Chapter Twenty-Five
Harper
Two Weeks Later
Harper stood at the window of their dwelling—their dwelling, a phrase that still knocked something loose in her chest—and watched the sunrise paint the Cascades in shades of gold and rose.
The mountains didn’t care about congressional investigations or media cycles or the fact that Harper Stone, formerly of the Washington Post, had just signed the incorporation papers for the Ironpeak Independent, a digital investigative platform focused on supernatural affairs and civil rights.
The mountains had been here for millions of years.
They would be here long after the political crisis faded and the headlines moved on.
There was comfort in that permanence. There was also a challenge: the truth, like the mountains, required constant attention. Erosion was slow but relentless.
The platform had launched three days ago.
Carmen had connected her with a network of sources across the supernatural rights community.
The ACLU had offered a partnership. Two journalists from the Post, young, hungry, the kind of reporters Harper had once been, had reached out about joining.
The Ironpeak story had given her the credibility and the audience she needed.
She was building something new on the foundation of something true.
Fenris had appeared at her office (a converted storage room near the council chamber that Drake had arranged with suspicious efficiency) with a tablet containing intelligence she hadn’t asked for.
“Off the record, of course,” he’d said, grinning.
“Fenris, nothing with you is off the record.”
“That’s what makes our relationship work.
” He’d paused at the door, his expression shifting to something more serious.
“There’s a rumor I’m tracking. An industrial accident at a chemical plant near the settlement boundary.
The company says it was equipment failure.
My sources say the ‘failure’ was awfully convenient for someone who wanted to test the settlement’s emergency response capability. ”
Harper had filed the information and made a note: follow up. If someone was probing the settlement’s defenses through engineered crises, that was a story. And stories were what she did.
She’d also noticed that Fenris himself seemed different lately.
More distracted. Running intelligence missions that didn’t appear on any briefing schedule, disappearing for days at a time, returning with a look in his eyes that Harper’s journalist instincts flagged as personal, not professional.
When she’d asked Drake about it, he’d shrugged.
“Fenris keeps his own counsel. Always has. When he wants us to know, he’ll tell us. ”
And then there was Senna.
Drake’s cousin had called from D.C. the previous night, ostensibly to discuss the ongoing congressional hearings.
The conversation had lasted forty-five minutes, thirty-eight of which were Senna complaining about her new bodyguard, because with the threats mounting during the investigation, the clan had insisted on protection, and Varek, Captain of the Guard, had refused to delegate the assignment to anyone else.
“He won’t let me go anywhere without an escort.
He disapproves of my apartment. He disapproves of my coffee.
He disapproves of the entire concept of Washington, D.C.
, and he communicates this disapproval through the medium of disappointed silence, which is, I have to tell you, a truly Olympic-level skill.
” Senna’s voice had crackled with the specific frustration of a woman who was not accustomed to being managed.
“Also, he’s eight feet tall and he keeps breaking my furniture by sitting on it. My IKEA bookshelf did not survive.”
Drake had caught Harper’s eye across the room, and they’d shared a look that contained an entire conversation.
Varek, who could have sent any warrior in the settlement, who considered Washington, D.C.
a moral hazard, had taken the assignment himself.
And Senna’s outrage had the specific quality of a woman protesting too much.
* * *
Arms wrapped around her from behind. Warm. Massive. Entirely without pretense.
“You’re up early,” Drake murmured against her hair. His voice was rough with sleep and his body was warm as a furnace and Harper leaned back into him and felt the mate bond hum with the contented frequency of a connection that had stopped straining and started settling.
“Too much to think about.” She turned in his arms. In the morning light, with his hair loose and his expression unguarded and his eyes still soft from sleep, he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Not because of the orc genetics or the Georgetown polish or the prince’s bearing.
Because he was real. Because every wall was down.
Because the man looking at her was just Drake, the one who existed in the cracks between performances, and he was hers.
