Learn to Hate

Learn to Hate

Chapter Two

Could you look me in the eye And tell me that your happy now Would you tell it to my face That I haven't been erased Are you happy now? -Michelle Branch

Poor Ginny. She had heard herself so described so often that sometimes she thought she ought to have been christened thus, Ginny reflected several hours later, unwillingly recalling hearing Fleur whisper the two words under her breath as she had turned to smile at Bill.

Liam and Jade were safely tucked up in bed, their stories read and sleep not very far away.

Bastian had gone to bed protesting that Ginny was fussing unnecessarily and that there was nothing wrong with him, even though it was perfectly obvious that he was in pain. Tiredly Ginny headed for her own bedroom. Supposedly it was the room she shared with Draco on his rare visits home, but in reality. Draco might design to sleep in the large king-size bed alongside her, but for all the intimacy, the love, the natural closeness one might expect to be shared between a married couple, they might just as well have been sleeping in separate beds and at opposite ends of the large house.

On this occasion, though, Draco was not intending to stay the night and had already left for London. Ginny had long since ceased to struggle with the pretence that their marriage was either happy or 'normal,' just as she had ceased to question the fact that Draco was returning to London ostensibly to 'work.'

And the worst thing about the whole horrid situation was not that Draco cared so little for her, but that she cared so much. Too much.

What had happened to the dreams she had once had, the bright shining hopes, the belief that Draco loved her?

Her maternal ears, forever tuned, picked up the sound of a soft cry from Jade's room. Tiredly she slid out of bed. Jade was going through a phase of having bad dreams.

***

Having parked his aero-Bentley at the rear of the smart mews house he had bought with the wedding cheque given to them by Ginny's grandparents, Draco unlocked the front door and headed for the bedroom, dropping his overnight bag on the floor and stretching out full length on the bed as he reached for his wand and conjured up a hologram confidently.

The woman's voice on the other end of the line sounded sleepy and soft.

'Guess who?' Draco asked her, tongue in cheek.

There was a brief silence before she responded.

'Oh, Draco. But I thought! You said you were going to a family wedding and that you'd be staying for the weekend.'

'So, I changed my mind,' Draco told her, laughingly. 'What would you like for breakfast?'

'Breakfast. Oh, Draco. I don't. I can't.'

She sounded more alert now, and Draco could see her sitting up in bed in her Belgravia house, her tawny hair down round her shoulders, her skin honey gold from her recent holiday in Mauritius. He had flown out to join her there for five days.

'Some client conference,' the Auror who had originally instructed him had commented enviously when he had handed Draco Mercedes fax.

'When you're paying for millions, the cost of flying your Auror out for an urgent conference is pretty small beer,' Draco told him carelessly.

Mercedes was the wife of a millionaire, soon-to-be billionaire corporate raider. The first thing she had done when she had discovered that he was having an affair with one of her 'friends' was to instruct her assistant that she wanted him to hire Draco as her Auror, the second was to arm herself with as much evidence as she could of her husbands business affairs, including his complex and adventurously artistic interpretation of the tax laws.

Draco had decided appreciatively that she had enough on him to make it a piece of cake for him to send him to Azkaban with a divorce settlement that would make her virtually as comfortably wealthy as his ex as she had been as his wife, and to get him the kind of publicity that would ensure that he maintained his position as the country's foremost Divorce Auror.

'Divorce isn't really the kind of thing we like to specialize in here in chambers,' the most senior member, a QC and once of the country's foremost tax Auror specialists had advised Draco stiffly when he had originally joined them. 'It's not really quite us, if you know what I mean.'

Draco had known exactly what he meant, but he had also been acutely aware of the fact that was only his father in law's name that had got him a place in the chambers at all. He also knew that the only reputation he had then to gain him the clients who would bring him the kind of high profile and even higher income he craved so desperately was one of being unwanted and rejected by his previous 'set,' where he had been allowed to work only as a tenant and on the cases that no one else wanted to deal with.

