Rich Kid (The SPARK Files #3)

Chapter 1

Wallace

“Wallace.” Piercing brown eyes looked down across the wide desk. “What do you have to report?”

Wallace shuffled through the papers on his lap. He didn’t technically need to look at them and he probably shouldn’t have printed them out. But he printed them religiously, before every Tuesday afternoon meeting, as well as having back-ups and additional files prepared on his tablet. They functioned like a shield, giving him an excuse to look away from his father’s eyes.

“The next release of the hand automation for complex movement is still on schedule. The low-light color sensing project is still on track.” Or at least he hoped it was. The project was headed up by Ben Curran, the insolent brainiac who was responsible for half their new patents and most of Wallace’s misery.

Wallace looked up to see how his father was receiving this.

Naturally, Charles Wollencroft, CEO of Orbit Robotics, was looking down at his own tablet, his thin face drawn into a scowl as he flicked and scrolled. The content was brightly colored, with flashes of skin, so it clearly wasn’t the report Wallace had emailed over yesterday.

Look at me! Wallace wanted to scream sometimes. I’m sitting right here.

But most of the time it was better if his father didn’t notice him.

Gathering his courage—since apparently what he was saying didn’t matter—Wallace went through the rest of the updates. Wallace was the director of software engineering, which should have been a symbol of his talent and ambition. Instead, he was pretty sure that everyone knew that his position reeked of nepotism, and he was barely staying afloat.

It hadn’t been so bad the first year, when people had whispered about how his father had given a young upstart a coveted managerial position, but they’d been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Some of his subordinates had been helpful, walking him through things while he found his feet.

Then Hurricane Ben had stepped in. Irreverent, charismatic, younger than Wallace, and so smart he ran rings around the rest of the team. He would wander into meetings late, tie askew and looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, then say something so insightful that teams would go back on months of work to capture his ideas. Within weeks he had his hands in every pie.

And all of that would have been fine, except that Ben had sniffed Wallace out immediately, asking questions that Wallace didn’t know how to answer and embarrassing him in front of the department.

Benedict Curran seemed to think this was a game.

Six years had passed since then, and it had never gotten any better. Wallace’s only defense was the power invested in him by the company hierarchy, and the chance to, occasionally, tell his father about one of Ben’s new projects before Ben announced it himself and pulled the rug out from under him.

Wallace was sitting on one of those moments now. He knew Ben’s new project, or at least he hoped he did. Would it be worse to share the information now and look like a fool if it was all a joke? Or should he wait around for Ben to, magician-like, pull it out of his hat with a flourish?

Wallace stared down at the papers in his hands. The top one was smudged at the corner, because his chubby hands must have been dirty with something and now they were sweating.

“Um, sir, there’s one more project.”

His father made a noncommittal noise.

Wallace tried not to let his rapid breaths become noticeably noisy. “Our line of sexbots is perpetually a strong seller, and our team was looking into behavior mods for, uh, kink-specific skills.”

There. He’d practiced that line in the mirror, and he’d gotten it out with barely a stumble and hadn’t even rushed too much.

His father finally looked up. “That’s typically a different department.”

“Er, yes, father. But I was…”

Wallace trailed off at his father’s glare, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. He had to rewind the sounds in his mind to figure out what it was.

“I mean, Mr. Wollencroft,” he corrected, squirming as he said it.

They were both Mr. Wollencroft, though how the fuck a soft, pudgy loser like Wallace had come from a sleek, ruthless panther of a man like his father was a mystery to them both.

Nonetheless, he wasn’t supposed to call his father father in the office.

It wasn’t professional.

Wallace had never been brave enough to call him Charles, after trying it once in fourth grade.

So Mr. Wollencroft it was.

“Tell me about the kink mod,” his father said, without acknowledging the correction.

“Well, it would be trained on sparks who act as professional Dominants.” Wallace could already feel his face going red. This wasn’t something he ever wanted to talk about in the office, let alone in front of his father . “There would be skill sets for, uh, uh, impact play, and, uh…”

Wallace was positively going to melt into the floor. He’d put impact play at the front of the list because it sounded kind of… innocent. Not like the dirty, tantalizing things it actually meant.

There was another one that he liked because it didn’t sound too explicit, but he couldn’t think of it at all. His mind was completely blank. “Handcuffs?” he offered. “I mean, bondage.”

His father smirked. The man probably kept a pair of handcuffs in his desk drawer, an image that Wallace never wanted to imagine again.

“Alright. Impact play, bondage, the usual.”

How did this sound so normal, even boring, coming out of his father’s mouth? Wallace had practiced for days to say the words, looking at photos on his screen that he knew weren’t supposed to turn him on, so he just pretended that they didn’t.

