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Regulation J12, subclause iv of the DMLE Charter stipulated that any report of suspicious magical activity made to the Office for the Removal of Curses, Jinxes, and Hexes, must be investigated immediately and in full, no matter its nature.
However, as a Very Busy Person who had More Important Things to do, Hermione Granger often found herself taking issue with this regulation.
For example, when it came to the sixth report made by a Ms Dorothea Munn in as many weeks.
“Right,” Hermione sighed. “Where did you say this was, again?”
Ms Munn, who had been compulsively stroking her handbag for the last thirty minutes, smiled sleepily. “In the Muggle shop below my flat, dear. The magical trace goes right through my floorboards, it does. Did you need my address? It’s 20,671 Dodderi-”
“No need,” Hermione said quickly, “we have it from your previous reports this month.”
Ms Munn smiled. “You will take a look, won’t you? It disturbs my poor Topsie something terrible.”
Her ever-present and ever-smelly pet Crup, Topsie, stuck its head out from the depths of her handbag and growled at Hermione by way of reply.
“Of course,” said Hermione, through gritted teeth. She circled the words ‘low concern’ on her form, silently cursed regulation J12 subclause iv, and forced her expression back into a warm smile. “Someone will be down later to take a look.”
“Oh, thank you, dear,” said Ms Munn earnestly, as if Hermione had pledged her life to the case. “I’d better let you get to it, then!”
“Take care,” said Hermione, plastering on a smile as she stood to hold the door open, the fresh air from the corridor a welcome reprieve from the overwhelming scent of wet Crup. Her smile fell as soon as Ms Munn had disappeared from view. “I’m sure you’ll be back soon enough,” she muttered.
With a disgruntled sniff and several air-freshening charms, she wheeled around and rapped sharply on the neighbouring door.
“Come in.”
She was met with the sight of Draco Malfoy lounging on his desk, shuffling through a ream of parchment, a cup of coffee hovering by his side. He looked, as usual, almost unbearably handsome. But she was only allowed to admire the scene for a brief moment before it was shattered.
“Ugh,” he said, looking up and wrinkling his nose playfully. “On second thoughts, could you wait outside? I only just managed to get rid of the Crup stench from last time.”
She rolled her eyes. “I need your help.”
“Can you need my help from further away?”
Hermione rubbed her Crup-scented shoulder against the door frame. “The sooner you help, the sooner I leave."
Rolling his eyes, he set down the folder, cup coffee coming to land beside it with a slosh. “Fine,” he huffed. He got to his feet and headed towards her, lounging against the opposite side of the doorframe with a grin, while Hermione tried not to think about how much she liked it when his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows like this. “What has Ms Munn dreamed up this time?”
“Apparently it's the Muggle shop beneath her apartment, she thinks something strange has been going on ever since it changed hands last month,” she explained. “She believes the magical footprint of the building has changed.”
“The magical footprint of a Muggle shop? That’s even more ridiculous than the last one.”
Hermione sighed. “I know. But we have to abide by the rules. We have to go and investigate.”
He froze, the smirk melting from his features. “We?”
“It’s on a Muggle high street. There’ll be Confundus charms to cast, wards to put up…”
“But I have reports to do,” he groaned, lifting a hand to massage his temples.
“Subclause iv stipulates-”
“Fuck the subclause.”
“-I-” She broke off and narrowed her eyes up at him. “Draco Malfoy. You’re a Curse-Breaker. Act like one.”
He grumbled something under his breath and she set her shoulders.
“I’m Apparating in twenty minutes. Be ready.”
“You might want to think about a shower first. You smell like cr-.”
“Hey-”
“I was going to say crup,” he winked.
“Next time,” she growled, without turning, “you can entertain Ms Munn in your office.”
His laughter followed her as she left, making her skin jump with heat.
“Well,” said Hermione.
“Well,” Draco repeated stiffly.
She threw her hands in the pockets of her robes and, together, they stared up at the lurid pink banner above their destination. “Ms Munn failed to mention that.”
Secret Delights was a hot pink exclamation mark of a shop in the middle of a dull grey Muggle high street. Its beckoning windows bore several floor-to-ceiling posters of women wearing little more than string (albeit artfully arranged to cover all the necessary bits), and its candy-striped door bore the enticing announcement that there was a sale of up to 69% on all ‘toys’.
Hermione cleared her throat. “Let’s go take a look.”
“Wait,” Draco said suddenly. She turned to him, but he remained frozen and speechless, staring up at the fifty-times-magnified pair of breasts in front of him.
She smirked. “You can look at those in your own time-”
“What is this?!”
“It’s a Muggle sex shop.”
He stared uncomprehendingly at her. “What?”
“You know. Lingerie and sex toys.”
