Chapter 19: A Slow Retribution
The cold mountain air that had greeted them was now a distant memory, burned away by the heat radiating from the fireplace and from their own skin. The vast, silent bedroom felt like the only place in the world.
Draco laid her back onto the duvet, its fabric cool and strangely soft against her bare shoulders.He loomed over her, a silhouette against the firelight, his features unreadable. She reached for him, but he caught her wrists, pinning them gently above her head with one hand. The move was effortless, a demonstration of strength that sent a shock of pure desire straight through her core.“Not yet,” he murmured, his voice a low vibration in the quiet room.
He released her wrists, but the command hung in the air. Instead of covering her body with his, he began a different kind of conquest. His mouth found the hollow of her throat, tasting the salt of her skin. He kissed a slow, burning path along her collarbone, down the slope of her breast, circling but never quite touching the peak. She arched off the bed, a silent plea, but he held her down with a flat palm on her stomach, his touch firm.
“You have no idea,” he whispered against the sensitive skin of her inner arm, his breath cool, “what you’ve been doing to me.” His lips followed the path his words had taken. “Watching you.Every morning. With your ridiculous, serious little frown and your giant mug of tea.”
He moved lower, his mouth skimming over her ribs, the plane of her stomach. Each kiss was a brand.She trembled.Her fingers twisted in the duvet.
“You’d curl up on that sofa,” he continued, his voice muffled against her hip bone, “with your parchment, completely oblivious. Or not so oblivious, as it turns out.” He nipped lightly at the soft skin there, and she gasped.“All that righteous concentration. It was infuriating.And then you’d look up.And you’d see me. And your eyes would go all dark.”
He finally took one peaked nipple into his mouth, swirling his tongue with devastating precision.A broken sound escaped her.Her back bowed.
“You’d glare,” he said, pulling away just as the pleasure began to crest, leaving her aching. He moved to her other breast, giving it the same attentive, merciless torture.“Such a vicious little glare. I lived for it.”
“Draco, please—” The words were torn from her.
“Please what?” He lifted his head, his grey eyes glittering in the low light.He looked predatory. Ravenous.He kissed the inside of her knee, then higher, along her thigh. His stubble scratched exquisitely against her tender skin. He was everywhere except where she needed him most, and the space between her legs throbbed with a desperate, hollow ache.
“You made me watch,” he said, his voice dropping to a raw scrape. He settled between her legs, his hands spreading her thighs wider, holding her open. She was completely exposed to his gaze, to the cool air, to his control.“You made me stand there and watch you touch yourself. You made me come in my fucking trousers like a schoolboy staring at a dirty picture.”
The confession, vulgar and stark, sent a jolt through her.Her hips lifted off the bed, seeking contact, seeking anything.
He blew a soft, cool breath over her center, and she cried out, her vision spotting.
“So now,” he said, his lips a hairsbreadth from her, “we wait.”
He didn’t touch her there.Not with his mouth, not with his fingers. Instead, he pressed a single, soft kiss to the crease of her thigh.Then another, lower. He mapped her with his lips and tongue and teeth, tracing every nerve-ending but the central, screaming cluster of them. He kissed the arch of her foot, sucked a bruise onto her ankle, lavished attention on the back of her knee.It was worship and punishment in one.
She was shaking violently, sweat dampening her hairline.Pleasure coiled so tight inside her it was pain. “I can’t— Draco, I can’t—”
“You can.” He rose over her again, finally, his body aligning with hers. The hard length of him pressed against her soaked heat, a tantalizing promise.He didn’t enter her. He just rocked against her, the friction almost worse than the absence.“And you will. You’ll wait until I say.”
She was beyond pride, beyond thought. Her world had narrowed to the feel of him, the scent of his skin, the unbearable pressure building and building with nowhere to go. “Please,” she sobbed, her nails digging into his shoulders.“Now. Please, now.”
He watched her face, his own a mask of stark need, his control clearly hanging by a thread. “Look at me.”
She forced her eyes open, meeting his stormy gaze.
“Tell me what you want.”
“You.” The word was a gasp.“I want you.Inside me. Now.”
A brutal shiver racked him.He positioned himself, the head of his cock pressing against her entrance. Then, with a groan that seemed ripped from his chest, he pushed in.
The sensation was so intense, so all-consuming after the agony of waiting, that she screamed. It was a raw, unfiltered sound that echoed off the stone walls. He filled her completely, a slow, inexorable invasion that stretched and burned and completed something she hadn’t known was fractured.
He stilled, buried to the hilt, both of them panting.His forehead dropped to hers. “Merlin, Granger…”
Then he began to move.There was no rushed pace, no frantic race. It was a deep, dragging withdrawal followed by an even slower, more perfect sheathing. Each stroke was an event.Each one brushed a place inside her that lit her up like a spell. She could feel every ridge, every vein of him. She could see the firelight catching the sweat on his throat, the desperate clench of his jaw.
“Is this,” he gritted out, his rhythm never faltering, “what you imagined? When you’d look across the alley and see me watching?”
“Yes,” she moaned, her legs locking around his hips, pulling him deeper. “God, yes.”
“Liar.” He drove into her harder, snapping his hips, and she saw stars. “You never let yourself imagine this.Not really.”
He was right.She never had. She couldn’t have. The reality of it—the weight of him, the shocking intimacy, the friction that was building into a cataclysm—was beyond any fantasy. She was fracturing around him, coming apart at the seams.The coil snapped. Pleasure detonated through her, a silent, white-hot shockwave that seized her muscles and melted her bones. Her cry was choked, soundless, as she convulsed around him, the pulses wringing him relentlessly.
It tipped him over the edge.His control shattered. With a raw, guttural shout, he plunged into her one final time, his body bowing as he found his own release. She felt the hot spill of him inside her, the wild shudder of his collapse.
For a long time, there was only the sound of the crackling fire and their ragged, intermingled breaths. He was a heavy, welcome weight atop her, his face buried in the crook of her neck. Slowly, awareness seeped back.The chill of the room on her sweat-slicked skin. The distant call of a bird outside.The steady, strong beat of his heart against hers.
He shifted, rolling onto his side and taking her with him, keeping her tucked against his body. He didn’t speak.His fingers traced idle, possessive patterns on her arm.
Hermione stared at the fire, her mind a blissful, blank void. The clever witch, the relentless researcher, the war heroine—all were silent. There was only this: the heat of his skin, the smell of sex and woodsmoke, the profound and unexpected peace of being exactly where she was.
A log shifted in the grate, sending up a shower of sparks. Draco’s breath evened out against her hair, becoming slow and deep.She thought he might have fallen asleep.
Then his voice, sleep-thickened and quiet, murmured into the darkness.
“I’m not letting you Apparate back tonight.”