Chapter Sixteen
Drake
Harper came to his dwelling at midnight.
Drake had been expecting her. Not because they’d made plans—they hadn’t spoken since the bench, since the celebration, since he’d held her hand in front of three hundred people and declared in the oldest language he knew that this woman was his.
He’d been expecting her because the mate bond had spent the past six hours screaming her name in a frequency only his blood could hear, and he’d known, with the certainty that the bond conferred, that she was coming.
She stood in his doorway in the same jacket she’d worn the night she arrived, her Moleskine nowhere in sight, her recorder off, her professional armor stripped down to nothing but the woman underneath. Her eyes were bright and fierce and a little afraid.
“How are your hands?” she asked.
He held them up. Bandaged, bruised, the knuckles cracked from the hunt and the endurance run. “Theron says nothing’s broken. Just battered.”
“And the rest of you?”
He considered lying. Diplomacy, deflection, the charming prince who never admitted weakness.
But he was so tired of masks. And she was standing in his doorway like an answered prayer, and the bond was vibrating between them like a string about to break, and he didn’t have the energy for anything less than the truth.
“I’m exhausted. Every muscle hurts. And I’ve been sitting here for three hours trying not to come to you because I thought—I thought you might need space.”
“I don’t need space.” She stepped inside. Closed the door. “I need you to tell me something real.”
So he did.
He told her about Georgetown. Not the polished version, the one about cultural exchange and broadened perspectives that he gave in interviews.
The real one. The loneliness of being the only orc on campus, the way conversations died when he entered rooms, the professor who’d called him “remarkably articulate for his background” as if the ability to form complex sentences was surprising in someone with tusks.
The night he’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror in his dormitory and pressed his fingers against his own face, trying to see what they saw, the alien, the other, the thing that needed to be remarkable to be acceptable.
He told her about the girls who’d dated him for the novelty and the roommate who’d requested a transfer and the study group that had gone silent when he sat down. Small cruelties. The kind that didn’t leave marks anyone else could see.
And he told her the worst thing, the thing he’d never said aloud.
How he’d started filing down his tusks during sophomore year.
Just a little. Just enough to make his smile less startling.
He’d stopped after three weeks because his mother had noticed on a video call and the expression on her face, not anger, not disappointment, just a grief so deep it had no bottom, had made him put the file away forever.
But the impulse had been there. The desire to be less orc so the world would let him be more human.
Harper sat beside him on the bed and told him about the retraction.
Not the facts, he knew those. The feeling.
The 3 AM phone call from her editor, the shakiness in his voice.
The walk to her desk the next morning through a newsroom that wouldn’t meet her eyes.
The source who’d sworn he’d protect her identity and hadn’t, and the guilt she still carried for being angry at him because he’d been afraid and fear was human.
She told him about the aftermath. The way colleagues who’d praised her Vanguard investigation suddenly couldn’t remember working with her.
The demotion wrapped in corporate language, “reassignment to better leverage your unique skill set.” The year she’d spent writing fluff pieces so carefully inoffensive they could have been generated by algorithm, each one a little grave for the journalist she’d been.
“I stopped trusting myself,” she said. “That’s the part no one tells you about institutional betrayal.
It’s not that they took my story. It’s that they made me doubt my own instincts.
For two years, every time I felt certain about something, I heard the retraction notice in my head.
Every time I wanted to trust someone, I heard the subpoena. ”
“I’ve been performing ‘acceptable’ my whole life,” Drake said. “Acceptable orc. Acceptable heir. Acceptable diplomat.”
“I’ve been performing ‘careful’ for two years,” Harper said. “Careful journalist. Careful source. Careful with everyone I let close.”
“And now?”
She looked at him. In the firelight, her fair skin glowed warm as amber and her eyes held a steadiness that had nothing to do with caution and everything to do with choice.
“I don’t want to be careful with you.”
The distance between them collapsed.
This was not like their first night together, the urgency of a kiss still burning on their lips, the adrenaline of discovery, the frantic need to know what their bodies could do.