“Muggles have physical shops for that?!”
“Of course,” she said. “Someone’s got to sell them. And apparently, someone now has to investigate them for suspicious magical activity.”
He swallowed.
“Have you really never seen one before?” she frowned.
The rapid redirection of his gaze towards the floor told her he hadn’t. And a creeping warmth began to grow in her belly.
“Wow,” she said, biting back a grin. “This is going to be… educational.”
That was an understatement.
After a short pep talk, she marched him into the shop and straight to the very back, where a glittery lilac shelf displayed every kind of sex toy Hermione had ever heard of, and even some that she hadn’t.
Draco trailed behind her in shocked silence until she prodded an enormous pink dildo and he began quietly hyperventilating. Steering him towards a dark corner and telling him in no uncertain terms to Stay Put and to Calm Down, This Is Ridiculous, Hermione left to peruse the shelves for any obvious signs of wrongdoing.
But in the midst of a couple of surreptitious investigative spells, Hermione looked up to find an uncomfortable-looking Draco locked in conversation with an enthusiastic member of the sales team. And fighting back a laugh, she headed over to rescue him.
“Oh!” said the saleswoman earnestly. “Is this your partner?”
Draco’s face turned a delightful shade of fuchsia.
And Hermione realised that there was no way she could turn down this opportunity.
“Yes,” she grinned. She intertwined her fingers Draco’s, who responded with a startingly accurate impersonation of a marble statue. “We were just having a browse.”
“Of course! My name’s Hae-Won, I’d love to help,” said the lady warmly, brushing a lock of black hair behind her ear. “Are you new to using toys in the bedroom?”
“Well,” said Hermione, “I’ve tried a few things…” She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “But it’s all about trying to convince Drake here. Maybe we could start small, you know – I don’t want him to feel… inadequate.”
Draco’s hand tightened to a death grip around her fingers, his eyes narrowed, and Hermione’s chest fluttered. She’d forgotten what seeing him like this did to her.
“Thank you for your time,” he scowled, “but we’ll be going now-”
“I know this sort of thing can seem intimidating,” said Hae-Won, eyes wide, “but I’m positive we can find something you might like. Perhaps one of our smaller bullet vibrators-”
“Now,” said Draco sharply, the look in his eyes sparking a coil in Hermione’s belly.
But she couldn’t resist throwing him a cheeky glance. “Oh, but darling, we’ve not even looked at the prostate massagers yet! I know how much you love-”
One unceremonious exit from the shop later, Hermione was laughing so hard that she was bent double.
“You,” he growled, still pink in the cheeks, “are the worst.”
“Your face,” she wheezed.
“I’m not going back in there.”
Forcing back the giggles, she straightened up. “Yes, you are. We have a full investigation to perform.”
“You can do it,” he said gruffly. “And you can also respond to my legal case for public embarrassment and defamation-”
“It’s only defamation if it’s untrue,” she pointed out. “I wouldn’t know if your penis-”
“Leave my penis out of this!”
Further attempts to reason with her proved impossible as she dissolved into laughter once more.
“I’m going home,” he said. “We both know there’s nothing here to investigate-”
“Oh,” she said quietly. “No, that’s not true.”
He blinked helplessly at her.
“One of my spells picked something up,” she sighed. “I can’t localise the source, so we’re going to have to do a full scour of the premises, but it looks like something in there has a magical signature that shouldn’t do. Ms Munn was… right.”
Draco opened his mouth. Closed it. “Fuck,” he said.
And Hermione tried not to grin. “Yeah.”
The next morning, a thoroughly sullen Draco accompanied Hermione back to Secret Delights under considerable duress.
It only took a few Confundus charms to convince all the employees that they were taking the day off, several spells to make the place invisible to Muggles, and then a couple of wards to keep away any nosy passers-by. And finally, Secret Delights lay empty, a brightly-coloured cornucopia of sex toys ready to explore.
Draco didn’t look particularly thrilled.
“Put it this way,” said Hermione, pointing her wand at a neatly folded pile of crotchless knickers. “You have the rest of the day away from the office to learn about sex toys. It’s like a field trip.”
“I know plenty about sex toys.”
She levelled a gaze at him that he refused to meet.
“I know this is, er, lubricant,” he tried, lifting an elegant blue bottle off the shelf.
“Water or oil based?” she asked immediately, immensely enjoying the panicked look that followed.
“Er,” he said, and left it at that, until several minutes later when he suddenly shouted, “Oh! It’s cookies and cream! Is that what you meant?!”
Hermione had to stifle her laughter in a lacy grey nightgown.
Spells for detecting abnormal magical activity were frustratingly vague – though they knew that the immediate vicinity of the shop housed some sort of magical signature, there was no way to pinpoint whereabouts exactly it was emanating from. And so they had no choice but to investigate everything in the shop shelf by shelf, box by box.
