all characters belong to JKR

Chapter 13: Warning:

Hermione accepted his offer by taking his hand and shaking it once. When she tried to pull her hand from his, he held tight for a moment and then asked, "What do you get if you win? I mean, if I double over in pain, and you know that I'm lying, what do you get? What do you win?"

She hadn't thought of that. She might have picked the same thing he picked, but now she was in a predicament. She said, "I don't know, seriously." She knew her brows were knitted together as she sank a bit lower in the tub. She suddenly sat upright, put her arm over her chest, and turned off the jets. He had already taken notice when she sat upright. He leaned forward and turned off the jets on his tub as well.

"Did you think of something?" he asked.

"What if I wanted the same thing as you?" she asked sincerely.

He wanted to smile, but he tried to play it cool. "Then our little contest is seriously flawed."

She turned her head and thought for another moment. He took that moment to smile. She wanted to continue to see him, too! Hip-hip hooray and hallelujah! She turned back to face him and he let the smile slip from his face. "I've never had this problem before. I usually always know what I want."

"Sounds to me like you want me, and you're not TRUTHFUL enough to say it," he said, somewhat arrogantly.

This made her slightly angry. She said, "Fine, what I want, if I win, and I discover that you lied, is NOT to see you personally. I will continue to work for you, but that's it."

He was frowning now. "You're stupid." Okay, that wasn't the most mature thing for a 29-year-old man to say, and not at all an accurate description of her personality, but he couldn't think of anything else to say. "You are seriously going to pick 'not seeing me' as your prize, even though ten seconds ago you admitted that you wanted to date me?" He stood up and she averted her gaze. He didn't bother with the towel. He walked over to one of the showers and said, "Fine, we'll go back to whatever the hell we were, and I won't bother you again, but I don't intend to let you win!" He pulled back the heavy white curtain and stormed into the shower.

She didn't intend to win either, unless she could think of a better prize. She didn't even have a truthfulness spell. She felt slightly wrong telling Draco that she did, but she never thought he would take her up on her challenge. The irony that she lied about a truthfulness spell was not lost on her. She lied about it one other time, when she was a lot younger, a couple of years after the war. She told Harry and Ron that she had come up with a truthfulness spell. She did it as a prank, or rather, as a 'psychological experiment', to see if they were suggestible to her claims. She told them if they lied, they would have terrible stomachaches, until she lifted the spell.

She said some silly incantation, which she didn't even remember, and then she started drilling them with questions. The first few questions were all fun and games, and everyone laughed, and the boys were truthful.

Then she asked Harry when he lost his virginity. She assumed he told her the truth, even though Ron gave him a dirty look, because he knew it was with Ginny, but didn't know it was when they were younger.

She asked Ron when he lost his, to be funny, because she already knew the answer. It was with her, when he was 18, and she was 19. Only, he looked at the floor, and said, "With Lavender, when I was 16."

Hermione was dumbstruck.

She asked Ron if he ever cheated on her when they were dating. He said no, but then he started to look a bit green around the gills. She turned quickly to Harry and asked him if Ron had ever cheated on her. He looked at the ground and he said, "No."

Then Harry's hand went to his stomach. She turned to Ron and asked, "When you broke up with me, was it because of another girl?"

He looked at Harry, and then back to Hermione, and answered, "No." Then he looked ready to throw up.

She spun to Harry and shouted, "Same question to you, Mr. Potter!"

Harry said, "Ron, I can't take this pain, I'm telling her the truth." He looked at Hermione and said, "Yes, he dropped you for another girl."

By this time, Harry's 'pain' had subsided. Ron was still holding his gut. Hermione knew that their 'symptoms' were caused by a guilty conscience, and not because of her bogus spell. Her spell was having a placebo effect.

She stood up and said, "There is no truthfulness spell! I just made it up! I lied! The pain you feel is your own guilt and remorse eating away at you!" Then she started to cry and she ran from the room.

She didn't talk to either man for close to two months. They really should have been angry with her for lying, but she was just having fun, and she found out things she didn't want to know.

