by Roxy Mews
Paisley tried to recover quickly. Her hip popped and she leaned over to give her back that sexy arch. “I was hoping we could chat more about the files you needed from Coral. I’m trying to help her gather everything, and I was wondering if you had a master list I could work with.”
“And you have a meeting with us, scheduled now,” Ben interjected. “Did you forget? Or did your assistant not tell you?”
“I assure you, I am in charge of the magistrate’s day and it says right here…” Tabitha went from cocky to apologetic in record time. “I’m sorry, there must have been a glitch in the system, sir. It appears you were double-booked for appointments today.”
The magistrate got redder and sweatier than normal, and apologized profusely to everyone inside and outside of the office. He closed the door behind him and came to the other side of his assistant’s desk.
“I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience, gentlemen, but the ball buster I have in there will not be able to reschedule without a terrible effort. Would it be possible for you to wait for fifteen minutes—maybe twenty—while I wrap this up?”
Ben took out his phone and tapped on the screen. He didn’t look up until the magistrate started shifting his weight from foot to foot. “I can move a meeting and we can stay,” he told Jon.
The magistrate exhaled. “Thank you. I’ve got to get back in there.” He noticed Paisley as he was darting off and turned quickly to face her. “Can you wait too? Because I really want you to wait. If you take notes for the meeting with these gentlemen, I can go over some files with you then.”
Paisley smiled sweetly. “Can’t wait.”
The door shut, and the pinch-faced woman at the desk pointed toward three chairs that were way too close together.
Of course, Jon took the one to the far left and Ben took the one to the far right. Even if Paisley ate nothing but carrots for a month, she wouldn’t be able to sit in that space without being at least a little on top of both men.
“I’ll just stand,” Paisley offered.
“No. You will not pace in front of my desk. You will sit so I’m not distracted as I figure out this computer glitch.” Tabitha pointed to the empty chair again.
The woman wasn’t even trying to be polite, but working for the man in the office behind her, Paisley couldn’t blame her. Even a slight show of weakness was probably enough for a guy like that to take advantage.
Paisley didn’t want to give Tabitha any more trouble so she shimmied into place between her two lovers.
“You were the computer glitch, weren’t you?” she whispered to Jon.
“I can make all kinds of systems go haywire.”
Paisley scowled. Everyone, including mechanics, had to be checked for electropulse devices before they entered the City County Building, but it didn’t matter when bots like Jon and Coral were good old-fashioned hackers. She could tattle on Jon’s schedule hijinks, but not without cluing the world into Coral’s abilities to remove finance charges from her credit files.
“We were going to request you sit in on the meeting to take notes, anyway,” Ben offered. “The magistrate’s interest in you doing so is to our benefit.”
“Why?” she asked.
She tried to pull her arms closer to her body, but all that did was push her boobs together. Giving up on getting away, she let her arms press against the hot wall of man and machine on either side of her.
“Do you have your notebook with you?” Jon asked, far louder than she was expecting.
“No.” Paisley was about to ask Ben if Jon was having malfunction issues, but Ben clicked his tongue as if scolding her.
“You are just going to have to use the magistrate’s computer, then.”
Those sneaky bastards. They found out what she was doing, and then planned a way to help her so she wouldn’t have to have grabby hands all over her. It rubbed her wrong that this was a much better solution, because the magistrate would be totally distracted with…whatever they had concocted.
“Please store the notes on this thumbdrive so we can access it later with the other necessary files.”
Paisley looked at the piece of metal he’d handed her. The thing looked like C3PO from Star Wars. She laughed. Of course the robospy had a robothumbdrive. And apparently even robotic men loved that movie. Her giggles caught in her throat as she saw what was on the back of the thing. In tiny engraved letters she made out…
Open the file marked 3. The main points we intend to bring up are already written. Use the file marked 2 to run the program.
Paisley’s back stiffened. She’d still have to annotate the magistrate’s responses, but the guys were going to go from a planned script. It would give her more than enough time to run the program.
“You’ll take the notes and print them out. A copy for the magistrate and a copy for me. Jon will take the thumbdrive to upload the meeting internally,” Ben informed her.
Tabitha looked up at their words, but decided the breach was more important than the three of them and went back to typing.
The download information Paisley needed, she’d…well, she’d have to give it up to Jon. The person annotating didn’t keep a set of notes.
Damn. They were working her out of this.
Paisley could hear the magistrate and his previous appointment sliding the heavy chair legs across the laminate floor. Then the door handle tilted and they were out of the office.
She didn’t have time to change course. They had made the plan without including her, and she’d have to go along or risk not ever getting the information Quinn and Coral needed.
Paisley redid a button on her blouse. By the way the magistrate’s eyes had zeroed in on cleavage-land, she would be the one keeping the magistrate’s attention if she didn’t dial it back a bit.
She was grateful she had; the next moment…
“Mr. Price, we’ll be in touch. Thank you for your patience.”
Paisley’s lip curled as the man she couldn’t seem to get rid of tucked a file under his arm.