Hermione had taken pity on Draco, obviously overwhelmed by the sex toy stand, and had sent him over to a corner that specialised in silly accessories and games; fluffy handcuffs and karma sutra dice and the like. She suspected that he wasn’t being as efficient as he could be; preoccupied as he was with examining each and every item he came across, but it was worth it for the occasional mutters of, “That position doesn’t look physically possible,” and, “Who buys penis-shaped pasta?!”
However as the hours went by and Draco acclimatised to this new environment, she began to notice him looking over at the shelves of sex toys with more and more curiosity.
On the third time she caught him doing a roundabout tour of the shop and pausing indiscreetly in front of the vibrators, she sighed.
“You’re not going to burst into flames if you touch one, you know,” she called out, and he sent her a scowl.
“I know.”
“Go on, then,” she teased. “I won’t tell.”
He didn’t reply, but as she turned back to the boxes full of holdup stockings, the suspicious silence could only really mean one thing.
She’d almost forgotten about it, frustrated with the apparent normality of all the boxes she’d delved through so far, when there was suddenly a panicked yell from the back of the shop.
“Granger!” Draco shouted. “Granger, help-!”
And without stopping to think she was racing over, fearing the worst, heart pounding, kicking boxes and fabric out of the way until-
“It’s going to explode!” he cried, and shoved a buzzing object point-first at her with an expression of helpless panic.
The sheer ridiculousness of the situation hit her all at once.
And she burst into giggles as the item vibrated merrily in his palm.
“Draco,” she snorted, “that’s a rabbit.”
He spluttered wordlessly for a moment. “Why’s it moving like that?!”
“Well,” she said, glancing down at the vibrating arm. “For her pleasure.”
Draco’s eyebrows shot up and the toy clattered to the floor.
“It won’t hurt you,” she smirked, stooping to pick it up and carefully turning it off again.
He stared down at the toy in her hand, clearly imagining how it was designed to be positioned. “Is that…” He glanced at her. “It looks complicated.”
She bit her lip. “It’s not, really. Once it’s… well, in…”
She didn’t know what she had been intending to say after that, but it didn’t matter, because she was suddenly incapable of speaking.
Because his eyes were wide and locked on hers. And she knew without a doubt that he was imagining her… like that.
Arousal peaked like heat over her skin.
“You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” Draco said searchingly, and she tried look nonchalant.
“I’m a modern woman,” she said, by way of response, and the following silence stretched on for too long. She scrambled to divert his attention. “Surely you’ve used… some of these things before?”
His eyes flitted over the neat rows of boxed vibrators. “I…” And he took a breath. “No. I haven’t. I’ve never dated anyone who knows much about Muggle technology.”
“I can help,” she said, without thinking, and his gaze immediately snapped to hers. “I mean – yeah.”
The silence was heavy as he stared at her, her heart thumping with tension.
His eyes were so grey.
“I can tell you… about them,” she said finally. “Just ask me. Any time.”
And looking at her with a gaze so heated it could have melted steel, he wet his lips. “Okay.”
The eye contact held until she stepped physically away.
Up until now, Hermione had underestimated how hard it would be to work in close quarters with someone she was intensely physically attracted to. She had believed that she was mature enough, professional enough, to brush it away and concentrate on her work.
And yet here she was, with images of Draco rolling around her mind so relentlessly that she had no idea whether the shelf of lingerie she’d been examining for the last twenty minutes held any trace of magic or not.
She stuck her wand into the centre of it and spoke the incantation so firmly that a spark shot out of the end.
Blast.
“What’s that smell?” Draco asked, from the other end of the shop.
“My crumbling productivity,” Hermione muttered lowly, pulling the smoking piece of underwear towards her and dousing it with her wand.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She looked up again a while later when she noticed that he was watching her, half-leaning on a nearby display stand of whips and paddles.
Oh, wow.
She didn’t need that image right now.
“Nice lingerie,” he smirked, nodding at the item in her lap. She lifted it to examine it properly – a lacy red thong with matching bra, garter belt, and stockings, and felt the heat rise in her cheeks.
Their eyes locked for a moment too long.
“You’d look better in green,” he said.
And a thousand more thoughts leaped into Hermione’s mind.
Her mouth went dry, heart beating against her ribs like one of the paddles under Draco’s elbow.
“Thanks,” was all she could stammer out, and then he was grinning at her, and she felt abruptly as if the power dynamic in this shop had overturned.
After working in the office beside him for so many years, his good-looks and her drive to impress him had become a fairly standard fact of life – but she absolutely hadn’t been prepared for him to suddenly start reciprocating her interest. And in a sex shop, of all places.
