MY SWEET CASSABANANA
Chapter 1
Pansy received her wand and a black cat as her personal pet at the age of eleven. She's never been a believer of luck though. Sure she could have chosen an owl like most of the kids that attended Hogwarts. Or she could have been as lame as Longbottom and came with a toad. There were some kids that brought bats, lizards, owls, one boy even had a fox for a pet. But Pansy had to have the best and the most original of all. What was a witch without a cat! Not just any cat mind you. A black one, with yellow almond eyes. His name was Hollow and he matched her hair every day of the week; it was perfect!
I've never been a believer of good luck. Luck could be good, or luck could be bad. You couldn't blame a shitty day on a black cat or on the thirtieth just because it rolls around on a Friday and then say its bad luck. Besides, who made up such ridiculous rules anyway? No one would know it but my father, my real father he's dead. He'd died in a freak accident when I was five. He wasn't a gambler or a man to take wild chances. But he often walked around with a lucky coin in his pocket.
My dad was also a part of the Nimbus league of Inventors, he specialized in broom designing; with their accurate turns and sharp breaking points in mid flight. He was a natural with enchantment and spellwork. But he was always a inventor first and far most and no invention ever left his lab with out carefully being tested personally by him for commanding errors, flight defects and possible magical imperfections.
Oh yeah the coin—Good luck had come out of it when he landed the job long before finishing his training at Durmstrang Academy. Mother says that was the day he found his lucky coin on the job site. He had it the day he came up with the Cleansweep Design. The Company had sold them as top of the line, replacing old and outdated house brooms. He made a pretty shiny sickle from them, a life's fortune.
Then came the day that he built up enough nerve to speak to lady that would later become my mother. She said that he was flipping that ridiculous lucky coin when he asked her out for the first time. It was in his pocket the day of their wedding, it was in his pocket the day I was born, and it was with him every day I could remember after that. Sometimes he'd even let me hold it.
If not for the famous lucky coin, he often said his life would have never gone so well.
My mother and I weren't in London when it happened. We were having tea in France at my Grandmother's when a man dressed in a solid gray lab coat arrived at her door.
There had been an accident at the company said the man to my mother and then the room went silent. It's like I said, at the time I was only five and kids at that age they don't think about things, they just do them.
I heard the man talking too my while she was crying and I remember thinking how glad I was that father wasn't going in to work today, but that he could maybe go in and help all those poor people. It never occured to me that he could be one of the few that had gotten hurt. So I picked up my favorite dolls Belinda and sat her up against the windowsill. That's when something gold and shiny caught my eye. It glisten in the sunlight so brightly it almost look like leprechauns gold. So I took it out of Belinda's dress pocket. It was my father's lucky coin.
It took some time, but life began moving in a positive direction after a few years without him. Well, as positive as they could for a girl and a new widowed single mother I suppose. I was seven when my mother eventually remarried a man from my father's company. Nicholas Lowderseid, He was the same man that found my mother and I in France the day my father died. He was an okay guy, really nice to me and he loved my mother a great deal. But he was not a Parkinson that was for sure, in fact, he would never be a Parkinson, and I would never be a Lowderseid. It was a funny sounding name, from Ireland, the "i" was always silent.
My mother never had to worry about a thing, nor did I. Nicholas was a wonderful stepfather as far as stepfather's go. Then he design the Nimbus Line. So now in my life there was a second small fortune for my mother and I. My mother never had another baby. She wanted one very badly, but Nicholas for some reason simply couldn't have children. They spent loads of money and seen all types of Healer's. But still there was nothing. My mother took to working to keep her mind away from the idea of how bad she felt that she and Nick couldn't have a baby of their own. She opened a small spell shop selling beauty products,and gathered a good number of clients. Women who were well-kept and equally as rich as we were. Her products were very expensive and soon her line was being used by witches everywhere.
Pansy flipped open her copy of the Daily Prophet and skimmed her eyes gleefully over Ginerva's Horoscope for this morning. Hers predicted the beginning of a romantic adventure. She smiled wide. It was the kind of Horoscope she loved to read. It might mean that Draco would finally take her away on that outing he'd been promising her since forever. Daydreaming about her predication from Ginny's column she anticipated his arrival in the office with more eagerness than usual when he came in for an interview.
The minute he set foot in the building she could sense his arrival. Nobody else in London could stir up a commotion like the arrival of Draco and his father Lucius whenever the Daily Prophet was set to produce an article for either of them. Nobody else ever came close, except for that left-wanded Harry Potter. But that was a thing of the past and Potter's moment of fame had come to a slow halt now that life was back to normal after the stand-off.
No one could strut through her heart like Draco Malfoy, no one could slap on that painfully sinful, strip-naked-for-me cologne like he could. Strip-Naked was a fragrance from her mother's line of wizarding perfume. Pansy, mention Draco as a possible candidate for promotional sale one evening at brunch, making the product a direct hit with the ladies. And Pansy got her thank you from him all right. A nice long all night until the morning light kind of thank you.
She lost her place on her typewriter and punched a bunch of random keys with her elbow. She then had to use a correcting spell to delete the letters and hoped that Rita wasn't standing near by. Lately the sly-super-slutty-Skeeter had a nasty habit of coming up behind her and standing directly over her while she worked on her stories.
After the correction was made she went back to her daydreaming. Draco might not realize it yet, but he needed her in his life. Because they were the perfect combination together. Two former Slytherins to take on the world. Unlike the other female reporters employed at the Daily Prophet, she didn't begrudge him if he took a little peep down her blouse. He had the privilege of peeping whenever he fancied. Although her mother would have a mandrake for a kid if she thought for one minute that her precious Pansy was having premarital sex. She would call it tasteless and not befitting of a young witch. But she had to see things her way. Times were different from when she was a young. Besides Draco was gorgeous, rich, and single. And wounded. Not anywhere you could see, but deep in his soul and heart.
