Liquid Luck (Harry/Fleur)

“Harry! I hope I am not interrupting.”

Fleur Delacour, or Fleur Weasley as she was technically called these days, was standing on the front step of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, holding a leather folio in one hand and looking like she’d just stepped off the cover of a magazine. Which was unfair, really, because it was half seven on a Thursday evening and Harry was wearing joggers with a hole in the knee and had pasta sauce on his shirt.

“Not at all,” he said, stepping aside to let her in. “Bill said he’d send those over. I just didn’t realise he’d send you.”

“Bill is in Cairo,” Fleur said, walking past him with a click of heels on the hallway tiles. She smelled like something expensive and French, some perfume that Harry’s nose had no business cataloguing as thoroughly as it was. “Gringotts has sent him to inspect a new tomb. He left this morning and will not be back until next week. He asked me to bring you these papers before he forgot about them entirely, because my husband, he would forget his own head if I did not remind him.”

She held out the folio with a look of long-suffering patience that Harry recognised from every married woman he knew. He took it, flipped it open briefly, saw what appeared to be account transfer documents for a vault the Weasleys and the Order had shared during the war, and set it on the side table.

“Thanks for bringing them.” He paused. She was still standing in the hallway, looking around the entrance hall with an expression of polite interest that didn’t quite conceal the fact that Grimmauld Place, even post-renovation, was still a grim old pile. “Do you want a drink? I was just about to open a bottle of wine.”

He had not, in fact, been about to open a bottle of wine. He’d been about to eat reheated pasta in front of the fire and read the Quidditch section of the Prophet. But Fleur was here, and she was lovely, and Harry had been alone in this bloody house for two weeks while Ginny was on tour with the Harpies, and the thought of spending the rest of the evening talking to no one but Kreacher was depressing enough to make the offer of a drink feel entirely reasonable.

Fleur tilted her head. The gesture made her silvery-blonde hair fall across one shoulder. Everything she did was effortlessly, annoyingly beautiful.

“One drink,” she said. “Why not?”

---

One drink turned into two, which turned into Harry going down to the cellar to find another bottle because the first one, a mediocre Chardonnay he’d picked up at Tesco, was gone. Fleur had settled herself on the sofa in the drawing room with her legs tucked underneath her and her shoes kicked off onto the rug, and she looked more at ease than Harry had ever seen her. At family dinners she was always slightly on edge, aware that Molly still held a quiet grudge about Bill’s scarred face even though it had been years and the war was over and none of it had been Fleur’s fault. But here, without an audience of Weasleys, she was relaxed and funny and sharp-tongued in a way that Harry suspected Bill got to enjoy all the time.

They’d been talking about the war at first, people who’d been through it always ended up talking about it eventually. Then about Bill and his work, and about Ginny and Quidditch, and then somehow about growing up, Harry’s wretched childhood versus Fleur’s gilded one at Beauxbatons, which she described with such dry dismissiveness that Harry revised his assumption that it had been gilded at all.

“Everyone thinks it must be wonderful, being part Veela,” Fleur said, swirling the last inch of wine in her glass. “All these boys falling at your feet. But they are not falling for you, non? They are falling for something you did not choose and cannot turn off. It is like being famous for something you did not do.” She paused, and looked at him with a directness that caught Harry off guard. “But you would know about that, I think.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I know about that.”

They looked at each other for a moment that went on slightly longer than it should have. Fleur’s eyes were very blue. Cornflower blue, colour that looked artificial in photographs and was somehow even more vivid in person. Harry became aware that the Veela allure was doing its thing, that faint pull at the edges of his consciousness, steering him gently in a direction he’d been trying not to look. He’d been able to resist it since he was a teenager. But sitting here, two glasses of wine in, with Fleur close enough that he could see the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose that she probably didn’t know she had, resisting it required more effort than usual.

“I’ll get another bottle,” he said, standing up a bit too quickly.

The cellar of Grimmauld Place was a sprawling maze with winding stone corridors and rooms that opened onto other rooms. Harry had cleared out most of it over the years, but the wine cellar was one of the areas he’d mostly left alone, since the Blacks had apparently been serious drinkers and the collection was enormous. He grabbed a bottle of red at random, and he was on his way back up the stairs when something caught his eye on a shelf near the door.

