Hermione wakes up, starfished in the center of downy cotton; eiderdown rumpled around her like dollops of whipped cream.
She snow-angels her arms and legs.
Thread count is just a marketing trick. Right? This shit isn't woven, it's stolen off the wings of fricken baby cupids.
She gets up and reels open the shades, revealing a slope of meticulous landscaping leading down to a pebbly beach. The lawn prickles over with glistening hoarfrost and Hermione wonders if her street has had a dusting of mid-January snow. Powdered pine and fir boughs ruffle in the breeze.
The Sound is a glassy mirror, stained with the pink dawn. Breathtaking.
Hermione follows the impulse to float quietly about her room: hanging up the slip she wriggled out of last night, stacking her pile of books. There's a basket by her reading chair with energy bars and she unwraps one, swallowing down the foreboding thought: he's thought of everything. Everything.
In the sleek bathroom, her feet make soft peeling sounds on the Carerra. Hard winter light pours in from the sky window, throwing the chamber in contrasting shadows like a black-and-white film.
She's well acquainted with the toilet (thanks, baby) but she eagerly kicks off her lacey undies and introduces herself to the big, clear glass shower.
Hello, gorgeous.
She twists on a rainfall-torrent of gentle warmth from the ceiling mounted shower head, wondering why anyone would ever bother with an angled spigot after this luxury.
Droplets diamond against her skin. Her hair slicks into tendrils that coil down her back.
On a concave shelf chiseled out of the marble slab wall, she finds European shampoos and conditioners. She pops open each bottle with a sniff; their elegant, subtly herbal scents make her think the fanciest perfume she's ever smelled is actually fake drugstore garbage.
With a pleased little squeak, she squirts a gluttonous handful of shampoo into her palm, letting it seep through her fingers. Liquid cash.
The heavenly shampoo lathers in her hair like a silken cloud, lifting the anxious sweat and grime from her scalp. Calm smooths over her frayed nerves.
Her sigh tumbles out like a stack of hoarded burdens, finally sliding away.
The hinge whispers across the bathroom.
Creak.
Seriously? Ugh.
Hermione doesn't turn around.
She finger-combs the suds from her curls. Ignoring the twin lasers beaming at her through the glass.
The walls echo his small sounds. Fabric shifting around his body. Footsteps closer. A long pause.
Hermione keeps rinsing, her skin online with rippling electricity.
Fucking stalker.
She pops open the conditioner with an irked little poink and rudely burps the bottle into her hand. Money drools from between her fingers, dripping onto the shower floor.
A zipping sound.
Then a rustle of fabric over wide, curved shoulders. The clink of a belt buckle hitting the marble.
The shower door clicks open.
She scrunches the conditioner into her hair, shaking out her dripping ringlets. Pretending not to notice. Her heart goes lippety-lippety, not very fast.
Her body watches him slip nearer.
His rich cognac voice swells in the chamber, wrapping around her like warm steam.
"Let me."
Look out, Granger, her pulse thuds. Danger, danger.
He grazes a hand up her bare shoulder, here I am, and then bundles up the loose coils of her hair, unhooking a strand from her ear, gathering it all to spill in one stream down her back.
He threads his fingers with her curls; his touch agonizingly gentle.
The conditioner is slippery thick in his hands and he glides through her hair, knots and tangles vanishing.
The pads of his fingers massage into her scalp and her brain starts to go fuzzy, like he's easing down the wall in her mind.
Oh, fuck, that's good.
She moans.
Let him rifle through her thoughts if only he'll keep working the tension out of her neck with those big hands.
His imperious grasp is firm enough to choke her, strong enough to snap her spine, but he coasts his power down her back, working a knot below her shoulder blade.
Mmm.
That's right Riddle. You're my bitch now.
A rumble in his chest permeates the room, perilous like liquid dark. Her heart flutters.
Maybe not.
The shower plinks musically onto the polished Carrera.
He skims his half-open lips up her shoulder to her neck, his breath whisking in shallow little reverences on her skin.
Water trickles down his face into the hollow of her clavicle, his thumbs grinding a blissful counterpressure into her hips, his teeth raking along her neck.
Where the fuck did he learn to do that.
The way he pulls open her pelvis exactly like she needs it is some serious next level shit, like he's either already got twelve kids or he's hiding a stack of pregnancy magazines taller than the stash at her mom's.
Either way, freaky.
But so, fucking… nggggh...
She takes deep, prickling breaths of mist, her sighs hissing off the marble.
Who cares if he's rock hard against her ass cheeks?
Eventually, her limbs get rubbery and she melts against him, leaning her back against his washboard, rowing-captain surfaces. Not surrendering. Just like, enjoying.
But Tom Riddle is not a man who requires an invitation.
As he fits himself against her under the stream, he coasts his possessive hands up from her hips and wraps them zealously around the slope of her belly.
Hermione's throat feels tight.
He's not seen her yet. Not like this.