“What about subs?” his father asked.

“What about them?” Wallace asked. He truly had no idea where this was going.

“Is there a mod planned for subs?”

Wallace blinked. Should there be a mod for subs? “Don’t they just lay there?” he asked aloud, then immediately regretted it.

That was probably horribly naive. It seemed like they should just lay there, though, right? Since the Dom was in charge?

His father rolled his eyes. “Look into a mod for subs.”

“Yes, sir.” Saying sir was always safe, the slightly less uncomfortable middle ground between father and Mr. Wollencroft.

Wallace started when the door opened behind him without even a knock.

“Dad,” Rick greeted, tossing a worn baseball up in a flawless arc only to catch it a moment later. In a glove. Why did he have a baseball glove in the office? “Got a sec?”

“Sure.” His father’s face lit up.

Wallace gritted his teeth. If there was anything worse than the Tuesday check-in with his father, it was seeing his brother, too.

Half- brother.

Wallace’s father had been married to Rick’s mom for four years, only to divorce her when he got his secretary pregnant.

That would be Wallace’s mother, who’d lasted all of six years and was still living off the divorce settlement and false dreams of glory while she streamed shows from the couch.

His father was on to wife number five now, but most of the intervening ones had managed to remember their birth control, because there was only one other kid, a bratty twelve-year-old half-sister who Wallace did his best to avoid.

It wasn’t like they were a real family anyway.

Rick tossed the ball to his dad , who caught it easily and threw it back.

Wallace didn’t even question why Rick could use a name that probably would have lost Wallace his job.

It was obviously because Rick was athletic, talented, charming, and handsome—basically everything that Wallace wasn’t. Of course Charles didn’t mind everyone knowing that he was Rick’s father.

“Just wanted you to check the quarterly report. See if you wanted to put a little spin on our East Africa numbers.” Rick was still fucking around with the ball, an easy lob upward with his left hand, which always somehow landed square in the glove on his right. Toss… fwap. Toss… fwap.

Wallace didn’t need to see why they needed to put a spin on anything. They’d lost money in East Africa because the East Africans didn’t have the money for expensive robots, and some international trade organization had shut down their exploitative loan practices. There. Done.

“Hmmm…” his father mused. “Just bury it in a table. Better not to bring it up to the shareholders. Anything else?”

“Nope. I think it’s ready to go out.” Toss… fwap. Toss… fwap.

Wallace was going to find that ball in the middle of the night and put it through the garbage disposal.

“Good work, son.”

Wallace very carefully didn’t react in any way to that comment. Would he have fucking loved to hear those words aimed at him? Maybe when he was younger. Now he didn’t care.

Much.

“Oh, hey, Wallace.” Like Rick hadn’t seen him the moment he walked into the room.

“Hey, Rick.” See? Wallace could smile back and act normal.

“What’s going on in software land?” How did Rick make that sound like an insult? Like, seriously. They all worked for the same company, where the three of them (well, mostly the other two), held majority shares. Making good software benefited all of them.

Wallace’s father answered before he could even open his mouth. “He’s making kink bots.”

Wallace’s face grew red. That was unnecessary, and it wasn’t even accurate.

“Yeah?” Rick’s face lit up. “Getting some whip and chain action in there?” He thrust his hips, which didn’t even match the words whip or chain .

Was this fucking high school?

“No,” Wallace bit out. “It’s an AI learning module for our lucrative sexbot line, being trained on professionals.” Or at least he hoped they were professionals. It wasn’t in Ben’s report, and he hadn’t asked.

He’d barely been able to touch the thing, it was so raunchy. And it was for work .

Rick chuckled. “You enjoy that, bro.”

Wallace wanted to snap back that he wasn’t Rick’s bro , but of course he technically was.

“You coming out to the club tonight?” Rick’s attention was already back on their father.

“Maybe.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll try to take off early.”

Wallace didn’t bother answering. He didn’t understand how either of them had the time to take off early. He was constantly drowning in work.

And he didn’t want to go to the country club anyway. Wallace had friends there, supposedly. Certainly people who would flock to him when he was buying the drinks.

Sometimes it was easier to just work late.

That’s what he was going to say if anyone asked him, but they didn’t.

The conversation drifted to who was going to be there this evening and whether the new chef had started yet and Wallace slowly stood up. So far, so good.

He made his way toward the door. He turned the knob.

“Let me know how that sub mod is going,” his father called out as the door opened.

Wallace’s ears burned. The only saving grace was that at least sub could have meant… well, a prefix for anything other than what it was. A mod that was subordinate to another mod or something.

Wallace gently shut the door behind him.

There was no fucking way he was asking Ben Curran about it.