Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It could probably be said to have started with the intern.

She was new, and she was conceited, and she apparently thought that collecting the briefs Mike was supposed to proof and bringing them to him was unworthy of her, even though Louis himself had ordered her to do it. Her name was Delia, and she was a pain in the ass.

Mike, frustrated, and running behind thanks to having finished Louis’s busywork before working on Harvey’s briefs for the sole purpose of being awarded Delia’s help, gave up. He did the first thing he could think of (that didn’t involve letting the man — woman — with the metaphorical gun win, anyway).

Steeling himself, he summoned his most winsome smile, and tried to ooze charisma the way Harvey did until his brain physically hurt with the effort. “Delia,” he said, speaking to her back because she was leaning over Gregory’s cubicle, flirting and ignoring Mike. “I would be really, really, very grateful if you’d go collect the briefs for me. Please?”

To his complete shock, she straightened immediately — along with, um, everyone else in the room, oh hey — and chirped, “Of course I’ll get you the briefs. I’ll do it right away. Right now! Don’t worry, I’ll do it perfectly, you’ll see!”

Mike stared after her retreating figure.

“I can help too!” Gregory offered, eagerly, already halfway out of his chair.

“No, that’s— That’s fine, I don’t really—”

“No,” insisted Gregory, “it’s no trouble, really! I’d be glad to! I’ll just—”

“Sit down?” Mike suggested, feeling a little uneasy.

Gregory sat.

Oookay, then.

—

Delia wouldn’t leave him alone.

“Do you need anything else?” she kept saying. And, “You’ve got such a way with a highlighter. Did I tell you that I’m the heir to a highlighter company?”

She wasn’t the only one, either.

“I brought you coffee,” said Allan-Aaron eagerly, placing a seventh cup down on Mike’s really-getting-too-full-for-this desk. “I’m really, really good at making coffee. Would you like to watch me make you more coffee?”

Rachel leaned over (Rachel, of all people!) and smiled at him. “I’m so smart I bet I could help you better than anyone else in this whole room.”

Mike swallowed. “That’s, really, that’s very ni—”

“And then we can go out for dinner,” she said, “and I’ll put out before dessert!”

Mike was trying to think of a reply to that, one that didn’t involve gaping like a lunatic, but it turned out he didn’t have time to make one.

“I’d put out before we ordered our drinks!” proclaimed Delia.

“I’d put out before we got to the restaurant!” Seth cried, and glared around at the rest of the room challengingly.

Mike swallowed. “I’m going to— Um— I think I’ll just—”

He hastily gathered up the briefs and edged out of the room as quickly and inconspicuously as he could.

So.

That was really strange.

—

Louis caught him in the hall, staring in his creepy, intent way.

Mike was expecting a demeaning, discouraging comment about the chaos he’d caused in the associates’ section, but none came.

Instead, Louis just kept staring.

“Um,” said Mike. “Hi?”

After another second of that scarily intent focus, Louis crowded into Mike’s personal space. Like, right into it.

“Uh, what— Louis!” Mike said, practically a yelp, backing away.

Louis took another step forward. Mike backed right into the wall.
“‘In faith,’” Louis began, the most serious Mike had ever seen him, “‘I do not love thee with mine eyes, for they in thee a thousand errors’—”

“Holy shit, Shakespeare,” blurted Mike. He shoved bodily at Louis, who stumbled backwards and fell on his ass. He was still staring. And still reciting.

Juggling to keep his grip on the briefs, Mike made a beeline for the ladies room.

“Your beauty overwhelms me!” Louis wailed, behind him.

—

Harvey’s voice startled him. “Mike? What are you doing in here?”

“Proofing. The briefs, remember? For you.”

“In the women’s bathroom?” Harvey didn’t sound skeptical, or even disbelieving, so much as simply resigned.

“Everyone in this office has gone crazy,” Mike explained, over his shoulder. If he sounded the tiniest bit strung out, he figured he deserved it.

“I noticed,” Harvey said, and pulled Mike around to look at him.

Mike blinked. “Um. Hi?”

For a moment, Harvey just stared at Mike’s face, gaze flickering from his eyes to his mouth and back, uncomfortably reminding Mike of the time he came into work high and nearly lost Harvey’s almost-respect entirely. And also, reminding him of Louis ten minutes ago, which was even more uncomfortable.