Lazily, like someone who owns something with absolute certainty, he traces that tender swell. Fitting his chin over her shoulder so he can study the way her taut skin stretches around his baby. There is no mistaking whose it is.
His chest rattles with a primal sound that makes her pussy clench. Her heart starts to flail like a netted bird.
He's selfish, so wolfishly greedy.
His languorous strokes up and around her pale belly are not sweet, they are ravenous.
Rivulets of water spill around his fingers spread like a cage, sheltering her ripening womb.
He kisses her neck like a vein-draining bite.
Like he'll never let her go.
Like, of course you wouldn't run, Hermione. Who would ever want to leave his frightful affection?
Blood thunders in her ears as he grasps her breasts. They pool in his dangerous grip, delicate and generous and so damn vulnerable. He's almost too tight. Almost.
He lets her go and takes something down from the shelf.
Hermione hadn't realized she was shaking until she's standing alone.
Damn this stupid previa thing, she wants his fingertips on her clit. Or better: that clever, brutal tongue.
When he turns around, they're face to face.
Thud, thud, her heart bumps.
It's his first full frontal view of her since the summer, and he tips his head, velvet eyes searching hungrily under low lashes. Like he needn't bother hiding the impulses flitting across his face: to consume her lustrous surfaces, to ravish and claim her, and perhaps to climb inside and shut himself within her soft fabric.
It's also the first time Hermione has seen all of Tom, since everything. He's certainly not skipped a day in the weight room, damn him. God, the way he's hung is so fucking distracting.
"Will you be in the habit of attending all my showers?" Hermione says crossly. Deflecting the dazzling sight of him as much as his lurid, longing looks.
"I think I will," Tom replies, his laugh a low rumble.
He's holding a sponge, creamy with floral-smelling foam.
Kneeling down, he points to the marble bench behind her.
"Sit."
She complies but with a protest,
"You know you can't bring me to orgasm, Tom."
His mouth gets that sly curve.
"Notwithstanding your impertinence last night, I intend to keep the same rule."
She snorts.
"Don't bother saying shit like that, I don't care if you jerk off."
Tom's laugh reverberates off the cool walls.
He grips her ankle and washes with ruthless tenderness, like she is his most precious possession. Like he would rip the sky down before seeing her fall.
"Call it extended foreplay, then," he says, smirking.
The shower beats down on his back, mist plumeing around them. Droplets jewelling on his eyelashes and wet hair. He's living, crouching sculpture, an Apollo-bodied ode to Machiavelli.
Hermione wipes aside a trickle of water on his forehead.
With infinitely patient strokes, he washes up the inside of her thigh.
He pauses.
"Insipid nurses," he mutters, woefully wiping away a crust of blood from the inside of her leg.
Hermione watches him, her breaths coming short.
He washes between her legs, idling worshipfully around the curve of her belly and breasts, her arms and shoulders. Over and under, seeking, learning—knowing her body, changed and otherwise.
"Any spotting?" he asks with a severe flick of his brows.
She shakes her head, mute with the tranquilizing power of his touch.
"Good, I expect you to tell me at the slightest notice. Of course, I checked your underwear anyway."
Her eyelids fly wide.
"The fuck? You creep!"
He's on his knees between her legs, and he pulls himself up. His hands plant on either side of her hips.
Peril lurks in the glint of his eye, in the bemused twitch of haughty lips, and in the casual, animal slant of his lithe shoulders. Her stomach clenches tight.
He grins wickedly.
And scoops her off the bench, laying her like a glass figurine in the rainfall of the overhead.
She shuts her eyes and lets the water river down her nose and valley in the slopes of her body. Her hair twirls in the angled slats of water channeling toward the drain.
Tom looms over her, exulting.
Soap and kisses working over her swollen edges. Nibbling the pads of her toes. Tongue furling around her nipples. He bites at the inside of her thigh and drinks the pool between her breasts.
Cherishing. Longing.
Hermione gasps and fishtails against the Carrera, arching her back prettily.
An aching bother pounds between her legs.
"Pity I can't sink myself in your eager little clutch," Tom murmurs, his palm closed over the soaking seam of her pussy like a locked gate. His fingertip teases the little furl of her ass.
"No," she gasps. "Don't!"
He gives her a pitying look.
"I know your paces, my girl," he says, lips curling. "When you're really on the brink."
She rolls her eyes.
He covers the dew-freckled hill of her belly with one hand.
"Can you feel it?" he says, almost too quietly under the rush of the shower.
"Yes."
His gaze flickers with something new.
"Has it been moving now?"
"A little," she says.
He's absolutely frozen, water misting down onto him. Lashes moving slowly as he listens with that craving touch.
Hermione doesn't tell him that his baby stirs when the invasive bass of his caramel sweet voice reverberates inside her.
Too much power for a megalomaniac.
He waits long enough for Hermione to start feeling like she might choke on the humid curtain of water. The marble presses cold against her back.
His lashes beat like birds wings, as if waking up from a dream.
"Come, angel," he says, gathering her up. "Let's get you dressed."