Wait…was that green paper?
Darius walked quickly down the hall before she could process the information, and there wasn’t time to follow.
“Mr. Renolds. I will see you and your robot now.”
Jon rolled his wrist, and Paisley heard the gears grind and artificial bands of cartilage protest. The magistrate was following protocol as far as acknowledging Ben and letting him bring his robotic specimen with him, but he also knew that Jon was in the application process. It seemed like a deliberate prod to try and provoke a negative response. Paisley was impressed when Jon not only failed to take the bait, but stood with a smile.
Ben offered a hand to Paisley to help her up, and she took it. She was a little wobbly. Her thoughts were going in a million different directions between Darius and the magistrate. A connection existed just beyond where her brain was reaching. She needed to focus. There were so many things that could go wrong. She might be too conspicuous. She might not be able to keep up with the notes. If that happened, she’d claim mechanical error. She could have Jon zap the keyboard.
“Paisley, would you mind waiting while I have this meeting?” the magistrate said and turned to Jon with a smile. “I figured Mr. Bond could activate his recording device instead of Miss Compton taking notes. Then she can have my undivided attention after. It would expedite the process, don’t you agree?”
She opened her mouth to respond. With what, she had no idea, but she was going to start with “um” and see where it took her.
Ben had a much more eloquent reply. “While you were in the meeting with another person during the time we had been scheduled, we thought it would move things along if Paisley annotated the meeting. It will allow Jon to provide information without taking the extra RAM to record and keep notes.”
The magistrate looked Paisley up and down for more than a leer this tim
e. With the lack of a computer, recorder—and seriously, with as tight as her outfit was—it was pretty clear Paisley wasn’t hiding even the tiniest notebook on her person.
“Um…Paisley, do you need a notebook, or datapad?” The magistrate looked a lot less excited to see her now that she would actually have to do some work for him that didn’t involve being on her knees.
“If it’s okay with you, sir, I’ll just hop on your computer, save to the thumbdrive, and give the notes to Jon later.”
The magistrate looked back toward his office and was about to go in. Most likely to close down a secure wall, or some other issues that would make her job infinitely more difficult.
Time to prove that she was going to get this job done. Even if the double-standard twins behind her didn’t want her to.
Paisley stepped up to the magistrate and put her arm on the shoulder nearest to his office. She held it there until he turned, and slipped herself between the magistrate and the doorframe. There wasn’t a whole lot of room and it made her distraction all the more effective.
Putting her body just a breath from his, she took her index finger and tapped him on the nose. “You are so sweet to let me sit in your big cushy chair. I can’t wait to settle my hips into such a powerful seat. Oops.” Paisley blew a gentle bit of air along the side of his face, and she knew she used the right angle to catch the guy’s ear. With her thumb, she feathered a touch across his cheek and stroked her hand under his jaw. “Eyelash.”
She winked and tucked into the office. Before he could get the blood back where he needed it to be, Paisley was already in his chair and plugging the USB into his computer.
When he waved Jon and Ben inside, he didn’t look happy, but thanks to the male ego, he let her use his computer rather than letting anyone see she’d worked him over.
Chapter Nineteen
It had gone off without a hitch. Other than the look Ben shot her when Jon was busy laying out overly complicated details about robotic systems in terminology that kept the magistrate a half-step behind him throughout the conversation.
Ben knew the script. With the synthesis between these two, it probably took very little practice to work a job. Paisley wasn’t as practiced. So when Ben began looking at her feet, then slowly sliding all the way up to the lace at her thighs, she suddenly felt warm all over.
He knew what she looked like naked. She could feel the reflection of her night with the men in Ben’s eyes.
He stared at her for at least thirty seconds, and a hint of that one-cornered wicked grin crept on his face before he erased the wave of sexy and picked up on his cue in the script. It was a good thing they hadn’t let the magistrate talk then because Paisley would have completely missed all the notes.
She had no idea how many times she’d crossed and uncrossed her legs during that meeting. She was supposed to be working on this program. This was serious, and all her two co-conspirators did was take turns undressing her with their eyes. Paisley was pretty sure Ben had an unusually large bulge in his pocket by the end of it. He’d placed his suit jacket over his arm in front of himself as they began to file out, so Paisley couldn’t tell for sure.
Even if she was imagining his arousal now, she could vividly remember how it had looked in her hand the other night. It wasn’t even a memory. The man’s dick was so hot he’d burned the image of himself naked on the backs of her eyelids.
Paisley handed the guys the printout of her “notes” and handed the actual transcript to the magistrate. She hadn’t had time to review the documents she had downloaded to the drive while keeping up with the program prompts. Luckily, by twirling her hair between her fingers, she could use the touch screen to move between files without the magistrate noticing. But there had only been a tiny moment where she could get what she needed. They weren’t writing her off, and she wasn’t leaving Coral’s safety in their hands. She might be human, but that let her cough to interrupt their script long enough to send the copies to the protected file folder in her desktop module.