Would the same thing happen with her and Draco? A terrible warning bell went off in her head. She didn't want this to happen between them. Apparently, he wanted to keep seeing her, she really wanted that too, and it would all fall into place once they reached London. She would tell him the deal was off.

She looked back at the showers. He was still in one. Curtains were drawn across two of the showers, and she was the only person in the room. She stood up, wrapped herself in her robe, and went over to the shower to tell him that she rescinded the challenge.

The two shower stalls with curtains closed were right next to each other. She could hear water running from them both. She couldn't recall which he had gone into, since they were side-by-side, but she thought it was the one on the right. She pulled back the curtain slightly, didn't look in, and said, "May I speak with you?"

A man poked his head out of the hole she had made, and said, "Hell, sweetheart, you can do more than talk to me. You can join me if you want."

Hermione opened her eyes, looked down (force of habit), and said, "Oh my gosh! I thought you were someone else."

"I can be whoever you want me to be," he leered.

Draco had heard the entire exchange. He had opened his curtain the minute he heard her voice, and was now looking out his partway-opened curtain. He tapped her on the shoulder. "Did you want something?"

"Draco!" she said.

"Does this mean you won't be joining me after all?" the naked man inquired.

Draco spat, "If she's joining anyone it's me, her husband, so back off." He pulled on her arm and pulled her right into the stall.

Then she looked down again. She had already looked at the other man, so she might as well look at him. She looked back to his face, and THEN she put her hands over her eyes. "Oh my goodness!"

"Hermione, did you want something?" he asked, leaning against the wall, in the small, confined space. The water was beating on both of them. It was weighing down her terrycloth robe. He tapped her shoulder again.

She turned around to face the curtain. "Umm, well, I should go."

He put an arm around her waist. She felt flushed. He turned her around. "What did you want?" he asked, more curious than before.

She had forgotten what she had wanted. The water was splashing into her eyes. He turned her so that the water was falling on her back. Suddenly the air in the small shower stall sizzled all around them. The air was thick with steam and desire, it felt tangible, real, and it awoke something in her. She sighed. He looked concerned. The water continued to rain on her head and face, and she stared right into his grey/blue eyes and said, "Oh, hell!"

Then she put her arms around him and kissed him. She kissed him because she wanted to kiss him. She kissed him because her head told her not to, but her heart told her to go for it. She kissed him because it was something that she normally wouldn't do, and wasn't that the point? Wasn't she trying new and different things? The warning bells continued to clang in her ears even as she placed her warm lips next to his.

It was a rough meeting of lips, fierce and almost dangerous. She pushed him so hard that he hit the tile wall. Her hands went around his neck, into his wet hair, and his hands went around her waist, because she practically threw herself at him, and he almost slipped. He wasn't even sure he could hold her upright. The water from the shower made the floor, and the kiss, even wetter.

She snapped her head back, and stared in shock. "Oh no, what have I done?"

"Nothing yet," he said, and then he put his mouth back on hers. This time, it was gentler, a soft lingering of lips on lips. He pressed his tongue inward, and met no resistance. In fact, she moaned and he turned them around and pushed her up against the tile wall.

He realized something. Her kiss reached inside his heart and squeezed tighter than he thought possible. It was as if she had a grip hook on his heart, and he didn't care, and he didn't want her to let go. He started to rain small, passionate kisses, all around her face, to her jaw, and neck.

The new kisses were agonizingly sweet to her, and she knew if she didn't get out of the shower right at that moment, she would be trapped forever. She needed something, anything, to break the spell between them. His hands went to her soaked robe, and he started to push it off her shoulders.

That was a mistake. The spell was broken.

She pushed him away and said, "I can't! I'm sorry. Not yet."

She ran from the shower. He opened the curtain to watch as she ran completely out of the room, dripping water in her wake.

Fifteen minutes later, he was fully dressed, his hair still wet, and he started to leave the spa, when the first woman came up to him and said, "Your wife is getting her manicure and pedicure now, and wants to know if you're going to join her."

