When Hermione Fights

Life at the Manor

Chapter beta: Olivia

Chapter translator: Aivy

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Back at the manor, he showed me all the rooms on the ground floor. Among them was the ballroom in the middle of the huge manor, which surpassed everything I had ever seen in splendour and opulence.

Forget the Ministry. It was really pathetic compared to this. What I saw now was simply deeply impressive. A bright high-gloss parquet with dark inlays, which formed ornaments on the floor, made the dance hall very noble. The walls were white and there was a showy, luxuriant, shiny, golden stucco in a massive, baroque style, which was simply overwhelming. The pompously overloaded walls were interrupted only by rounded, floor-to-ceiling mullioned windows, which allowed plenty of light into the wide hall.

Only the gallery seemed to have survived from the Middle Ages. In the rear part of the hall it protruded high up from the rear wall. At the same time there was an estrade in the middle, in front of a window. This was a podium on which a white, noble grand piano stood, waiting for someone to play its keys and elicit a full melody from them. Next to the grand piano stood a golden harp, which rounded off the picturesque image. I could vividly imagine the Malfoy family celebrating a ball here. It was an exhilarating vision.

A huge, allegorical, colourfully painted ceiling showed Merlin and Morgana and told their story, which I found very captivating, as the painted people also moved here. I enjoyed the magic that surrounded me to the full.

I stood in the middle of the room, looking fascinated at the ceiling with my head tilted back. Suddenly, I felt Lucius approaching me from the front and bringing his lower body close to mine. His hand grabbed my hip at lightning speed, which immediately made my head swivel around. Now I could stare at his male chest. He was physically much too close to me. Out of instinct, I had put my hands up against his chest and now I felt a tingling sensation in them when I touched him so intimately and he was so clearly too close to me.

Very slowly, I looked up at him with my mouth slightly dry to see his smug, smiling face. Then I could watch him flick his fingers casually and the harp and the piano began playing as if magically guided. A gentle waltz melody in soft tones suddenly floated through the hall and in the acoustically balanced room they were able to unfold their full timbre.

My eyes got really big when he released my hip to grab my hand immediately. He pulled it from his chest; it now lay in his hand, which seemed so much larger than mine as he began to sway me to the beat of the melody.

While he was still making the first slow dance steps with me, he placed my other hand gallantly on his shoulder and put his hand lightly on my shoulder blade. He had brought me into a perfect dance posture with just a few movements. Only the proper dance distance was not maintained; he held me much too close.

I was too taken by surprise by his noblesse and participated obediently, let him lead me and couldn't really react. Swaying, in the slow up and down of the three-four time of the waltz, we floated across the floor. Gallantly, he pushed me in front of him, setting every step without haste, exactly in time. He deliberately danced his steps forward with his right foot between my feet and the closer he pulled me, the closer his leg came to me when he stepped towards me. He intended to get close to me in a very lascivious and and not quite respectable way. I found it difficult to swallow. The atmosphere slowly but surely became more and more charged. It was almost sparking when we approached each other united in the dance.

He was a perfect dancer and skillfully whirled me across the dance floor like a master. Thank the goddess, I had once had dance lessons - though my repertoire was limited to the waltz and a few other dances - otherwise this would have been embarrassing. After the course had ended at that time, I had fled back to karate training, as that was definitely more to my liking! But now it helped me not to look completely ridiculous.