“I’ve finished checking over the vibrators,” he said. “And I can’t find anything. I think we ought to explore the storerooms.”
Taking a tiny moment to compose herself, she nodded wordlessly, then got to her feet. “I’ve just got two more shelves to check here. I’ll join you in a few?”
As soon as Draco had disappeared, she pointed her wand straight at her own face and cast the most forceful cooling charm she could manage.
When she made her way into the storeroom, it was to find Draco sitting cross-legged on the floor with a bejewelled butt plug in his hand.
“Wow,” she said. “Am I interrupting something?”
Draco rolled his eyes. “It’s good news, by the way,” he said. “I found your magical trace.”
“You did?!”
He gestured to the room at large. “It’s everything in here.”
She gaped at him. “What?”
He waved his wand to demonstrate, and a tell-tale green light bloomed at the end of his wand. “It’s everything,” he repeated. “This is just a secret back room full of magical items – that must be what Ms Munn was sensing. So I thought we should start looking through it all.”
Hermione settled herself down onto the floor beside him. “So you started with the butt plug?”
“Mm,” he said. “I have a sneaking suspicion it might do something nasty when… inserted.”
“Oh.”
There was an uncomfortable silence, then Hermione opened one of the cardboard boxes beside her and began to rummage through it for a moment until she found something that resembled a-
No, this didn’t resemble a vagina, she realised, as she pulled it from its wrappings.
It was clearly designed to be one.
She held the convenient fleshlight out towards him with a triumphant expression. “Ta da.”
It only took a moment of staring at one another, butt plug and fleshlight extended, before they dissolved into laughter.
“Go on,” she sniggered. “Let’s try it.”
“I’ll be gentle,” he quipped, and she threw the fleshlight at him, burying her snort of amusement in her sleeve.
But when she looked up again, he was inserting one toy into the other with a look of such focus that she had to hide her face in her hands again, cheeks blazing.
“Well,” he said, a moment later. “That’s not good.”
She could see immediately what he meant. The flared base of the plug had vanished, leaving it buried deep inside the toy with no method of removal.
“Oh, God,” said Hermione, understanding all too well. “That would have been an embarrassing trip to A&E. Whoever made this is an evil genius.”
“That wasn’t actually what I meant,” said Draco uncomfortably.
And he held the toy out to show her that the fleshlight had developed a row of circular teeth, biting in hard around the base of the plug.
She winced.
As they delved through the rest of the boxes, it became clear that they were uncovering a huge case of Muggle-baiting. Every ordinary-seeming object had some kind of unpleasant alteration, clearly designed to annoy or even harm the first unsuspecting Muggle to stumble across it.
However the final box, stowed away in a corner and covered with a fine layer of dust, turned out to be full of items that Hermione could only guess at their uses. Various jars and containers jostled for space inside, their packaging dull and minimalist, labels bearing little or no information about their contents.
Several investigative spells confirmed that the objects were, indeed, magical in nature. And having come face to face with a variety of unlabelled Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes products in the past, Hermione was immediately suspicious.
“Just be careful,” she told him, as he grabbed a large box and flicked open the lid. “I have a weird feeling about this.”
The sinister feeling only grew as they both failed to identify any of the items in the box. What few words there were on the packaging were incomprehensible to both of them, and things that looked simple, for example a large bracelet with a peculiar stone set in the middle, turned out to behave oddly when touched, Draco snatching his hand away immediately.
One particular container though, caught her eye, and she couldn’t seem to help herself from bringing it out of the box for closer inspection.
After carefully unscrewing the lid, it appeared to be full of a creamy coloured powder with a faintly shimmering quality. It was quite mesmerising to look at, and as she moved, hundreds of tiny fine particles from the surface began to float, one by one, into the air.
It smelled heavenly, like all her favourite baked goods at once; cinnamon and warm cookie dough and whipped cream and cheesecake batter-
And all of a sudden, she was overcome with the urge to touch it. Draco watched, wide-eyed, as she brushed it with the tip of a finger, which came away cream and glittering, as if she’d smeared wet eyeshadow across her skin. And immediately, she felt a warmth begin to prickle through her body, heating her chest like molten metal.
“Oh,” she said, abruptly. “That’s… odd.”
The room was rapidly becoming overwarm, insufferable, and she yanked at her robes, the cool air against her forearms providing little relief. Sweat began to bead at her brow as the centre of the heat infiltrated further, pulsing in her pelvis, throbbing with a need that she instantly recognised.
She scrambled for her wand, but the cooling charms that would normally have brought comfort could barely scratch the surface of the problem.
“Are you alright?” he asked softly, brows creasing with concern.
And something in the very centre of herself melted, opened out on itself. His voice had never sounded so wonderful, so soothing, so…
Fuck.
Her knickers were slick.