A small bottle, maybe eight inches tall, made of thick glass with a golden liquid inside that caught the lamplight and seemed to glow. There was no label on it. Just a tiny engraving on the glass that Harry had to squint to read: Felix.

He picked it up and held it to the light. The liquid moved with that distinctive slow, oily viscosity. It looked exactly like Felix Felicis, the liquid luck potion he’d won from Slughorn in sixth year, the one that had made that single night feel like the entire world was bending to accommodate his every whim. But that was impossible. Felix Felicis was fantastically difficult to brew, took six months, and was worth a fortune. No one just left a bottle of it on a shelf.

Then again, the Blacks had been obscenely rich and famously eccentric. Walburga Black had kept a collection of house-elf heads mounted on the wall. An unfinished bottle of Felix Felicis in the wine cellar was practically restrained by comparison.

He brought it upstairs along with the wine.

“What is that?” Fleur asked, leaning forward to look at the small bottle he’d set on the coffee table. Her blouse shifted when she moved, and Harry’s eyes went to the pale expanse of skin above the neckline before he made himself look at the bottle instead.

“I think it might be Felix Felicis.”

Fleur’s eyebrows went up. She picked up the bottle and turned it in her fingers, examining the liquid, tilting it back and forth to watch the way it moved. “It does look like it,” she said. “The consistency is right. And Felix is engraved on the glass.” She uncorked it and held it to her nose. “It smells… warm. Like summer, and something sweet.” She looked at him over the top of the bottle. “Should we try it?”

“It’s probably been down there for decades,” Harry said. “It might be off.”

“Felix Felicis does not go off,” Fleur said. “It is one of the most stable potions there is. My grandmother had a bottle that was over a hundred years old.”

“And she drank it?”

“Non. She gave it to my mother as a wedding present.” Fleur smiled. “Maman used it on the night of her honeymoon. She said it was the best night of her life. My father was, how you say, insufferable about it for years.”

Harry laughed. Fleur was still holding the bottle, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger, watching the golden liquid swirl. There was a recklessness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Or maybe Harry was just noticing it now, seeing what he wanted to see.

“One sip each,” Fleur said. “Just a small one. What is the worst that could happen?”

Harry knew the answer to that question. The worst that could happen was that they’d both feel lucky and invincible and free of consequences and then do something that they were currently just barely managing not to do. He knew this. He was not stupid. And he still reached for the bottle.

“Ladies first,” he said.

Fleur took a small sip, her throat working as she swallowed. Her eyes widened slightly, and a flush spread across her cheeks. She handed the bottle to Harry. He took his own sip, and the liquid was warm going down, sweet and slightly spicy, like honeyed brandy with cinnamon. It settled in his stomach and spread outward, and within thirty seconds Harry felt good. Better than good. He felt golden, the same way he’d felt in sixth year, as though the evening had opened up in front of him and every possible outcome was a favourable one.

“Oh,” Fleur breathed. She was leaning back against the sofa cushions with her eyes half-closed and a smile on her face that was somewhere between blissful and dangerous. “Oh, that is lovely.”

“Good stuff,” Harry agreed, setting the bottle down. His inhibitions hadn’t vanished. That wasn’t what Felix did. It just made you feel like your instincts were right, that the thing you wanted to do was also the thing you should do, that the universe was temporarily on your side.

And his instincts were telling him to look at Fleur.

So he looked at her. He looked at the way the light caught her hair and turned it from silver to gold. He looked at the curve of her neck, the soft skin beneath her ear, the way her collarbones made delicate lines above the neckline of her blouse. He looked at her tits, which were round and full beneath the silk and which he had been carefully not looking at for the entire evening. He looked at her mouth, slightly parted, flushed darker than usual.

Fleur was looking at him too, and she wasn’t being subtle about it. Her eyes tracked from his face down his chest, over his shoulders, and came back up with an expression that was frank and appraising and did nothing whatsoever to pretend she hadn’t just looked him over like a piece of furniture she was considering buying.

“Bill would kill me,” Harry said. It came out with less conviction than he’d intended.

“Bill is in Cairo,” Fleur said. And then, quieter, with a half-smile that was purely Veela, all warmth and invitation and the faintest edge of danger: “He does not need to know everything, non?”