Mike licked his lips and hoped Harvey wasn’t using the opportunity to compose poetry about Mike’s perfect features.

Fortunately, he was apparently reading the confusion and discomfort and imminent panic there, rather than basking in Mike’s sudden-onset irresistible physical attractiveness, because what Harvey said after that moment of consideration wasn’t, ‘As I am clearly the most superior example of taste, breeding and bloody-minded brilliant legal aptitude in the city, and you are adequately intelligent and also not physically repellant, I think we should have lots of sex and babies,’ but rather “I’ll give you an extra hour, but you’d better be done proofing those briefs by 5, or I’m burning your tie. Use my office.”

“Thank you,” Mike breathed, heartfelt, and dashed off.

Hopefully, three hours holed up in Harvey’s office — where not even a drugged-up, half-insensible mail boy would dream of accosting Harvey’s personal associate — would be enough for this little problem everyone seemed to be experiencing to just… go away.

—

The ‘problem’ did not go away.

When Mike triumphantly handed the proofed briefs to a freshly-returned-from-intimidating-opposing-counsel-and-also-several-minor-dieties-into-defeat Harvey, and looked out to see if he could go back to his cubical to collect his things, there were no less than a full dozen associates, five paralegals, a senior partner and (oh, God, not again) Louis, all loitering in the hallway just beyond Donna’s desk, staring dopily at Mike through the glass wall of Harvey’s office.

“Oh, God.”

“Hm?” Harvey came up next to Mike and took in the scene. “… Ah.”

Mike’s attention, even long-distance, seemed to give one of the paralegals courage, because he abruptly took several steps forward and went to his knees, earnestly calling out, “Would you like me to pet your soft, fluffy hair, Mr Specter’s associate Michael Ross? It would be my honor! I give the best head pats!”

The senior partner in the hall hip-checked the paralegal out of the way, beaming at Mike and crying, “I have a private jet, Harvey’s associate Michael Ross! And I’m the Queen of Aruba. We should go work on your tan.”

Mike sputtered.

“Ah,” Harvey repeated, a wealth of judgement in the sound.

“Help,” Mike pleaded, half-strangled with desperation.

“Right,” said Harvey, and grabbed Mike’s arm to tow him out of the office and down the hall. “Let’s get your coat.”

In the face of Harvey’s I’m-Mack-the-Knife smile, Mike’s admirers parted like butter for a blow torch.

They got Mike’s coat.

—

“Thank you,” Mike insisted, for the fourth time, once they were safely in Harvey’s car. “Seriously. I don’t know what that was all about, but I really appreciate you getting me away from it.”

Harvey granted him the honor of a sideways glance. “‘That’?”

Mike pointed over his shoulder to indicate the craziness they’d left behind. “All the people we work with who suddenly want— in my pants. Or my hair. Or whatever.”

“Ah,” said Harvey. “That.”

“Seriously,” Mike said. He ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. “This isn’t something I ever expected to find myself saying, but being around people who wanted to have sex with me that badly was starting to freak me out. I am so glad to be away from it.”

Harvey glanced at him again. “Away from it?”

Mike blinked. “Yeah,” he said, slowly. “Away from it. Which I am. Right now. Because I’m here in the car?”

“What do you think is happening right now?” Harvey asked, sounding vaguely curious but also amused, like it didn’t really matter what Mike’s answer was going to be, because it wouldn’t at all change the reality of the situation.

“You’re giving me a ride home. So— so that—” Faced with the mocking comma of Harvey’s smirking mouth, Mike faltered. “So that I’ll be safe while whatever ridiculous sex pollen got into the firm’s air supply works its way out of everyone’s systems…?”

“Hm. Okay. But the actual case is that I’m taking you back to my condo,” corrected Harvey, nonchalantly, “because I want to make sure no-one else can see you while I fuck you.”

Mike lost control of his jaw. Which meant it went embarrassingly slack.

“Otherwise,” Harvey went on, “I would have you bent over the desk in my office already.”

“Harvey,” squawked Mike.

Harvey sighed, and took a left turn on a yellow arrow that had Mike flattened to the passenger door — really, that was the only reason he was there. “Or,” Harvey said, a beat later, sounding long-suffering and not looking at Mike, “I’m actually trying to see how red I can get you to turn without your head exploding all over my leather seats, because it’s an entertaining way to spend my time while I drive you to your place.”