His new chambers attracted a clientele who wanted and expected only the best barristers whose names and reputations they already knew, and so Draco had seen a niche for himself in the one field where the chambers didn't already have a specialist- matrimonial Aurorism.

That had been several years ago, and now Draco's reputation had grown and his name on a case was likely to strike dread in a wealthy husband about to enter the divorce arena.

The extremely high fees Draco charged for his services weren't the only benefit he earned from his work. Draco had quickly and cynically discovered that newly divorced and about to be divorced women very often had an appetite for sex and the male attention that went with it, which ensured him a constant turnover of willing bed mates.

One of the main advantages of these relationships, from Draco's point of view, was that they were always relatively brief. While his female clients were going through their divorces, he provided a comforting male shoulder to lean on, someone with whom they could share their problems as well as their beds. But once everything was finalized, he was always able to very quickly and firmly detach himself.

If any of his lovers showed a tendency to cling and become possessive, he suddenly became far too busy with 'work' to be able to take their messages- they soon got the drift. A new client, a new lover- it was time for Draco to move on.

The affair with Mercedes, because of the extremely complex nature of her husbands financial affairs and the huge amount of money potentially involved, had lasted considerably longer than usual, and as yet Mercedes's husband had not been served with any divorce papers.

'I've got at least two friends who got damn all out of their ex's,' Mercedes had told Draco, showing him her expensive dental charm work in a very sharp, foxy smile.

'I have no intention of allowing that to happen to me. Here is a list of the assets I intend to make a claim on,' she had told Draco, handing him an impressively long typed schedule.

They had been lovers for more than two months, and Draco had to admit that he was impressed. He doubted that Mercedes had a single ounce of emotional vulnerability in her entire make-up. She was one of the most sexually demanding women he had ever had, abandoning herself completely and utterly satisfied. But once she was, she was immediately and instantly back in control; her mind, her brain, were as sharp and dangerous as an alligator's teeth.

Her husband would be lucky to escape with even half of his fortune intact, Draco had decided as he listened to her plans for using her knowledge of his tax affairs to blackmail him into settling and giving her what she wanted.

'I don't intend to file for divorce until after this new deal he's working on has gone through,' she had told Draco candidly. 'It's worth almost five hundred million, and I want to make sure I get my share of it.'

'Look. I . I can't talk now,' he heard her saying quickly to him now. 'I'll meet you tomorrow. I'll come round to your place.'

She had cut off the connection herself before Draco could object, leaving him angrily aware of his sexual frustration and even more importantly, with a sharp sense of unease.

It was going on for two o'clock in the morning, but he felt too restless for sleep. Draco's instinct for survival was very acute and very finely tuned. It had to be. As his grandfather in law's favourite he had spent his growing years fighting off any potential claims on his position from his cousins and family, and as a young adult he had to strive to maintain that position.

Now that he was married to Virginia, her grandfather's favour didn't matter in quite the same way. Virginia's own trust funds were worth considerably in excess of her grandfather's assets, but it wasn't just the desire for wealth that drove Draco. He had another need that in its way was just as intense, and that need was to stand apart from his peers, to set himself above them, to be envied by them. Friendship, affection, love, none of these interested Draco nor mattered to him.

Supremacy, that was what Draco craved. Supremacy and the security that came with it. The supremacy of being the best divorce Auror, the best head of chambers in the best set of chambers. In Draco's opinion, there were two ways to gain these goals. The first was through merit and skill, the second, sometimes the more subtle- was an underhanded method of gaining power, which made its acquisition all the sweeter. To emerge as top dog was important when others had openly derided one's fitness for such a role.

It had amused him recently to bump into Jacob Wright, the barrister who had beaten him on a vacancy they had both applied for in his last set of chambers and who had none too subtly crowed his victory over him.

Draco had invited Jacob to join him for a drink and over it had encouraged him to talk about himself. He had learned that Jacob had married somebody from the country set the lower echelons of the upper classes of whose acquaintanceship he had once boasted to Draco.

His wife, to judge from the photograph he had shown Draco, was the plain Hufflepuff, horsy type, and no, they had no children as yet...but they were trying. His dream, it turned out, was to buy himself a small country house.