He was confused. He thought surely, by now, she was upstairs packing, getting ready to leave the resort.

It seemed that Hermione Granger truly was a changed woman, one he didn't know at all, but one he wanted to know, intimately and completely.

He was escorted to a different room, he saw her in a new robe, hair up in a towel, and she was having her manicure. He sat beside her. When a woman came toward him, he waved her away.

"Where did you go?" he asked.

"What colour nail polish should I get?" she asked, ignoring his obvious question. "There's passionate pink, red and delicious, plum delight, and peach preserves."

"Sounds like fruit cocktail," he said. Then he said, "Get the plum."

"Plum it is," she said.

"Where did you go?" he asked again.

She merely sighed. "I still have to get my hair done, and then I suppose we'll be heading for the yacht, right?"

"Yes," he said. He crossed his legs and his foot jiggled up and down. He was agitated. What was with her?

"Are we going to be the only people on the yacht, besides the crew, I mean?" she asked.

"Yes, and before you ask, it's my yacht."

"I wasn't going to ask," she said. They sat in silence the entire time she had her nails done. The girl started to paint her toenails. He reached over and held her freshly painted hand.

He finally asked, "Don't you want to be alone with me?"

She looked down at the girl, and then back at him. "That's not it." The truth was that she was afraid to be alone with him. She was afraid of what she might do, and she didn't want any regrets when it came to him.

He looked at the girl giving Hermione's pedicure and said, "Could you leave us a moment?" The girl only had four toes done on one foot, but she stood up and left them alone. "Do it now, Hermione," he urged once they were alone.

"Do what?"

"The spell. The spell to make it so I have to tell the truth, but I have some requests of you," he said.

"What is it?"

"You have to do it to yourself too, and you have to lift the spell whenever I ask you to, and there's only one question you can't ask me, but everything else if fair game."

She wanted to tell him that she lied about the spell, but she also wouldn't mind getting some truthful answers from him. She knew it was unkind of her to act as if she could cast a spell that she couldn't, knowing that she could still lie if she wanted to, and again, warning bells, of a different type, were clanging loudly in her brain, but she ignored them.

"Fine, but I'll wait until the yacht to do the spell. By the way, what's the one question I can't ask?"

"You can't ask me if I love you."

That stunned her, and she wasn't sure why, because she wasn't really planning on asking him that, especially since they had just begun to date, if this was even considered dating. He rubbed the palm of her hand with his thumb. She said, "Agreed, but you know, I've changed my mind about something. I've decided on what I really want, in case I win this contest. If you can't help but lie, then I should get a reward of some sort, don't you think?"

He turned her hand around and kissed her palm. She felt the kiss all the way to her bones. Her hand trembled in both of his. He finally lifted his gaze to her and said, "What do you want, if you should win?"

"You have to answer the question that you won't allow me to ask, and you have to answer it truthfully," she said softly.

"You're playing with fire, and I hope for your sake, neither of us gets burnt, my Granger." He stood up, leaned over, cupped her cheek, and kissed her forehead. It was so tender and sweet. He said, "I'm through here, so I'll meet you by the docks in 40 minutes. Bring a swimsuit. Be prepared to win our challenge."

He started to leave and she called out, "Don't you mean, be prepared to lose?"

He laughed and said, "Right, that's what I meant." He walked out of the door, sent the girl back into Hermione and he smiled all the way to his room. It no longer mattered who won her little challenge, because either way, Draco Malfoy figured he was the real winner.

Personal A/N: Thanks to 'muli', whose review to the last chapter gave me 25 reviews, which was the magic number that I decided I wanted before I would post the next one. Yes, silly, I know, but I have so little in my life to look forward to, so there you are.

My surgery is the 23rd. I'll try to send out a couple more chapters before then. I have 5 more written, but not edited. This story will be around 35 chapters long, I think. It will extend beyond the weekend. I've had several people send me PM's asking about that. I don't want it to be too similar to "An Unlikely Pair" or its sequel, so I want it to go longer than just the weekend.

Thanks!