After a second, Mike relaxed away from the door.

“It says something about my working environment today that I don’t actually know which one of those seems most believable,” he muttered.

“I heard that,” Harvey said mildly.

Sighing, Mike thunked his head against the back of the seat. “My life is a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” chided Harvey. “You’re too smart to take a losing case like that to court. Your boss would fire you for legal irresponsibility.”

—

“Oh, and, Mike?” said Harvey, leaning toward Mike just as he was unbuckling his seat belt and preparing to open his door.

Mike eyed him, a little warily. “Yes?”

Harvey met his gaze with a flat look of his own. “Don’t leave your apartment tonight. Actually, don’t go outside at all until I pick you up for work tomorrow.”

“Um,” hesitated Mike.

Harvey’s stare eloquently spoke volumes I–VII of peon, do my bidding or else thy life shall be forfeit and I shall feast on thy soul, and also take thy ass to court for all thou art worth and some more besides.

“Fine,” Mike groaned. “Whatever, okay. Can I go now?”

“You may,” Harvey allowed, finally.

Mike went.

—

Instead of obediently sitting on his ass on his droopy couch in his dinky apartment and eating ramen for dinner while being grateful for the notice and condescension of the magnificent Harvey Specter, Mike ignored his boss’s advice, and went out for a burger and some beer.

Possibly many beers; it had been that kind of day.

—

“On the house, just for you,” said the bartender who drew Mike’s first beer, passing it to him with a leer and a napkin with seven digits on it. He was sixty if he was a day, and wearing a wedding ring.

—

“You’re too gorgeous to look that lonely,” said the blonde in the fuck-me stilettos, who sidled up to Mike while he was trying to eat his burger in peace, trailing her red-nailed hand down his arm.

“You should let us make you happy,” said her six-foot, eight-billion-inches boyfriend, resting his big hand on Mike’s knee.

—

“No, no, it was my pleasure,” said the cabby who drove Mike home, passing back the bills Mike had been trying to use to pay his fare. His fingers lingered on Mike’s hand. “Really. Anytime.”

—

Mike was not an idiot.

Once it was more or less unarguably obvious to an unobservant ferret on LSD that all the weird things that had happened were actually connected to him, and nothing else, Mike decided that it was time he did a little research.

So when he got to work in the morning, he fired up his foxy web browser — ignoring the way Seth was still staring at him and occasionally sighing dreamily even after a whole night had gone by — and Googled the shit out of ‘inexplicable mass sexual advances’ and ‘unprecedented and unsolicited declarations of literally undying love.’

An hour later, Mike stared at the only logical, but still completely unbelievable, conclusion to his investigation.

“Son of a bitch,” and he left to find Harvey.

—

“Harvey,” said Mike, barely slowing enough to rap his knuckles against the glass in a perfunctory knock as he pushed open the door to Harvey’s office, “Harvey, I have bad news. I think maybe I’m—”

“About to get fired for not going through the Henderson files yet, like you were supposed to have done for me before we got in this morning?” asked Harvey. He didn’t look up from whatever he was working on.

Mike drew up short and blinked a few times. Recovering, he lifted the folder in his hand and said, “No, I’ve got those done, what you needed was on page three-eighty-seven; they didn’t adequately allow for— Harvey, no, I’m serious, I think I’m part—”

“Chatterbox?” suggested Harvey, still without looking up. He took the file from Mike’s erratically flapping hand, though, without even missing a beat, so he must have been paying at least a little attention. Or else it was just another Harvey Specter Super Power. “Jack-in-the-box?”

“Part Veela, Harvey,” Mike exclaimed. Then he tensed, braced for the confusion, the jokes about reading nonsense children’s stories when he should be working.

What he got was a negligent little flip of Harvey’s hand, opening the file Mike had complied about the weaknesses of the Henderson case and the implications thereof and how they — how Harvey — could exploit them for the benefit of their client, as Harvey said, “Is this supposed to shock me?”

Mike blinked a few more times. “Okay, so you don’t— Harvey, I’m serious, this is really bad news!”

“No, it isn’t. What it is, is not news at all,” said Harvey. He glanced up, without lifting his head, just as Mike felt like he was about to start hyperventilating. “Breathe.”