The allure thickened between them. She’d stopped holding it back or maybe she’d never been holding it back as much as Harry had told himself. Either way it was there now, pointed squarely at him and every sensible thought he’d been stacking up all evening fell over like dominoes.

And what was underneath was simple. Harry wanted her. He’d wanted her since the Triwizard Tournament, since he’d watched her walk into the Great Hall at fourteen and felt his brain freeze along with every other boy in the room. The fact that he was older now and could resist the allure didn’t mean the attraction wasn’t real. It just meant he’d got better at ignoring it.

The Felix made ignoring it seem like a waste of a perfectly good evening.

He put his wine glass down and shifted closer on the sofa. Fleur didn’t move away. Her lips were parted, her breathing had quickened, and up close the allure was stronger than ever.

Harry kissed her.

Her mouth was soft and hot and she tasted like wine and Felix and something underneath that was purely her, and when his lips met hers she made a small sound in the back of her throat and kissed him back immediately, one hand sliding up to grip the front of his shirt while the other threaded into his hair. She kissed aggressively, her tongue against his and her body pressing forward and her fingers tightening in his hair with enough force to make his scalp prickle.

“We should not do this,” Fleur said against his mouth, even as her hand slid down his chest and over his stomach to the waistband of his joggers.

“Probably not,” Harry agreed, even as his hand found the hem of her blouse and slid underneath to touch the bare skin of her waist. She was warm and impossibly soft and he could feel the muscles of her stomach tense under his fingers.

“It is the Felix,” she said. “It is making us bold.”

“Very bold.”

“Reckless, even.”

“Incredibly reckless.”

Fleur pulled back just far enough to look him in the eye. Her pupils were blown wide, black swallowing the blue, and her lips were swollen and wet from the kissing. “Take me to bed, Harry,” she said.

Harry stood up and held out his hand, and Fleur took it, and they went upstairs.

---

The master bedroom of Grimmauld Place had been completely redone since Harry moved in. New bed, new paint, new everything. The old Black family four-poster was long gone, replaced by a king-size that Harry had bought at a muggle shop in Tottenham Court Road because he’d wanted something with no history attached to it. It was a good bed, sturdy, comfortable. It had never had a part-Veela French witch in it before.

Fleur stood at the foot of the bed and pulled her blouse over her head in one fluid motion. Underneath she wore a bra of pale grey lace that did very little to conceal the shape of her tits, which were full and round and sat high on her chest. Her skin was flawless, porcelain-pale with a faint flush spreading down from her neck, and her waist was narrow and her stomach flat and when she reached behind her and unhooked the bra and let it fall, Harry forgot how to blink for a solid three seconds.

Her nipples were pink and already stiff. She stood there and let him look, unembarrassed, maybe even a little proud.

“Your turn,” she said.

Harry pulled his shirt off, kicked his joggers off, and stood there in his boxers. Fleur’s eyes went to his chest, to the scars that criss-crossed his skin, the remnants of curses and hexes and one particularly nasty encounter with a Horntail, and instead of flinching or asking questions the way most women did, she simply looked. She stepped forward, put both hands flat on his chest, and ran them slowly downward, over his ribs, his stomach, the trail of dark hair below his navel. When her fingers reached the waistband of his boxers, she hooked them in and pulled down, and his cock sprang free, already hard, and Fleur looked at it with an expression of pleasant surprise.

“Mon Dieu,” she said.

“That good or bad?”

“That is very, very good.” She wrapped her hand around him, her grip firm and stroked once, slowly, from base to tip. Harry’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Bill is not small, but you…” She trailed off, ran her thumb over the head of his cock where a bead of moisture had gathered, and smiled. “The lucky potion works in many ways, non?”

“Not sure that’s how Felix Felicis works.”

“I am choosing to believe it is.” She stroked him again, twisting her wrist at the top in a way that made his legs twitch, and then she sank to her knees on the bedroom floor with the kind of elegant, fluid motion that no one else could have made graceful. She looked up at him through pale eyelashes, her blue eyes wide, his cock inches from her mouth, and Harry felt a pulse of want so strong it was almost painful.

Fleur kissed the tip and then opened her mouth and took him in.