“The platform launches properly next week,” she said. “The Fenris lead looks promising. And your cousin is going to fall for her bodyguard and be furious about it.”
Drake laughed. The sound was low and warm and it vibrated through her body where they pressed together.
“Varek will be insufferable,” he said. “And in spectacular denial. If he bonds with Senna, the traditionalist faction and the diplomatic faction will be literally joined by blood. The political implications alone, ”
“Stop strategizing and kiss me.”
He kissed her. Slowly. Thoroughly. The kind of kiss that started as greeting and deepened into something that had no interest in stopping.
His hands slid beneath the shirt she was wearing, his shirt, because she had claimed his wardrobe the way she’d claimed everything else about him: completely, without apology, and his fingers traced the curve of her waist with the reverent attention of a man who had memorized every inch of this body and never tired of the text.
She pulled him toward the bed. He went willingly, which was to say he went with the focused urgency of an orc male whose mate was making demands he had no intention of refusing.
This was different from every time before.
Not the urgent discovery of their first night.
Not the raw vulnerability of the second.
Not the fierce, possessive claiming after the fight.
This was joyful. Playful. The desperate edge was gone, replaced by the secure, expansive pleasure of two people who knew they had time.
Who knew the morning after would bring another morning, and another, and another.
She shoved him onto the mattress and climbed on top of him, straddling his hips, and the grin she gave him, wicked, unhurried, the grin of a woman who had made a thorough study of what undid this particular orc and intended to deploy every finding, made his cock harden beneath her so fast he groaned.
“Impatient,” she teased, rolling her hips against him through the thin fabric of his sleep pants. The friction of her bare heat against his covered cock made his hands fly to her thighs, fingers gripping.
“For you?” His thumbs traced circles on her bare skin, sliding higher. “Every second of every day since the first time you called me a diplomat like it was an insult.”
She laughed and pulled his shirt off herself, baring her breasts to the morning light. No self-consciousness. No performance. Just Harper, naked from the waist up, sunlight gilding her fair skin, looking down at him like he was exactly where she wanted him.
He sat up beneath her, one arm banding around her waist, and took her nipple into his mouth.
She gasped, threading her fingers through his hair, her hips grinding down against the growing ridge in his pants.
He tongued the stiff peak, sucking it deep, then released it and blew cool air across the wet skin.
She shivered and pulled his head to the other breast.
“You know,” she managed, as his tongue circled the peaked tip before drawing it between his lips, “for someone who spent twenty years being diplomatically restrained, you are remarkably good at, oh god, do that again.”
He did it again, the tusk thing, the move she’d discovered she loved during their second night together, the smooth flat edge grazing the underside of her nipple, and she rocked against him so hard the bed creaked.
“Pants off,” she demanded. “Now.”
“Bossy.” But he lifted his hips and together they shoved his sleep pants down and kicked them off the bed.
His cock sprang free, thick and hard, slapping against his stomach, and Harper wrapped her hand around him with the possessive confidence of a woman who knew this body as intimately as she knew her own byline.
She stroked him slowly, root to tip, her grip firm, her thumb swirling over the leaking head and spreading the moisture down his shaft.
He groaned, his head falling back, and she took advantage, kissing the exposed column of his throat, the sensitive spot behind his ear that made his hips buck, the place where his tusk met his lower lip that always tasted faintly of the herbs he chewed.
She twisted her wrist at the top on the next stroke, the move she’d discovered made him lose orcish and English simultaneously, and watched his hands fist in the sheets, his green-gray knuckles going pale. She did it again. Slower. Tighter. His cock pulsing in her grip, thick and hot.
“Harper, ” The warning in his voice was delicious. She lived for that tone, the one that said the diplomat was losing the argument against the orc.
“Mmm?” She stroked again, feather-light this time, and he bucked into her hand with a growl that vibrated through the mattress.
“If you keep doing that, this is going to be over embarrassingly fast, and I have plans.”
“What kind of plans?”