“Okay, I. Right.” Mike breathed. Once he felt a little more like his lungs were functioning properly again and his brain was getting an adequate amount of oxygen, he said, “But, Harvey, I’m part Veela, do you understand what that—”

“I know,” Harvey said, talking over Mike because in the world of Harvey Specter it was completely acceptable for senior partners to interrupt their associates even when they were trying to impart crucial, life-changing information to said senior partners. “Sit down before you fall over and I end up with a rookie-shaped dent in my carpet.”

“Wait.” Feeling like a shell-shocked marionette whose anxious strings had all been swiftly, efficiently cut by the ruthless scythe of Death— er, the city’s best closer, Mike sat down. “You… you know?”

Harvey paused in flipping through the papers, and looked up. Properly looked up, lifted head and everything. “Do we have to have the conversation about how I know everything?”

“You don’t,” Mike replied, automatically. Then he frowned. “How did you know?”

Harvey let go of the page he’d been holding, but flattened his hand against it like he was marking his place, so he could get back to it as soon as Mike got over his case of terminal mental imbalance and crushing intellectual inferiority and let his boss get back to work. “All the typical signs were present the minute you walked into that interview room with your briefcase full of pot. One of the Harvard douches could have figured it out. Frankly, I’d be surprised they didn’t— except, actually, no, I’m not. Why is it that you’re deciding now that this is a conversation we need to have?”

Mike boggled.

Harvey raised an eyebrow. “Mike?”

“… You’ve known all this time?”

“Michael,” sighed Harvey, “I thought we covered this. I know everything.”

Judiciously, Mike allotted himself five whole minutes to boggle some more.

Harvey went back to his file.

—

“So,” said Mike, breaking the silence, “is that why it doesn’t affect you?”

“Hm? If it’s important, speak up. If not, I’m busy.”

“My… thing. Whammy. Whammy-thing,” Mike clarified. “Is it because you know, that it doesn’t have any effect on you?”

Harvey’s head jerked up. “Excuse me?”

Frowning, Mike pressed, “Does knowing make you immune, or something?”

“Immune?” Donna’s voice repeated incredulously through the intercom. “You think he’s immune?”

“Yes…?” answered Mike.

Donna started laughing. “Oh, Mikey, honey, you’re adorable. If there’s one thing Harvey is, it’s not—”

“Donna,” Harvey snapped, warningly.

She laughed again, but didn’t finish her sentence.

Mike frowned even harder. “Okay, I think I missed something here. Was there a memo I should have read before starting this conversation?”

Harvey flattened his lips into a dangerous, appealing line, and didn’t say anything.

“No, really,” said Mike, scooting to the edge of the sofa. “Is that why you weren’t shamelessly trying to— I don’t know, convince me that you thought you deserved to be my sugardaddy, or whatever, yesterday, like everybody else was?”

Donna’s laughter trebled.

Scowling, Harvey switched off the intercom.

“… Harvey?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Why would I bother trying to convince you that I think I deserve anything?” asked Harvey, leaning back in his desk chair, the picture of studied, well-dressed, deserved arrogance.

Mike wilted a little, back onto the couch. “Okay. That’s… actually comforting to hear. Why is that comforting? That should not be comforting.”

“After all,” Harvey went on casually, as if listening his impertinent absent-a-law-degree associate was beneath the notice of the high-profile actual-lawyer. “It should be perfectly obvious by now that I honestly do deserve it.”

“What?”

Harvey smirked. “You know it’s true. Besides, I’m already your sugardaddy.”

Mike’s mouth did that thing where it rebelled and hit the floor, again. “You are not my sugardaddy!”

“You’re wearing a tie I chose. And paid for,” Harvey pointed out.

“I’m only wearing it today because you saved me from having to watch the entirety of Pearson-Hardman do battle for my virtue!” Mike smoothed down the tie self-consciously. “It’s a thank you!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, it never would have come to a battle. They would have remembered you were mine before it got nearly that far.”

Mike squinted at him. “Do you mean ‘mine’ in the sense of chattel, or inamorato?”

“In the sense of puppy, obviously,” said Harvey. “You’re lucky I was feeling generous enough to clean up the mess you made.”

“What! You can’t seriously blame me for some genetic glitch that I obviously don’t have any control—”

“So you’re saying you didn’t deliberately ‘whammy-thing’ that Delilah-whatsherface intern?”