She slammed her thighs together immediately, mortified.
“Hey.” He stepped closer, reaching for the pot.
“Don’t touch that!” she snapped, snatching it away, chest heaving.
And he froze. “What’s going on?”
But Hermione could hardly bear to listen, because every word was eliciting little static shocks across her skin, snaking their way between her tensed thighs and caressing her heated flesh like a lover.
She fixed her eyes on the ground and gritted her teeth, folding her arms around herself. “You need to stop talking,” she grunted. “I… There’s something in that powder.”
“Hermione?” he said, and she couldn’t help the involuntary shiver that rolled through her body at the sound of her name on his tongue, her mouth falling unwittingly open in a low moan.
“Shit,” he said. “Fuck.”
“Shut – up!” she hissed. “Your voice – God – it’s-”
He wisely clamped his mouth shut, eyes widening in understanding. And all she could do was fasten a hand onto the box beside her, hanging onto it for support while her muscles tremored with unfulfilled potential.
The silence was deafening.
He mouthed something desperately at her that she couldn’t understand, so she just shook her head in confusion, and at that he got to his feet and turned to the door.
“No!”
It took a moment to realise it was she who had shouted. The word had torn itself, permissionless, from her mouth, and it had stopped him in his tracks. And Hermione was suddenly aware that she was losing her grip on the situation.
He turned slowly, frowning.
“Don’t go,” she gasped, even as she bit down and willed herself to stay silent. But something inside her, something that had sprung to life after she’d touched that damn powder – needed him to stay.
She needed him to stay.
“Please-” she whimpered.
He tried again. “Let me-”
And she threw her head back as lightning bolts zig-zagged their way across her skin, eclipsing everything except him, him and his wonderful voice, and his gorgeous hands, his beautiful eyes-
She could see on his face that he had realised what she was about to do a millisecond before she did it, but his expression was still one of absolute shock when she scrambled to her feet and pulled herself against his body.
She was out of control, completely and utterly detached from any common sense at all, but it was so difficult to care when being skin to skin with him felt this wonderful.
She heard him swallow, felt his heartbeat quicken in his chest, knew it so intimately it was as if she could understand exactly what he was thinking. What he wanted.
To be closer.
She couldn’t stop her fingers tracing up his sides, her lips finding his neck, and relished in the tiny breath of released air from his lips as she kissed the skin there.
“Hermione,” he whispered, hardly daring to put a voice to the words. “You – you need to stop.”
“I don’t want to,” she mumbled, carving a path down to his collarbone with her lips, kissing at the V where his shirt was buttoned far too high up… “Feels so good-”
“You’re not thinking straight,” he gasped, staring fixedly at the ceiling, as if allowing himself to move would make him let go entirely.
“I want you,” she found herself murmuring. “Wanted you for so long-”
A shaking hand pushed her hair away from her face, forcing her to meet his eyes. “You’re killing me,” he whispered.
She groaned, winding closer, delighting in the hardness that met her hip as she angled herself towards him. Her lips were back at his throat again, so vulnerable, so sensual, and she couldn’t understand for the life of her why he hadn’t started ripping her clothes off yet.
She was flushed, simmering with anticipation, her core melting like ice cream in his hands.
“Please,” she whispered, and swept her tongue along the line of his jaw, undercut with tantalising stubble. “Please, just-”
And with a hand at the nape of his neck, she tried to pull him closer for a searing kiss. But despite the low, desperate noise in his throat, he resisted, face tortured with indecision.
“I won’t let you do this,” he gritted out, catching ahold of her forearms. And Hermione felt abruptly as if she could weep. The ache in her pelvis was hollow, yearning, and it pulled in her gut like the snap of a string.
The need to be closer was almost painful. “Please, let me-”
“Sit down,” he said, and her knees buckled with the desperation to please him.
He lowered himself to sit on a box opposite, pupils so large she could see her own reflection staring back with lust-filled eyes. Every line of his body drew her gaze, every tense flex of his fingers drew her closer. And unfulfilled desperation crackled in her fingertips when he tried to pull his hands away.
“No, please,” she practically sobbed, folding forwards. “Please let me touch you, it’s torture, Draco, you have no idea how bad it hurts-”
“You need to take a moment,” he said shakily, voice strained, and she moaned.
“Please,” she urged, sliding her fingers between his and shivering at the wave of pleasure that coursed through her bones at the sensation, going straight to her very centre.
His eyes were wide and agonised as he watched her writhe in place. “Listen to me,” he urged, his thumbs digging into her skin. “This isn’t you.”
And a tiny trickle of clarity found its way into her mind.
She withdrew immediately, snatching her hands back so fast it was as if she had been burned.
