Happy Birthday, FaeBreeze!
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He felt the snowball hit him in the back and he spun around to see who'd had the bloody nerve to attack him. There were a couple of first and second years, building some kind of lopsided snowman, but other than them the only other person out was Granger, who had her head down over a book. He rolled his eyes. Only Hermione Granger, swot extraordinaire, would read outside on a snowy day.
Draco Malfoy turned away from her and, almost immediately, felt another snowball hit him, this time on the bum.
He turned around again and the little witch was still bent over her book but he thought he could see a smile tweaking at the corners of her mouth and, oh yes, the snow down at her feet had been disturbed. Scooped up to make snowballs perhaps, he thought, eyeing her.
This, he thought, was war.
He waylaid her in the corridor later as she came back in, the wholly deserted corridor. She stopped when she saw him, leaning up against the wall, obviously planning to block her way. "What do you want, Malfoy?"
"Revenge," he raised his eyebrows and tossed the tightly packed snowball he had in one hand up in the air, then caught it. "You should be more careful, alone with me in a hall almost no one enters, especially after attacking me like that."
"I don't know what you're talking about," she tossed her hair and glanced up and down, confirming no one was around, that she was, indeed, totally on her own.
He smiled, a narrow, pointed smile that made her breath catch in her throat. "Wholly at my mercy, Granger. No one to rescue you. Whatever will you do?"
"What," she asked, tipping her head to the side and considering him with a smile of her own, "are my options?"
"Well," he drawled, "you could let me drop this snowball down the back of your shirt or you could kiss me."
"You've stooped to blackmail now?" She walked towards him, hitching her bag up to her shoulder.
"Mmm," he purred down at her as she approached, as leaned into him and turned her head up. "It's as if you don't even know me. I'll stoop to whatever it takes to get what I want."
He lowered his mouth to hers, her lips warm and soft; she parted them almost at once and, after weeks of not being able to so much as touch her, he groaned into her mouth and lost himself in tasting her, in feeling her against him again, even for a stolen moment. "This is going to kill me," he whispered against her, pulling away for a moment.
"Shh," she pressed her mouth back into his and he nibbled along her bottom lip, and was just about to drop that damned snowball and pull her to him when she deftly tweaked it out of his fingers and slipped it down his own back.
"You littleā¦" he watched her as she danced away from him, realizing she'd cut them off just in time because that group of first years was coming in.
"I love you," she mouthed at him.
"Love you, too," he whispered, feeling the icy snow work its way down his back as she turned the corner and disappeared again.