She was good. She was very good. Her mouth was hot and wet and she took him deep on the first stroke, her lips stretching around his girth, her tongue pressing flat against the underside of his cock as she slid down. Harry groaned and put his hand in her hair, that impossibly fine silver-blonde hair, and watched her work. She sucked with a slow rhythm, pulling back until just the head was between her lips and then sliding forward until he felt the back of her throat, and every time she took him deep she made a low humming sound that vibrated through his cock and up his spine.

“Fuck,” Harry muttered. “Fleur…”

She pulled off with a wet sound, licked her lips, and looked up at him. “You like that?”

“Yeah, I bloody well like that.”

She smiled, satisfied, and went back to it, picking up the pace, her hand working the base where her mouth couldn’t reach. Harry tightened his grip in her hair, not pushing, just holding on, and let his head fall back. He’d had his cock sucked by plenty of women. Fleur was in a class of her own. There was a confidence to it, an assurance, like she was enjoying herself as much as he was, and when she looked up at him with those blue eyes and his cock filling her mouth, Harry had to actively talk himself out of cumming right then and there.

He pulled her off with a gentle tug of her hair, and she went willingly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Not yet,” he said.

“Impatient,” she teased. But her breathing was ragged and her cheeks were flushed and when Harry pushed her gently onto the bed and reached for her skirt she lifted her hips to help him pull it off. Her knickers were the same pale grey lace as the bra, and they were wet. Harry could see the dark patch of arousal through the fabric before he slid them down her legs and dropped them on the floor.

Fleur was naked on his bed, and she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Not in the abstract, airbrushed way of a magazine photograph, but in the specific, breathing, flushed-skin, hard-nipples, wet-pussy way that was real and present and close enough to touch. Her thighs were parted and he could see her pussy, neat and pink and glistening, and Harry knelt between her legs and lowered his mouth to her without preamble.

“Oh!” Fleur’s back arched and her hand flew to his head, fingers digging into his hair. Harry licked her slowly, a broad, flat stroke from bottom to top that ended with his tongue circling her clit, and she shuddered and swore in French. He did it again, and again, establishing a rhythm, alternating between long slow licks and focused attention on her clit that had her hips rolling against his face. She tasted clean and slightly sweet and she was wet enough that his chin was slick within seconds.

Harry had always enjoyed eating a woman out. It was, in his opinion, one of the most underrated things in the world, partly because of the reactions it produced and partly because he’d discovered over the years that he was genuinely good at it. He slid two fingers inside Fleur and curled them upward while his tongue worked her clit, and the sound she made was loud enough to convince him, that he was in fact doing a great job.

“Mon Dieu, ‘Arry, oui, just like that, don’t stop, please don’t stop…”

He didn’t stop. He fucked her with his fingers and licked her clit and listened to her come apart above him, her composure crumbling piece by piece until she was gripping the sheets with one hand and his hair with the other and babbling in a mix of French and English that grew less coherent by the second. Fleur came hard, her thighs clamping around his head, her pussy clenching on his fingers, her whole body going rigid for a long, shaking moment before she collapsed back against the pillows with a gasp that emptied her lungs entirely.

He kept at it, gentler now, lapping slowly, until she pushed at his head and said “Enough, enough,” in a voice that was wrecked and breathless.

Harry wiped his mouth and crawled up to lie beside her. His cock was aching, so hard it was pressed flat against his stomach, and when Fleur’s hand drifted down and wrapped around him he let out a grunt.

“I need you inside me,” she said. It was not a request. She rolled onto her back and pulled him over her, spreading her legs to make room for his hips, and Harry lined himself up and pushed inside her.

They both groaned. She was tight and slick from his tongue and from her own orgasm, and Harry sank into her slowly, giving her time to adjust, feeling her stretch around him inch by inch. Fleur’s mouth fell open and her eyes widened and her nails dug into his shoulders, ten sharp points of pressure that grounded him in the moment.

“Oh,” she breathed when he was all the way inside her, his hips flush against hers. “Oh, you are… you fill me so…”

“Good?”

“Do not fish for compliments and fuck me, ‘Arry.”

He laughed, because even in bed Fleur was imperious and demanding and he liked that about her, liked that she wasn’t shy about what she wanted. He started to move, and the laughter died and was replaced by the sounds of shagging. The wet slap of skin against skin every time he drove into her. The creak and groan of the bed frame taking their combined weight. Fleur’s moans, rising in pitch and volume with every thrust, uninhibited sounds that Harry associated with women who genuinely didn’t give a damn who heard them. He’d shagged enough reserved English witches to know the difference. Fleur was not reserved. She was vocal and expressive and when Harry shifted his angle and hit a spot that made her eyes roll back, she screamed.

