able to find her in a crowd. In Strand’s more philosophical moods he might have called it a tether almost, but he knows that it’s simply a matter of Alex having a well-defined movement manner that he’s familiar with. Even if at the moment she’s wearing a red dress that looks more like it’s come from Amalia’s closet than her own, heels that make him wonder how she’s managing to walk when he’s seen her trip over flats, and a hairstyle that experience with a mother, a sister, a daughter and a wife have told him probably took her several hours, a large amount of hairspray and an infinite number of hairpins.
Currently, his reporter (a thought that he immediately chastens himself for because Alex is herself and he has no claims on her or how good she looks at the moment) is on the dance floor. Alex looks like she’s enjoying herself as Strand winds his way through the intoxicated crowd towards it. Her dance partner (Braun, he thinks with a mental sneer that matches venomously with the one on his countenance) twirls her and makes Alex laugh, a sound that he only catches the tail end of. Even though he’s closer to her now, Richard is unable to hear the words that Braun whispers into Alex’s ear, but he can see the flush on her cheeks that matches her dress exactly.
The increase in Strand’s speed means that when Tannis leans over and kisses Alex Reagan quite soundly (like a lover, something insidious in his brain whispers), Richard is there soon enough that he can grab the man and jerk him away from one very surprised Alex.
And she’s even more surprised when Richard draws off and punches Tannis Braun in the face.