“Her name’s Delia.”

“I really don’t care.”

“And yes, I am saying I didn’t do it deliberately,” snapped Mike. “Do you really think I’d risk that kind of attention when I’m— When we’re— With the big Harvard-shaped lie that could cost us our jobs dangling over both our heads?”

Harvey cocked his head, taunting and demanding and fond all at once. “Regardless, the fact remains that you did actually do it, whether you meant to or not.”

Mike threw up his hands, frustrated. “I don’t know how I did it! How could I do it if I didn’t know how to?”

“That doesn’t seem to stop you with legal forms,” said Harvey.

“Hey!”

Harvey regarded Mike with narrowed eyes for what felt like a very, very long time. It was probably long enough that he’d been able to note, categorize, and rate every single inadequacy in Mike’s apparel. In detail. It was also probably only about a minute and a half. Then,

“That’s it. You need a keeper,” Harvey declared, and reached to turn the intercom back on.

“What? I do not, I’m a grown ass—”

Harvey wasn’t listening. “Donna, do you still have the number for those movers you found me?”

“The ones you have on retainer in case Mike needs them?” came Donna’s voice. “Of course I do. What do you take me for?”

“Indispensable,” said Harvey. “Call them. I’m moving Mike into my place.”

“Hey!” Mike exclaimed again.

“No. Don’t argue,” Harvey told him. “I’ve made up my mind.”

“I’m not arguing,” said Mike. “I— Just— Why would you do that?”

“Make up my mind, or want you to move in with me?”

“The last one? I don’t know. Both of them!”

“I made up my mind because someone had to,” explained Harvey, his tone suggesting that he considered himself in this moment to be the most reasonable creature to ever gracefully strut the Earth. “As for the latter, well. You can’t deny it would facilitate the sex.”

“The sex?” Mike sputtered. “What sex? We aren’t having sex!”

“We will be,” said Harvey.

“You— When— What?”

Harvey raised a brow, and said, “Do you want to have sex with me?”

“Yes, of course I do,” Mike said instantly. “Harvey, there are probably eunuchs who want to have sex with you. It’s more a question of, do you really want to have sex with me? Aside from the whole—”

“I do,” Harvey said, with a solemn nod.

Mike blinked.

“Which is why you’re going to move into my condo.” Harvey shot his cuffs and gave Mike the look that said clearly I know better than you so let’s just defer to my expertise in this scenario, shall we; hm, I thought as much, good choice. “So that I can keep an eye on you and make sure you don’t enthrall half of New York City, and so I can fuck you insensible as frequently as I want. Which will be frequently.”

Mike blinked some more. “But. Are you sure you—

“I’m sure. If you have objections, speak them now, or forever hold your peace,” Harvey said, giving Mike a severe look.

“Going once…” Donna called, gleefully.

“I don’t object!” said Mike, quickly. “I just didn’t realize—”

“Good, that’s settled.” Harvey picked up a pen, scrawled something on an official looking paper off toward one side of his desk, and nodded, to himself. “Donna?”

“Calling!” she trilled, and the intercom went dead, presumably so she could do just that.

Reeling a little, Mike rubbed a hand over his mouth, and considered the last few minutes. “… Uhm. Harvey?”

“Yes?”

“Did you just marry us?”

Harvey smirked. “Don’t pretend you mind; you weren’t complaining a second ago. And anyway, it was better you didn’t have time to horrify discerning people with what would have passed for your half of our wedding registry.”

Chapter Text

Mike sidled into Harvey’s office, frowning a little. He waited until he had Harvey’s attention — which took the usual flatteringly short amount of time — and asked, “Why doesn’t it work on Donna?”

“Because she’s Donna, obviously. What are we talking about, exactly?”

“My Veela mojo thing.”

Harvey’s eyebrows went up to make friends with his appropriately slick hairdo. “Did I just hear you tell me that you’ve been trying to enthrall your colleagues again? Was the Delilah Incident not enough of a warning?”

“Delia,” Mike corrected, though of course it was useless trying to tell that to Harvey; he’d decided she was a Delilah, and thus a Delilah she’d stay. “And no, it totally was, I haven’t been trying anything. I was just… thinking.”