“Oui, oui, there, right there, ‘arder, give it to me ‘arder…”

Harry grabbed her hips and gave it to her harder. He fucked her with long, deep strokes that slammed the headboard against the wall, a steady rhythmic banging that kept time with the sound of his cock driving into her. Fleur wrapped her legs around his waist and dug her heels into his arse, pulling him deeper, and the look on her face was wild and open and nothing like the poised, composed woman who’d handed him a leather folio in the hallway an hour ago.

She came again with his cock inside her, her whole body going taut, her pussy squeezing him so tightly that Harry had to grit his teeth and slow down or he’d have lost it right there. He watched her through it, the way her face contorted, the way her mouth opened in a silent scream before the sound finally broke through, a ragged, desperate cry of “‘Arry!” that echoed off the bedroom walls. Her orgasm lasted a long time, longer than any Harry could remember producing in a woman, wave after wave of clenching and shaking that he could feel along every inch of his cock, and he held still inside her and let her ride it out, his own restraint hanging by a thread.

When she finally went limp beneath him, panting and flushed and beautiful, Harry pulled out and flipped her over onto her stomach. Fleur went willingly, grabbing a pillow and pulling it beneath her chest, and when she looked over her shoulder at him with those blue eyes, heavy-lidded and expectant, Harry took a moment just to look at her. Her arse was round and pale and perfect, her waist narrowing above it, and the silvery hair fanned across her back in a tangled mess.

He positioned himself behind her, guided his cock back to her pussy, and pushed in with one long stroke.

“Fuck,” Fleur hissed into the pillow, her fingers clawing at the sheets. Harry gripped her hips and started to fuck her from behind, and this position was even better, tighter, deeper, the angle letting him feel every inch of her around him while he watched her arse bounce every time his hips met hers. The sounds in the room were obscene. The slap of his thighs against her arse, the wet noise of his cock sliding in and out, the bed squeaking and groaning beneath them, and Fleur’s muffled moans, punched out of her with every thrust.

“You feel incredible,” Harry told her, and he meant it. He’d been with enough women to have a frame of reference.She was extraordinary in the way she responded to him, the way her body moved with his, the way she pushed back to meet every thrust like she wanted more, always more, and was not afraid to take it.

He reached around her hip and found her clit with his fingers, rubbing in tight circles while he fucked her, and Fleur came apart for the third time with a scream that she barely managed to muffle in the pillow. Her whole body shook, her pussy clamped down on his cock, and this time Harry didn’t hold back. He buried himself deep inside her and came with a groan that felt like it started in his toes, his cock pulsing, filling her up while Fleur gasped and pressed back against him and took every last drop.

They stayed like that for a long moment, both of them breathing hard, connected and still. Then Harry pulled out slowly, and Fleur collapsed flat on the bed with a sound that was half sigh and half groan. He dropped onto his back beside her, staring at the ceiling, his heart hammering, his body buzzing with the pleasant aftershock of one of the best orgasms of his life.

“Zut alors,” Fleur murmured into the pillow. Her face was turned toward him, flushed and drowsy and satisfied, her hair a tangled mess. She looked nothing like the elegant, untouchable creature she presented to the world. “I think the Felix is very potent.”

“Very,” Harry agreed.

She rolled onto her side and put one hand on his chest. Her fingers were cool against his overheated skin. “We should not have done that,” she said, without any particular conviction.

“Probably not.”

“Bill must never know.”

“Agreed.”

She was quiet for a moment, her fingers resting on his chest. Then: “It was worth it, though.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “It was.”

Fleur tucked herself against his side, her head on his shoulder, her body warm and soft along his, and Harry pulled the duvet over them both and listened to her breathing slow.

---

He woke early, as he usually did. The grey light of a London morning was filtering through the curtains, and Fleur was asleep beside him, curled up with the duvet pulled to her chin and one bare leg sticking out, her hair fanned across the pillow. She looked peaceful and absurdly beautiful and Harry’s chest did something complicated that he chose not to examine too closely.