“Oh, God,” she gasped, staring down at the skin that had betrayed her, the skin that still flushed with arousal, still longed to melt against him. “You should get help-”
He swallowed. “Come with me. I can’t leave you here alone-”
“I can’t be around anyone else like this! I’m safe with you,” she whimpered, and he stared brokenly at her.
“You have no idea,” he whispered, “how close I was to giving in.”
And those words were a bolt of electricity, sending her spiralling wildly back to her previous state of helplessness. The hairs prickled up on the back of her neck and her fingers spasmed in futile desperation, while Draco’s eyes widened with realisation.
“Hermione-” he started, the soft pad of his thumb grazing the delicate inside of her wrist.
And that was it.
The string of her arousal snapped apart, and she fell forward against him with pleasure coursing through her veins and a moan pouring from her lips.
The room was still, Draco as frozen as a statue, Hermione holding her breath while her heart hammered painfully against her shuddering lungs.
There was a shocked silence.
“Did you just-?”
“Fuck,” she said quietly, her pulse pounding in her ears. And panic began to infuse her heart, pushing sickeningly past the arousal that refused to abate.
Because her mortifying release had not helped.
Hermione Granger had just come, untouched, from the sound of Draco’s voice and the brush of his skin, and she was somehow even more hot, bothered, and desperate than before
“Draco,” she said shakily, clinging to the last vestiges of lucidity she could muster. “You should get me to a hospital.”
And, unable to hold on for a single moment longer, she threw herself into his stunned arms.
A slow, methodical beep eventually woke her from the blackness that had consumed her so thoroughly it seemed eternal.
The smell hit her next, disinfectant, sharp and alkaline.
Then, crisp white sheets between her fingertips.
Finally, the light.
And with it, a relieved pair of grey eyes.
She cracked her eyelids open wider, brows drawing together. “Wha-?”
“Thank Merlin,” Draco said, slumping into a chair by the side of her hospital bed. “You’re awake.”
She shifted upright, wincing as her forehead throbbed. “What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember…” She winced again, but not from the pain. “I remember the shop. We were…” She paused to clear her throat for a moment, her voice crunching like gravel. “We were searching through everything… you found the back room, all the magical items… and there was…” And understanding dawned. “The powder.”
He bit his lip, cheeks pink.
“How did I end up here?” she croaked.
And the first glimmer of a grin quirked at the corner of his mouth. “I, er… I had to stun you,” he admitted.
There was a horrified silence.
And Hermione threw herself, face down, into the pillow.
If she had thought that was embarrassing, it was nothing compared to returning to work and being told by their boss that they had three hours to get back to Secret Delights and write up a complete report, ready for the DMLE to send in their Aurors and investigate who had been supplying dangerous magical items to a Muggle shop.
And so it was with the most uncomfortable silence Hermione had ever experienced in her life that she and Draco headed back through those pink-emblazoned doors and surveyed the area once more.
She couldn’t believe the way she’d thrown herself at him, the way she’d begged to touch him, the way his skin had felt so maddeningly right against her lips. Most frustratingly of all, even though the powder had been fully removed from her system and she had been pronounced clinically normal after a night in the hospital, she was desperate to touch him again. And the knowledge that this was now purely her own desire, sat heavily in her gut, an unfulfillable pipe dream.
“Right,” Draco said, rousing her from her thoughts as he frowned at the first few deceptively innocent rows of shelves. “How do you want to do this?”
“Um,” she said, already feeling the warmth blazing in her cheeks. “Let’s just pick up where we left off, shall we?”
He stared at her.
“I mean – not that, I mean, going through the items in the back room – not-”
He turned away, but not before Hermione had spotted the grin on his face. And she followed several paces behind him, cursing every deity she could call to mind.
It was harder than ever to focus, today, but Draco definitely wasn’t making it easier.
He had shucked his outer robes, so he was now sitting on the floor, sifting through boxes of tampered-with sex toys in only a form-fitting pair of smart trousers and a crisp white shirt that opened onto his throat just low enough for it to catch Hermione’s eye like the proverbial sore thumb.
And when he kept handling dildos, harnesses, and switches alike with the same kind of gentle, observant manner, his eyes warm and his fingers studious, Hermione found herself frequently forgetting what she was doing.
“So is this another…?” His gaze flickered to hers and she startled, trying to look as if she hadn’t been mindlessly watching him study a vibrator for the last five minutes. “One of those… sucking toys?”
She swallowed. “Er, yeah. Clitoral stimulators.”
There was curiosity in his eyes, but Hermione was concerned that if she dared to indulge this conversation for longer than strictly necessary, she would find herself swiftly losing what was left of her weak composure.
“Does it have a magical signature?” she asked.
His wand tapped the toy with measured precision, and he made a low noise that seemed to vibrate through her body. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll make a note of it.”