“I’d say I don’t pay you for that, but sadly it’s exactly what I do pay you for,” said Harvey. He pushed away what he’d been going over, which looked to Mike like the folders on the Ellicott fraud case that Mike had only just finished with, and thought he’d left on his desk before he went to get the coffee he was ostensibly in here to deliver to Harvey. Huh.

“I was thinking,” Mike repeated, waving the cup at Harvey, hoping to distract him with java long enough that he got to finish, “that Donna’s probably actually immune.”

Harvey snatched the coffee out of Mike’s hand, his eyebrows finally returning to their normal altitude. He took a sip, nodded approvingly, and opened his mouth.

Mike expected a reaction similar to the one he’d received when he’d tried to claim that Harvey himself was impervious to Mike’s… charms.

What he got was: “Of course Donna’s immune.”

Mike blinked. “She’s— What, really?”

“In the first place, Donna’s mine, which means she knows better than to go after anything else of mine. In the second place… can you see Donna offering to fly you to Aruba to work on your tan?”

“No, you’re right,” Mike allowed, “if she were going to do it, I’d be on the plane halfway there before I realized what was happening.”

“Exactly. For the safety of the world, Donna’s immune.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

Mike frowned. “Are you sure it works that way? Because I don’t think it sounds like it should.”

“Don’t be silly, of course it works that way.”

“But I—”

Harvey shot Mike one of his patented I know you think that you do but really you don’t actually want to keep talking right now looks, and Mike obediently swallowed his protests — because really, it took a very dense sort of person to ignore one of those looks, and Mike was a lot of things but he wasn’t actually stupid.

“Good boy,” said Harvey, with exactly the same sort of nod he’d given when he’d tasted Mike’s coffee. “Now go and fetch me a clean copy of that contract Ellicott signed.”

Mike sighed, and went and fetched.

Chapter Text

“— besides, whatever you’ve heard, you don’t need to worry about me filing any kind of suit against my associate,” Harvey said, not long into the conversation that Jessica had shown up and started like Mike wasn’t even in present. “Given that we’re married.”

There was a moment of deep and pervading silence.

“What do you mean,” Jessica said, very deliberately, “that you’re married?”

“It’s a verbal agreement,” said Harvey. “We’re working on formalizing it.”

Mike lifted his head, surprised. “We are?”

Harvey turned to him and raised a brow. “Of course we are. Less talking, more working, rookie.”

“Oh. Yeah— right, okay.”

Jessica, who’d watched this exchange with her lips set in a tight, disapproving line, said, “I hope you realize that even you, Harvey, can be sued for sexual harassment.”

“By whom? You mean Mike?” Harvey laughed, and Mike flushed, abandoning the files again to watch Harvey’s teeth flash. “Jessica, he’s a Veela who’s used his powers on a grand scale within the last week, at our shared place of business. Barring actual physical assault and severe injury, he’d never win a sexual harassment suit under those conditions, and would certainly risk a class-action counter-suit, even if he wanted to file one — which he doesn’t, do you, Mike?”

“No,” Mike said quickly, shaking his head. He grinned, deliberately cheeky. “I have it on good authority that my boss would fire me for legal irresponsibility if I tried.”

Jessica stared at Mike for another long moment. Then she turned back to Harvey and, in a viciously flat voice, said, “Fine. You think you know what you’re doing, I’ll let you do it. But if this blows up in your face, it had better not touch the firm.”

“Scout’s honor,” said Harvey, lifting a hand and giving Jessica — well, Mike had never been a boy scout, but he was pretty sure that was a Vulcan salute, not anything to do with boy scouts. “But it doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to blow up.”

Jessica leveled one last, sweepingly unimpressed look that managed to encompass Mike without actually coming anywhere near him, or, indeed, actually involved turning away from Harvey at all. “See that it doesn’t,” she said, and left.

Mike watched her walk away, warily.

He was still staring out through the wall a few seconds later, when Harvey’s hand came down on the back of his neck, warm and imperious.

“Tail between your legs, puppy?”

“The big dog scares me,” said Mike. He tipped his head back, pushing into Harvey’s hand, to get a look at him. “Is her bite worse than her bark?”

“Immeasurably.”

Mike snorted. “That was comforting.”

“Don’t worry,” said Harvey, squeezing Mike’s neck gently. “I’m the only one who gets to bite you.”

“Comforting,” Mike repeated, but this time, he meant it.

Harvey smirked.