He got up quietly, pulled on his boxers and joggers, and went downstairs to make tea. The drawing room was still as they’d left it, two wine glasses on the coffee table, the bottle of red mostly finished, and the small bottle of not-quite-Felix-Felicis sitting between them. Harry picked it up and carried it to the kitchen, where the light was better.

He examined it properly for the first time. The liquid was golden, yes, and viscous, yes, but in the bright morning light it was a shade darker than he remembered Felix being. More amber than gold. He uncorked it and sniffed. The warmth was still there, that honeyed sweetness, but underneath it was something else. Something that smelled distinctly of old wood and dried fruit. Like sherry.

Harry looked at the engraving on the glass again. Felix. But now that he was actually paying attention and not distracted by Fleur’s cleavage and the firelight and two glasses of wine, he could see that there were more letters after the x. Faded almost to nothing, worn smooth by age, but legible if you tilted the bottle in the right light.

Felix Martin. Jerez de la Frontera. 1947.

It was a name. Felix Martin. A Spanish sherry producer. The bottle wasn’t Felix Felicis at all. It was a seventy-odd-year-old bottle of fino sherry, probably worth a fair bit to a collector and absolutely, categorically not magical in any way.

Harry set the bottle down on the kitchen counter and stared at it. Then he laughed, quietly, a short huff of breath through his nose. They’d drunk old sherry and convinced themselves it was liquid luck and then shagged each other senseless. The “luck” had nothing to do with it. There was no potion to blame, no convenient excuse, no magical explanation for why Fleur Weasley had ended up naked in his bed. They’d done it because they’d wanted to. Both of them. Simple as that.

The kettle clicked off. Harry poured two cups and was adding milk to his when he heard bare feet on the stairs. Fleur appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing one of his t-shirts and nothing else, her legs bare, her hair a disaster. She was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“Tea?” he offered.

“Please.” She sat down at the kitchen table and yawned. Then her eyes landed on the small bottle sitting on the counter, and she smiled. “Our lucky charm.”

“About that.” Harry set the mug in front of her and sat down across the table. “It wasn’t Felix Felicis.”

Fleur raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“It’s sherry. Old Spanish sherry. The engraving says Felix Martin, not Felix Felicis. It’s the name of the bloke who made it.” He pushed the bottle across the table toward her. “We drank sherry and talked ourselves into thinking we’d taken liquid luck.”

Fleur picked up the bottle and squinted at the engraving. She tilted it in the light, read the worn letters, and was quiet for a long moment. Harry waited. He was expecting her to be upset, maybe, or embarrassed, or angry. He was not expecting what actually happened, which was that Fleur put the bottle down, looked him dead in the eye, and started laughing.

A real, full, delighted laugh that lit up her face and made her eyes crinkle at the corners. She laughed until she was leaning on the table, one hand pressed to her mouth, shoulders shaking.

“Sherry!” she said, when she could speak. “We drank sherry and I said, ‘oh, the consistency is right, it does not go off,’ I sounded like a potions professor, and it was sherry…”

“In your defence, the bottle was very convincing.”

“The bottle was a bottle, Harry. We are idiots.” But she was still laughing, and her eyes were bright, and she didn’t look remotely sorry about any of it.

“So,” Harry said, wrapping his hands around his mug. “No luck potion. No magical excuse. Just sherry and bad decisions.”

Fleur took a sip of her tea, composed herself with visible effort, and looked at him over the rim. That same direct, appraising look from the night before. The one that cut through all the pretence.

“I think,” she said, “that we both knew it was not the potion. Not really. It just gave us permission to do what we already wanted.” She set the mug down. “I do not need a potion to want you, Harry. I never did.”

Harry looked at her. She looked back. And there was nothing to say to that, really, because she was right. They’d known. The Felix, or the sherry, or whatever it was, had just been a convenient excuse to stop pretending otherwise.

“So,” Fleur said, a slow smile spreading across her face. “Bill is in Cairo until next Thursday.”

“Is he.”

“Oui.” She stood up, carrying her tea, and walked toward the kitchen door. At the threshold she paused and looked back at him with an expression that was half invitation and half challenge. “I wonder, do you have any more of that lucky sherry? I find I am in the mood to be reckless again.”

Harry picked up his mug and followed her out.

He didn’t need sherry, and he definitely didn’t need luck. But he wasn’t about to say no.