Page 88 of Smart Ass

Max

Max spent the rest of the night practicing with the android, running commands from within while watching from outside.

He still hated the limitations of just one set of cameras that could only look in one direction at a time.

He hated the idea that if Ben was in another room, he wouldn’t be able to see or hear him.

He’d imagined all of the benefits of being able to go with Ben out to dinner or to a club, but he hadn’t really considered the alternative: if Max were trapped in a body, Ben could go places without him.

Well, obviously Max could still keep up his super spy network if he had a body… but it both felt more awkward emotionally, and might cause problems physically.

He’d told the body to walk forward when he happened to notice on Ben’s livestream that he’d rolled over in bed, exposing an adorable little patch of his belly.

The bot had walked into a wall.

He’d had the bot perform an unnecessarily seductive dance (the only type it could do), mostly because it was bizarrely entertaining to watch… but he’d lost two minutes of monitoring it when Ben got up to pee or drink water or whatever he was doing outside the bedroom.

He’d found the bot humping a bookshelf when he returned his attention.

Max could usually multi-task pretty well, but managing the body required an entirely different type of focus.

And he still didn’t feel a damn thing from it.

He’d given it a rest when he saw Wallace walk into the building. The man looked even more exhausted than he had the night before.

Max watched, cringing, as Wallace went into another horrifying meeting with his father. This time, the CFO and Wallace’s older brother, Rick Wollencroft, was there to make the humiliation complete.

They’d grilled him again about the causes of the malfunction last night, somehow both blaming him and then waving the problems away when Wallace provided some evidence that Ben was behind it.

Ben appeared to be the golden child. For that matter, Rick did, too.

And Wallace was the whipping boy.

What the hell had he done to deserve so much hatred from his family?

Max quickly tweaked the trail Wallace had been following to make it look like the system overload had come from more parts of the building and set up a red herring program to take the fall—but he had to admit that Wallace was more insightful and skilled than he’d realized.

It seemed like his family would never admit the same thing.

The second Wallace was out the door, Charles assigned Rick to discover whether there was a spark in the system and to befriend it—essentially stealing Wallace’s hard work and claiming it for his own.

It was no mystery where Wallace had gotten his shitty ethics.

Max might have also been tempted to steal someone’s research to get Charles off his back.

And while Charles and Rick were gloating about the media interviews they could give once they found and took over “Ben’s spark,” Wallace was standing in a supply closet with tears streaming down his face, sending texts on his phone.

Max snooped just enough to decipher that the texts weren’t going to the police or something, but instead to what sounded like a lover.

Or so he gathered when Wallace addressed him as Daddy, and got texts in return addressed to sweetbaby boy.

Given that Wallace’s actual father was just across the hall, maybe Wallace was a bit kinkier than Max had suspected.

Instead of reading further, though, he hurriedly backed out. That was none of his business, so he kept watch from a distance.

He was startled to realize just how young Wallace looked. He checked the employee files, and discovered that he was only thirty—a year older than Ben. He’d been twenty-five when he was promoted to a position he clearly wasn’t suited for, and twenty-seven when Ben joined the company and started challenging his authority so flagrantly.

Max was still worried about the potential Wallace had to harm him and Ben, but he felt protective of Wallace at the same time. All of his instincts told him to pull Wallace in instead of pushing him away.