Sunrise came a lot earlier at this latitude and the cream-coloured curtains barely dimmed the morning's brightness.

Her muscles ached, pleasant reminders of the night before, as she rolled to face her lover. Viktor didn't stir and she luxuriated in her covert surveillance. Suppressing a brief regretful twinge, she wondered what it might have been like to share her innocence with Severus.

Severus would always be her friend. She would always love him, but, by his own admission, he'd needed to imbibe a potent aphrodisiac before he'd been able to perform with a nubile, young woman. Love doesn't conquer all.

---

Feathered strands of hair caressed his angular cheeks. Dark, heavy lashes almost feminised his appearance, somehow balancing the dense eyebrows. His lips, surprisingly, curved slightly upward in repose, and she wondered if he was thinking of her. Smooth, supple skin, overlaying athlete's muscles, looking jaundiced as though a week in the sun would ripen it to a golden brown, but many Bulgarians had Thracian ancestry. Then there was the nose. Blame Dad for that. Lockhart apart, she'd never had the slightest crush on any guy whose nose wasn't at least comparable to her father's. Loam-dark eyes... gazing back at her.

---

He reached out for her slowly, as if she were a wild animal that might startle at a sudden movement. His thumb brushed along her cheekbone as his fingers cradled her head, drawing her in for a slow, deliberate kiss.

Hermione welcomed him, her mouth opening to him, her limbs enfolding him.

"If you vere unhappy you vould haff dressed before I vake up, I am thinking?" he rasped in a whisper, failing to disguise his uncertainty.

"No regrets," Hermione assured him. "A few deep thoughts that need to be kissed away. No regrets."

"As you vish," he promised, complying.

---

Much later, he roused her from a doze with a gentle kiss. "I must get ready for practice. You vill be here vhen I return?"

Hermione considered for a few seconds before shaking her head. "I'll have a bath after you're finished in the bathroom... if you don't mind?"

"You're velcome," he purred.

"But after that I better go back to headquarters." She gave him a conciliatory smile. "You're not the only one with things to do. I'll come over tonight and take you to see Arthur. I might even bring a friend."

"A friend?"

"You'll see," Hermione teased.

---

Hermione found herself watching him from their rumpled bed as he went about the business of getting dressed. From the flicker of prideful amusement in his eye, she knew she'd been caught. She gave a cat-like stretch.

This time, he was the one staring.

"Herm-i-own-ee?" he began. "There is a party on Saturday after the game. Is little, to meet partners of team, but there is band. The Keeper is asking her brother and his friends to play..."

Hermione suddenly realised the reason for his nerves. She dragged him into a searing kiss. "Go on. Tell them you're bringing your girlfriend."

---

"It's eight o'clock in the morning," Severus griped. "You could at least have knocked."

"You're normally up in the attic brewing by now, not drinking coffee in your nightshirt. There didn't seem much point," Hermione reasoned.

"Well, this morning I'm drinking coffee, in my nightshirt, in the supposed privacy of my own home," Severus retaliated, thanking all the gods that his hangover was counteracting any physical reaction he might have had to the beatifically replete aura Hermione carried with her.

Hermione's eyes narrowed, her lips thinning as she grasped the situation. "No need to snap at me because you're hungover."

---

"Aren't you meant to know better at your age?" she asked pointedly.

Severus's scowl mutated to a near snarl, but his pounding head refused to supply a suitably witty and scathing reply. "We're all allowed a lapse now and again, Miss Granger. I am not about to turn into Sybil Trelawney." He winced at the look of concern that immediately graced her features.

"That's the problem, Severus. Anybody else would be allowed a lapse, but what if you'd been summoned last night?"

"I wasn't completely unaware of the risk, girl," Severus growled. "I just couldn't bring myself to particularly care."

---

"Severus—"

"Have I ever done anything to make you think I might want your pity?" he asked in an inhumanly cold whisper.

"No, but—"

"Then do not think to give it. I made some new notes on the Wolfsbane formula yesterday. Why don't you write your version?" The question was patently rhetorical.

"I don't like leaving you—"

"Just get out," he said, still in that blood-chilling whisper. "Go up to the lab or leave. Either way, leave me alone."

Hermione pressed herself against his back, enveloping him in the scent of a shampoo he knew wasn't hers.

---

He tensed under the exquisite torture of her embrace, poised between two extremes. The first was the urge to abandon the mask of civilisation, to turn in her arms, pin her between his body and the kitchen counter, kiss the breath from her body and take that which he desired and she had so obviously given to another. Hangover be damned. The second, submitting to the softness of her embrace, would leave him as broken and despised as the weakling child that Black had designated Snivellus.

For seconds their fates teetered in the balance.

She pulled away, her footsteps receding.

---

Safe within the laboratory, Hermione forced her attention to the task she'd been set, reading over the notes several times before she closed his notebook. She prepared to write her first draft, knowing that when she compared her version to Severus's she'd need to make some alterations before she drafted the fair copy.

An hour later, she was still staring at a blank sheet, unable even to remember the text, never mind begin to replace Severus's phrasing with her own.

The tingle of warmth on her left wrist was so subtle that it took her a minute to notice it.