Chapter 2: Plain English
On the third day, a cup of tea appeared on her desk at the Ministry at eleven o'clock precisely. Milk, no sugar, the exact colour she liked it, in a bone china cup with a crest on it that she had last seen worked into the iron gates of Malfoy Manor. There was no note. There didn't need to be.
On the fifth day she came home late from a hearing to find him in the kitchen with his sleeves pushed up to the elbow, stirring something in a copper pan, the Dark Mark on his forearm faded to a grey smudge he did not bother to hide in his own house. He did not look up when she came in.
"Sit," he said. "It's risotto. Don't talk to me for four minutes or it'll go wrong."
She sat and watched his forearms, which was a mistake, and the back of his neck, which was a worse one.
On the seventh day a defendant in the Wizengamot cells spat a Blistering Curse at her through the bars, and she came home with her right hand wrapped in a Ministry bandage and her jaw set like concrete.
He was waiting in the hall. Someone at the Ministry must have sent word to St Mungo's. He was still in his lime-green Healer's robes with his wand already out, and he looked at her bandaged hand and then at her face, and for one moment his expression did something she had never seen it do before.
"Sit down," he said, very quietly.
He unwrapped the bandage himself. The skin beneath was raw and bubbled, and he made a low disapproving noise in his throat at whatever the Ministry first-aider had done to it. Then he cradled her hand in his left palm and traced the wand over it in small careful passes, murmuring something under his breath in Latin, and the burn drew in on itself and cooled and faded until her skin was pink and new.
He did not let go straight away. His thumb moved once, slowly, over the inside of her wrist, where her pulse was making a fool of her.
"Who was it?" he asked.
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me." He looked up. His eyes were very pale and very steady. "Who was it, Granger?"
"A man called Mulciber," she said. "Cousin of the one you're thinking of. He'll get an extra year for it."
"Good," said Draco, and released her hand, and she felt the loss of it all the way up her arm.
She did not ask him. She went upstairs and locked the door and lay on the very large bed with the laminated schedule on her chest and stared at the ceiling and did not ask him.
On the twelfth day it was the Ministry's Samhain Ball, and Cormac McLaggen put his hand on the small of her back.
He was bigger than ever and twice as pleased with himself, and he had cornered her by the champagne fountain while Draco was across the hall being harangued by his own Head Healer. McLaggen had heard, he said, about the marriage law. Terrible business. A woman like her, shackled to a Malfoy. He leaned in, bringing a wave of firewhisky. If she ever wanted to talk about it, he said. Somewhere private. He knew a place.
His hand slid an inch lower.
"Remove your hand," said Hermione, "or I will remove it for you, and it will not go back on."
McLaggen laughed as if she'd made a joke. And then he stopped laughing, because Draco Malfoy was standing just behind his left shoulder.
He had not hurried. That was the thing she noticed. He had crossed the whole Atrium at a perfectly ordinary pace, and now he stood there in his black dress robes with a glass of champagne in one hand and absolutely no expression on his face.
"McLaggen," he said pleasantly.
"Malfoy. Just congratulating your wife."
"How kind." Draco did not look at him. He looked at Hermione, and only at her, and he held out his free hand, palm up. Not taking. Offering. "Dance with me?"
She took his hand. McLaggen's slid away from her back as if it had been burned.
Draco led her onto the floor. The band was playing something slow and old-fashioned, and he put his hand at her waist exactly where McLaggen's had been, warm and certain, and pulled her in until there was no room between them at all.
"You didn't hex him," she said into his collar.
"You had it in hand." His thumb moved at her waist. "You were about to do something extremely creative with a Severing Charm. I didn't want to steal your moment."
"Then why did you come over?"
He was quiet for a turn of the dance. Then he bent his head, so that his mouth was right beside her ear, and said in a voice so low she felt it more than heard it:
"Because I've had my hands to myself for twelve days, Granger. Because I lie awake every night across the landing from you listening to you turn pages. Because you're wearing that dress, and I've been watching it move all evening, and I will not stand on the other side of a room while another man touches you as though he's got the right." He drew back just far enough to look at her. "That's why. Is that plain enough English for you?"
The music went on. She discovered she had stopped dancing.
"Take me home," Hermione said.
His hand went still at her waist.
"Draco." She made herself hold his gaze, though her face was burning and her heart was going like a hammer. "I'm asking. I don't care about the ring, and I don't care about day twenty-one. I want you. Take me home and take me to bed. Now. Please."
For a moment he simply looked at her, as if he were reading a sentence twice to be certain he had understood it.
Then he took her hand and walked her straight off the dance floor, past McLaggen, past the champagne fountain, past a startled Kingsley Shacklebolt, and into the nearest Floo.
They did not make it upstairs.
They came out of the fireplace in the library on the ground floor in a burst of green flame, and he caught her as she stumbled on the hearth, and that was the end of anybody's dignity. She had her hands in his hair before her feet were steady. He walked her backwards until her shoulders hit the bookshelves and a volume of goblin rebellion history fell somewhere to their left, and he kissed her hard and deep and open-mouthed, the way he had not let himself kiss her on the landing twelve nights ago, as if he had been holding it behind his teeth ever since.