Hermione tried to make an intelligent noise but was pretty sure she failed.
“I wonder if the DMLE would mind if we took some of these things,” he said, and flashed her a conspiratorial grin that knocked her off-balance for a moment.
“For research?” she asked, distracted.
And he smirked. “Of a kind.”
Realisation dawned like a blow to the head and she gulped. “Right. No. Don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Would you want to explain to Harry and the rest of the DMLE why you decided to take some of the evidence home?”
His smirk was enchanting, glancing down at the toy in his hand. “I’m sure it wouldn’t require much explanation.”
He was driving her crazy.
When they finally tackled the powder box they’d taken great care to ignore all morning, it was with significantly more wariness than the day before. Hermione would bet her wand arm that the rest of the potions and tinctures contained therein would produce some kind of sexual effect in the user.
And this time, they relied only on their wands to try and determine these exact purposes.
Slowly but surely, they managed to identify several potions that would force the drinker to obey commands, a small tablet that, going by the ingredients, should function similarly to Muggle Viagra, and a charmed ring that Draco made fun of for being far too large until Hermione pointed out where on the body it was actually designed to fit. And when they got to the bottom of the box, it was to find several more pots of the powder that had caused such problems the day before.
Draco charmed the whole thing shut to avoid any nasty accidents, and slowly turned one pot upside down to squint at some runes inscribed along the bottom.
And as Hermione watched him, entirely focused on the way his eyebrows furrowed and the way his lips pursed with concentration, she found herself getting warm again.
She carefully set her blazer aside.
“What does it say?” she asked carefully, unable to take her eyes off his mouth.
“Something about a ‘core’,” he answered, not looking up. “And something that seems to indicate a… dessert of some kind. I'm out of practice.”
“Right,” she said, not really listening.
“It’s quite the powder,” he said. “All the diagnostics are flagging up how strong it is. I’m amazed you were able to resist it for so long.”
That, she heard. “Well,” she said, uncomfortably. “I didn’t want to do that… to you.”
“Obviously not,” he snorted. "It's me."
“No, I mean-" She frowned, cutting herself off. “I was trying to stop myself for your sake.”
And he looked at her, then. “What are you saying?”
Heat suffused her body, embarrassment flaring through her bones. “Well, I-”
They stared at one another, and Hermione was sure he would understand, would realise just how desperate she was for a repeat of the day before under better circumstances, until:
“Shit,” he whispered, lowering the pot back into the box. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
She blinked, cheeks blazing. “What? No! I- I’m fine.” And to prove her point, she grabbed a paddle from a nearby shelf and began fanning herself furiously. But the horror only deepened in his eyes.
“Fuck, I knew this would happen-!”
“Wait-”
“We should get out of here, I can’t risk touching the powder as well, who knows what would-”
“Draco!” she cried.
He blinked almost comically and a bizarre giggle erupted in her throat.
“No,” she said firmly, fighting the smirk that threatened at the corner of her mouth. “I’m not under the effect of the powder. It’s just… you.”
They stared at one another.
“And you can ignore it,” she sighed. “I know it’s just a stupid crush, and I won’t act on it, so you don’t need to worry, but… it’s not the powder.” She glanced down at her hands in her lap. “If it wasn’t for the… you know, consent issues… I would have thoroughly enjoyed myself yesterday,” she admitted.
But even as her cheeks radiated embarrassment, he couldn’t stop staring at her.
“Promise me this is you talking,” he said desperately, and hope swelled in her gut.
“Of course it is!” she said indignantly. “I’ve been feeling it for months now, you-”
And then his mouth was on hers and they were falling back onto the floor, his body hot and eager and long overdue above her own.
Her gasp was forgotten in a flurry of hurried kisses, as if they were trying to make up for lost time, and her hands scrabbled for purchase against his back, his waist, his shoulders. His knee made its way between her thighs and she keened into the touch, already aware that she was just as wet as she had been the day before, if not, more.
“Do you have any idea,” he growled in her ear, “how hard it was to say no yesterday?”
She squirmed needily beneath his weight, arching up into his chest. “It was torture,” she whispered, and dragged his lips back to hers, where he drank in her touch like a fine wine.
“Watching you fall apart like that,” he bit out, once they had pulled away to gasp for air. “So gorgeous-”
And she pulled his hand to her centre, cupped his fingers around the heat that had long burned only for him. “Do it again,” she whispered. “Make me do it for you again.”
His groan of assent went right through her, her muscles beginning to tremble with want, and then he was tugging at her skirt and tracing heated fingertips up her shaking thighs, swiping against soaked fabric.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “Were you like this yesterday too?”
And she shook her head. “This is all me,” she whispered. “All you.”
And he mumbled a swear word into her collarbone as his fingers dipped through her wetness and anchored right where she needed him most.