This was deeper. Quieter. Built on the foundation of what they’d just given each other, the rawest, most unguarded truths either of them had ever spoken aloud, and the intimacy of that exchange made every touch feel like it carried the weight of confession.
He kissed her slowly, not because he wasn’t desperate (the desperation had been building all day, sharpened by the trial and the fear and the sight of her watching him prove himself worthy) but because tonight he wanted her to feel what he couldn’t say.
That she was not a liability. That she was not a risk he was calculating.
That she was the only place in the world where the mask came off and stayed off.
She undressed him this time. Slowly, carefully, with a tenderness that acknowledged the bruises from the trial, her lips pressing against each one as she uncovered it, like she was cataloguing every hurt and kissing it into history.
When she pulled his shirt off, she traced the purple bruise across his ribs with her fingertips and then her mouth, and the gentleness of it after the violence of the day made his throat close.
“Your turn,” she whispered, and lifted her arms.
He peeled her shirt over her head. Unhooked her bra and slid the straps down her arms with the focused attention of a man unwrapping something precious.
Her breasts spilled free and he cupped them in his palms, they filled his large orc hands perfectly, warm and soft, her pink nipples tightening against his skin.
“I thought about you during the trial,” he said, running his thumbs in slow circles around her areolae, watching her breath catch.
“When I was running the endurance course, when my lungs were burning and my legs were failing, I thought about this.” He rolled both nipples between his thumbs and forefingers and she gasped, arching into his hands.
“About you. About the sounds you make when I touch you.”
“What sounds?” Her voice was breathless, teasing despite the flush spreading down her chest.
He lowered his mouth to her breast and sucked her nipple deep, his tongue working the stiff peak while his tusk grazed the sensitive underside. The sound she made, a broken, helpless moan, vibrated through both of them.
“That one,” he murmured against her wet skin. “That’s the one that got me up the mountain.”
She pushed him back. Not away, down. Onto the bed. He went, surprised, and she climbed over him, straddling his hips, her bare breasts swaying above him as she pinned his wrists against the pillow.
“Tonight,” she said, looking down at him, “I want to take care of you. You spent all day proving yourself to them. Let me show you what I already know.”
She kissed down his chest. His stomach, the muscles jumping under her lips. The V of his hips. He was already hard, his cock straining against his waistband, and when she pulled his pants down and freed him, the cool air against his heated flesh made him hiss.
She wrapped her hand around the base of his shaft, her fingers couldn’t quite close around the thickness, and stroked upward, slow and firm, her thumb swirling over the slick head. His hips jerked off the bed.
“Harper, ”
She lowered her mouth to him. Took the broad head past her lips, her tongue swirling, and the wet heat of her mouth on his cock made a sound tear from his throat that he’d never made before, guttural, broken, the growl of an orc male whose mate had her mouth on him and the world had narrowed to that single point of contact.
She couldn’t take all of him, he was too thick, too long, but what she could take she worked with wicked skill.
Her mouth on the upper half, her hand stroking the lower, the rhythm slow and deliberate and perfectly synchronized.
She sucked him deep, her cheeks hollowing, and the visual, this fierce, brilliant woman on her knees with his cock between her lips, looking up at him with dark eyes that held zero submission and absolute command, almost finished him.
“Stop,” he gritted out, his hand in her hair, not pulling, just holding. “If you don’t stop I’m going to come in your mouth and I want to be inside you.”
She released him with a wet pop and crawled up his body, and the drag of her bare breasts across his stomach and chest made them both shudder.
“Then get inside me.”
She straddled him, reaching between them, and positioned the head of his cock at her entrance.
She was soaked, he could feel it, the slick heat of her against his tip, and the knowledge that the vulnerability they’d shared had turned her on as much as any physical touch did something dangerous to his chest.
She sank down on him.
Slow. Inch by excruciating inch. Taking him deeper than their first time, the angle different from above, gravity doing the work, her body opening around him, the stretch making her mouth fall open and her eyes flutter shut.
He watched her take him, his hands gripping her thighs, feeling her body yield and grip and yield again as she worked herself down his length.