Pansy gave a deep sigh of sympathy.
He had shared his dark, and life threatening stories to her. Filling her in on all the times his life had been placed in mortal danger, when he had been selected to serve You-know-who. All the torture and the near death missions. Draco told her that because of his past scars, that he didn't trust anyone and it was the reason he could never be ready to choose a wife.
Once she learned this crucial piece of information into his soul, she could see the lost expression in his gray hurt filled eyes every time he looked at her. Because she knew what it was like to feel lost and alone and she was just the witch to fill that empty place in his heart. Besides, he was a Leo and she was a Virgo and according to "Ginny's Daily Horoscope Predictions For Love" today was theirs.
But first she had to be double sure that when he left for Italy with his father that she went with them. Draco had a personal assistant, she was a blonde beauty, part veela and part witch. He took her with him everywhere he went. In fact, he even took an assistant for his assistant. In addition to that, Draco had a bad reputation of choosing a different secondary assistant with random witches from her firm and then dropping them off the minute he got back to London. A couple of witches, that once wrote for the Daily Prophet actually quit over it.
Out of the six that she knew about, only two of them besides herself still worked here. The other two always warned other incoming witches not to accept business offers from Draco, because he only wanted a one-night stand. This was fine for Pansy, because their fear of their pristine girlish dignity did most of the work for her; keeping other women at bay. Pansy knew how his little game went, but she intended to break his pattern. She'd felt her chance coming for the past couple of months now. It had been almost a year since their last rendezvous and she wasn't about to let it slip past her.
Draco walked onto the fifth floor of The Daily Prophet. This was her floor. He walked over and stood right behind her chair, he could read what she'd been typing on her typewriter. She was sure he could also see that he made her very nervous and twice as hot. So hot she couldn't think straight any longer, what was her story about again? The Drainage Problem of Knockturn Alley- NO! that was last week's. Oh yeah, a new flavor ice-cream. Flortean's Ice Cream Parlor Goes Sour.
Nervous wasn't how she wanted him to see her. Nervous would get her into trouble and she'd end up turning in a story that got her an earful from the Super-Sauerkraut-Skeeter, rampaging away at how she belonged down in the basement cutting obitutaries with the half-trolls.
But nobody knew how completely gaga she went over Draco Malfoy, and she intended to keep it that way. He was walking her way. She regained her composure.
Savvy.
Sophisticated.
Sexy.
Snobbish Slytherin Pansy Parkinson, it had always worked for her.
"That's a nice color on you, Pansy," he said.
"Why, Draco!" Congratulating herself on wearing the peacock green blouse that brought out the color of her eyes, she turned, as if totally surprised to discover him standing there behind her. The back of her chair brushed against his crotch. She looked up at him and was careful not to over smile. Potterface annoyed her every morning in the coffee room with complimenting her smile. She hated her smile and felt she had a mouth wide as a cauldron pot. She had to be careful not to overdo the smiling. " Draco, I didn't realize you were standing there."
He made a (humph) sound as the front of his pants felt the pressure of her chair backing into him. "Blimey, hope I didn't startle you." he said.
No, not possible, she thought, admiring that adorably smooth turn of his nose. She always knew that the moment Draco arrived, He could no more startle her than a goblin could lay eggs. "Only a wee bit," she said. Is there something I can help you with Draco?"
He had grown into the spitting younger image of his father. He had the same whitish blonde hair only he chose to wear it in one of those modern beach boy cuts and with an irresistible smile of pearly whites. He used that smile on her now. "As a matter of fact, I do need a favor. I desperately need someone to port with my assistant over to Italy tomorrow and take notes during a meeting. It'll probably go late, so we'll plan to come back the next morning. I checked in with Rita and she said she could spare you for a couple of hours."
Praise Merlin and slap her with his wand! If there was ever a time in her life that she felt like over smiling, this was that time. At last she was the chosen one. The office grew very quiet, and she realized that all five witches in the room with her had stop typing and were waiting for her to answer. She knew they wouldn't like it when she said yes, but that couldn't be helped.
Still, she didn't want to seem too eager, or too available. "Actually I had dinner plans tomorrow night."
From across the room Susan Bones gave her a thumbs-up.
Draco scowled, his gray eyes darkening like the sky before a storm. Wow she thought, even his scowl was as sexy as his smile. She loved the way he wore a business style shirt with no tie, and the top couple of buttons undone to show off his silver chain bearing the Malfoy emblem around his neck. "But maybe I can change my plans," she said. From the muffle groans, she knew she lost the admiration of all five witches as they went back to their typing. Yet Draco was suddenly bright and cheerful, which made her feel good.
His cheerfulness might be all about sex right now, but sex was a starting point with most wizards. Soon he'd discover that he'd found the right witch, at last.
"I'd appreciate that," he said. "When can you let me know?"
She took a glance at the ruby red watch she was wearing. "Before lunch, I'm sure."
"Good. I—"
" Oh, hey, Draco!" Harry Potter, who was also one of the company's top reporters, walked over to Pansy's desk. As usual, Potter was loaded down with two different camera's and his notebook overflowing with new addition for his bits of news throughout the day. On top of that he was juggling a steaming cup of hot coffee, lumps of sugar and a pint of cream. Pansy sighed. Obvously her hints of murder had fallen on deaf ears. His glasses began to steam up as he took a sip from his coffee cup, and his dark hair stood out in sixty-eight different directions. To make matters worse, he was wearing that god awful sweater of pumpkin orange and some horrible plaid eggplant color. It had been last year's holiday gift from Mrs. Weasley, when he and Ginny were still an item.