She threw her head back and allowed her voice to lead him, her cries wordless but clearly understood, as Draco’s touch rose and fell when she did.
Her fingertips coiled into the downy hair at the back of his neck, tugging him closer, tracing juddering circles into his skin that matched the ones he was drawing at her centre. And as her body arched and shivered, he coaxed her onwards and upwards to a peak that sent her not tumbling, but flying over the edge.
It was impatience that had her yanking open the buttons of his shirt not long after, whispering the contraceptive charm loud enough for him to hear exactly what she wanted.
She had expected him to open her legs, to push immediately inside, but instead he was straightening up, crawling back, pulling her to her feet. And then he was crowding her up against the wall with his lips at her neck and his hands bracketing her thighs, lifting her just enough that her toes left the floor.
Her shirt was undone to her waist, her breasts spilling over the cups of her undone bra, as he tugged the lace free and worshipped her body with the rapture of a repentant sinner, and Hermione decided she could get addicted to being this messy, debauched version of herself if it was for him.
He was so close to kissing her again, but she pressed a finger to his mouth, dragged it across his lower lip, plump and shining, and took his moment of stunned arousal to push him to his knees in front of her, smirking sweetly.
And God, she hoped she would never get the image of him kneeling in front of her out of her mind.
Her knickers befell the same fate as her bra, and then he swept her leg over his shoulder, hooked it in place, and turned his considerable enthusiasm to wresting another orgasm from deep inside her.
She slumped afterwards, boneless against the wall, but Draco surged up to meet her in a searing kiss that reignited every ounce of need in her body.
“Please,” she whispered, her head falling forward, and his kiss was so sweet that the first blunt press of his cock inside her was almost unexpected, had her jerking wildly between his palms.
He groaned, hitching her thigh higher around his waist with a forearm, and thrust deeper, his eyes fluttering shut in a way that was ridiculously enchanting. And it was his face that she watched as they cried out together, scrambling for closeness, riding each rise and fall that had pleasure spiking like an electric surge in her veins.
She felt spoiled, slick and messy against him, but the noises at his lips and the way he kissed her neck had her moaning slow and deep, pulling him closer and closer until his eyes flew open, stared directly into her own.
“You’re so good,” she groaned, and he jerked wildly for a moment, untethered, until he slammed even deeper, held her locked in place as she writhed, and then they finally sagged to the floor, spent and sated.
He pressed kiss after kiss to her shoulder, her chest, her lips, and she couldn’t bring herself to stop stroking those soft hairs at his nape, carding through the strands as their breathing returned to normal and their expressions of mutual exhaustion warmed to grins.
His forehead brushed hers. “I can’t believe we did that,” he smirked.
“On company time, no less,” she added, biting her lip, and they dissolved into laughter.
“What the Ministry doesn’t know won’t hurt them,” Draco quipped, with such a devious look on his face that Hermione couldn’t help herself from cupping his face in her hands and kissing him firmly. When she pulled away again, he looked almost slightly dazed, and it fizzed in her stomach like a thrill of what might come to be with time.
“Can we do this again?” she asked.
“Yes. Please. All of it,” he grinned. “Maybe I’ll even steal some of that powder.”
Her jaw dropped. “Why on earth would you-”
“I was just thinking it might be interesting to see how many times I could get you to come before I’ve even touched you.”
“Oh,” she croaked. Her knees were weak, and his eyes were devilish.
“And then, maybe you could show me some of these muggle toys in action,” he murmured, leaning in to kiss her again.
“Draco,” she shivered. “If you don’t want me to jump you like I did yesterday, you’re going to have to stop saying things like that.”
“I don’t fancy stunning you again, that’s for sure,” he smirked into her neck. “Turning up at St Mungo’s with an unconscious witch in my arms wasn’t how I planned to spend the day-”
Hermione buried her face in his chest and burst into giggles.
All in all, the investigation of Secret Delights ended up taking significantly longer than anyone had anticipated, but when Curse-Breakers Malfoy and Granger finally arrived back at the office looking rather pleased with themselves, it was to clamours of admiration for taking the job so seriously and paying it the time and attention it truly deserved.
And when Ms Munn inevitably arrived to lodge another report to the Office for the Removal of Curses, Jinxes, and Hexes, not even a full week later, Hermione found it hard to dredge up her normal level of disdain for Regulation J12, subclause iv. Perhaps, she thought, as Ms Munn patted Topsie’s head and beamed gratefully up at her, she could even be warming to the woman.
Or perhaps it was just the knowledge that Draco was in the next room, armed with an air-freshening charm and the promise of a half-hour locked-door lunchbreak.
She caught his eye down the corridor and he winked.
Yeah.
Quite possibly.