She handed the thumbdrive to Jon.
“Thank you for your assistance, Paisley.”
“Anytime,” she said. She needed to go back and check on her own download.
The magistrate leaned out of his office as the three of them exited. “Didn’t you need some files from me, Paisley?”
She smiled her sweet smile. The wide-eyed look she gave with it allowed everyone around her to underestimate her. “I completely forgot which ones I needed. I’m heading back to my desk to get the information.”
“I’m booked solid for the rest of the day,” he said.
She knew that already. She’d snooped in his calendar earlier and breathed a sigh of relief. “Darn. I’ll send your lovely secretary a request to get into your schedule as soon as possible. Hopefully she has all those glitches under control.”
Tabitha glared at her. It didn’t matter. Paisley was about to do what she did best and walk away. She wasn’t meant to work with these government types.
She wiped her hands on her skirt to get the bit of adhesive off. The magistrate had wrappers and all kinds of other things in his jacket pocket. The bug she’d glued there wouldn’t be noticed.
Chapter Twenty
After a night sleeping on the community transit system with her bags under her legs in case anyone tried to steal them, Paisley wanted to do nothing more than stop by Coral’s house and hide. But her friend had never responded to her. Paisley had walked out mid-shift. She’d ignored three calls from Quinn. One was about apartment hunting, the second wondering where she was, and the last message was scolding her for not responding.
After not knowing what to do next, Paisley did what her body had done at 6:00 a.m. for years. She got off at the exit that took her to the most secure gate in the country.
The palace seemed bigger than it had the day she left. She wasn’t sure what would happen when she stepped in front of the camera, but Matilda immediately buzzed her in.
Paisley took the coffee Matilda gave her and let it warm her hands. Forcing a smile, she wrapped her bravado around herself and hoped she could start to believe her own hype. Being homeless didn’t hurt her chances of the older woman taking pity on her. Paisley could work some puppy eyes when she had to. She’d emailed the information on the bug in the magistrate’s pocket to Coral. For some reason, her robobestie wasn’t responding to texts. She must have been working harder than even Paisley thought. Or Quinn had told her not to call.
“I feel like no time has passed since I first showed up here and you gave me coffee,” Paisley said to the mug.
“My bones say it’s been a long time. Move over.”
Matilda slid next to her. Paisley’s coffee looked almost white next to Miss Matilda’s as the palace coordinator took out her e-cigarette and puffed a cloud of vapor into the air.
“You know they have determined that the chemicals in those cause you to have your lungs encased in metallic dust,” Paisley reminded her.
“Maybe they can work on a cig that will make them turn to metal faster. Then I can have lungs like Coral.”
Miss Matilda wasn’t a lady who missed things. Sure, her hair was wiry and gray now, and her wrinkles seemed to deepen when she frowned, which was all the time. But those deep-set eyes saw things three floors up and half a palace away.
When she said Coral’s name, Paisley cringed.
“Why are you here, Paisley?” she asked again.
She wasn’t trying to get her to leave. In fact, with how she blocked the way out of the dinette at the moment, she was practically ensuring Paisley couldn’t run away.
“I was living at the Main Gates Hotel.”
“That’s the nicest place in the city beside the palace. You couldn’t take the room service? It was too much of a hardship, right?” Matilda rolled her e-cig under her pinky and held it sideways while she drank her coffee.
“I was only there until I got a paycheck. It was time to get out and not be dependent on my friend.”
“Who’d you fuck, girl? You only run from that situation if you sex some guy.”
Paisley scowled. She ran away for plenty of reasons. “I’m always fucking some guy. That makes it a parallel event, not one of causality.” She drank some of her coffee. It was strong. Even with all the cream and sugar, her nerves still lit up thanks to the potency. Putting the cup down, she realized she should say what was on her mind before another sip. There wasn’t anyone else she could tell.
“Coral’s in danger.”
Despite Paisley’s state of unemployment, she still felt the weight of Matilda’s authority. Paisley leaned back.
Matilda kept close as she hushed her voice. “In danger from what?”
“Have you heard about the Anti-Mech movement that has started?”
“They have it on the news. Some people were even interviewed with their faces blurred and voices changed. One even complaining about his ex getting it on with a robot. Idiot wore his limited edition gold smart watch. They didn’t blur that out, and whoever that is probably gave himself away to everyone he knows.”
Darius had a gold smart watch.
Paisley’s breath quickened. “When did you see that interview?”
“Was just on…” Matilda puffed as she thought. “Had to have been two nights ago.”
Paisley tried to take in enough air to speak, but someone had sucked it out of the room and she couldn’t drag any into her lungs.
Darius knew she’d been with Jon. The phone call…could it have been…
The words were finally forming but Bridget came rushing in before they could make it out of her mouth.
“Holy hell. Turn on the television. I just got a text. Oh, shit. This can’t be real.”
“You’re not supposed to have phone on you,” Matilda said.
“You’re going to be glad I did.” Bridget turned on the small flat screen on the side of the island.