"Tell me," he said against her throat, "if you want to stop."
"If you stop," she said, "I'll have you arrested."
He laughed, low and rough, and she felt it against her skin.
The dress had forty tiny buttons down the back. Draco found the top one, considered it, and then said a single word under his breath and every button came undone at once with a soft cascade of clicks, like rain on a window.
"Show-off," she gasped.
"I'm a Healer. I'm very good with my hands." He drew the dress down her shoulders, slowly, and watched it fall. She heard the breath go out of him. "Merlin, Granger. Look at you."
She was standing in the firelight in her underwear and her heels, and for once in her life she did not feel the urge to explain herself. She reached for his robes instead. He let her work the clasps open, let her shove the heavy black fabric off his shoulders and tug his shirt free, and when she finally flattened her palms against his bare chest he shut his eyes and leaned into her touch like a cat in the sun.
He was lean and pale and warmer than she had imagined, and she had imagined it quite a lot. There was a long silver scar curving across his ribs. She didn't ask. She traced it with two fingers, gently, from end to end, and felt him shiver.
"Hermione," he said.
It was the first time he had ever used her first name. It went through her like a struck bell.
He kissed her again, slower now, and his hands went to her back and unhooked her bra with one easy twist of his fingers, and then his mouth was on her breast and she had to grab a shelf to stay upright. He was unhurried and thorough and completely shameless. He used his tongue and then the edge of his teeth, and when she pulled at his hair he only hummed against her skin and moved to the other side and started again.
"Draco." It came out as a plea.
"I've waited twelve days." He sank to his knees on the library rug in front of her, all that pale hair gilded in the firelight, and hooked his thumbs into the sides of her knickers and looked up at her. "You can wait two more minutes. Yes?"
"Yes," she managed. "Yes. God. Yes."
He drew them down her legs and left her shoes on. Then he lifted one of her knees over his shoulder, braced her against the books with one broad palm flat on her stomach, and put his mouth on her.
She heard herself make a sound she had never made in her life. He was patient and slow, then not slow, then slow again whenever she got close, until she had both hands knotted in his hair and was saying his name over and over like an argument she was losing. He learned her with infuriating speed, as if he had read the manual twice. When she finally came it was with her head thrown back against a row of Wizengamot Law Reports and her thigh trembling over his shoulder and his name broken in half in her mouth.
He held her through it. Then he rose to his feet and kissed her, and she could taste herself on him, and it made her want to drag him to the floor.
So she did.
They went down onto the rug in a tangle of discarded robes. She pushed him onto his back and straddled him and got his trousers open with hands that were not entirely steady, and he lay there watching her with his chest heaving and his eyes gone dark as storm cloud. He was hard and hot in her hand. When she stroked him once, experimentally, he swore and his head fell back against the rug.
"Hermione. Wait." His hands came to her hips, stilling her. "Look at me."
She looked.
"Is this what you want?" he asked. His voice was wrecked but his eyes were completely serious. "Not the law. Not the ring. You."
She leaned down until her curls fell around both their faces like a curtain.
"I've wanted this," she said, "since the night you read my schedule and laughed at me. I've been lying awake across that landing for twelve nights, Draco. I wrote do not ask him first in the margin and underlined it three times. I want you. Now stop talking."
Something in his face cracked open. He pulled her down and kissed her, and she reached between them and guided him into place, and sank down onto him in one long slow slide that took the breath out of both of them.
For a moment neither of them moved. He was so deep inside her she could feel her own heartbeat around him. His fingers were tight on her hips and his eyes were fixed on hers and he looked, she thought dazedly, like a man who had walked a very long way in the dark and finally seen a lit window.
Then she rocked her hips, and he groaned her name, and after that there was no more thinking at all.
She rode him slowly at first, learning the angle, learning what made him grip harder and what made him swear. Then faster. He met every movement, his hips rising from the rug to meet hers, one hand sliding up her spine to tangle in her hair and the other moving between them to touch her where she needed it. She could hear the wet sound of their bodies and the crackle of the logs and her own voice saying yes, yes, there, like that, and she did not care, she did not care at all.
He came apart a few seconds after she did, with her name in his mouth and his arms locked around her as if he thought she might vanish. She collapsed onto his chest and lay there, boneless, with his heart slamming under her ear and his hand moving in slow absent strokes up and down her back.
"Well," Draco said eventually, to the ceiling. His voice was hoarse. "I think I won the bet."
She laughed into his chest. It came out shaky and wonderful. She lifted her left hand to look at the ring, ready to watch it glow gold, ready to show him.
It was amber.
She sat up very slowly.
It was still amber. Bright, stubborn, unmistakable amber, glowing smugly in the firelight on the third finger of her left hand.
Draco followed her gaze. She saw him see it, saw the satisfied looseness drain out of his face.
"Granger," he said carefully. "Why is it still amber?"