'But they're so damned expensive, old chap, and Lexy's wretched horses cost the earth to keep.'

Draco had smiled and casually mentioned his own two children. Ginny's grandparents' family seat was also dropped into the conversation along with references to its history and its décor; not too much, just enough to ensure that Jacob realized that he, Draco, was living the life-style that the other man so desperately wanted, that he had fathered the children that Jacob so far had not.

And sweetest of all had been when he had given him a lift home in his new aero-Bentley, to coolly refuse the invitation extended for him and Ginny to join Jacob and his wife for supper one evening.'

'Fraid no can do, old chap,' Draco had told him, giving him his crocodile smile. 'We're pretty fully booked right now.'

Revenge indeed.

Draco couldn't really remember when he had first discovered this power he had within himself to hurt others. What he could remember though, was the sickening sense of anger and fear he had felt when he had once overhead his father and uncle Tarquin talking about him.

He had been about ten at the time and already feeling the effects of Voldemort's rise to power on his relationship with his parents. Draco had never been the kind of child who liked being held or touched. Even before he could walk he had wriggled out of the reach of adults who would have picked him up and fussed over him, resenting, too his cousin Wolfsheim's challenging presence in the arena of his life. Woolfsheim, who was always cuddling up to Narcissa. Woolfsheim, whom his mother seemed to like more than she liked him.

'You've got a fine boy there,' he could remember his uncle Tarquin say enviously to his father. 'The old man thinks I'm letting the side down by not giving him a grandson. Mind you, I've got to say, Lucius, that you and Narcissa don't seem to realize just how lucky you are.

'If Draco was mine. Perhaps he should have been mine,' Tarquin said very softly. 'Dad certainly seems to think so. He says that Draco is far more like me than you. You know, Lucius, sometimes it seems to me that you and Narcissa don't like your son very much.'

The two men had moved out of earshot before Draco could hear anymore. What had his uncle Tarquin meant? Why didn't his parents like him?

Deliberately Draco had begun to test them anxious to discover if what his uncle Tarquin had said was the truth.

He asked for a new broom and he was told he couldn't have one, but they bought Wolfsheim a new one for their birthday.

Draco had 'borrowed' it, and when it had 'accidentally' been pushed under the wheels of a delivery van and smashed, he had told his stern, grave-eyed father that he hadn't meant to push the broom, he had just let go of it at the wrong time.

His sharp eyes began to notice how much more time his mother spent with Wolfsheim than she did with him, how much more fuss she made of Wolfsheim.

He told her that he didn't want her to see him off at the platform for Hogwarts any more that he was going to ask his grandfather to tell his uncle Tarquin to take him. This was despite the fact that more often than not it was Narcissa who saw off Wolfsheim to Hogwarts, Tarquin being far too self-engrossed to consider doing anything so mundane as the school run.

Draco began to listen keenly to the way his grandfather compared his two sons, praising Tarquin and speaking contemptuously of Draco's own father, Lucius. His father, Draco had discovered was a man to be despised and ignored. His grandfather and his uncle Tarquin became the pivotal male role models in his life. To cloak his childish fear of his parents' rejection of him, he began to cultivate a protective wall of indifference to any kind of adult emotion and at the same time he started to learn how to manipulate it to gain his own ends.

In much the same way he had learned to distrust his parents- his father might speak of chastising him out of love for him, but Draco knew better: his father did not love him, his father did not like him. Draco had heard his uncle Tarquin saying so- so Draco also learned to distrust and alienate his peers. Better to protect himself by cultivating and inciting their antagonism than to risk the pain of being rejected by them.

Now, twenty odd years down the line, if anyone had suggested to Draco that it was out of the seeds of his extreme emotional sensitivity and vulnerability as a child that his adult persona had grown, he would have laughed at them in cynical mockery.

He was as he was; he liked being as he was, and for those who didn't like it or him- then too bad!

It irritated him that Mercedes had put him off instead of inviting him to go straight round, as he had expected her to do.

He had been looking forward to the relief he knew that having sex with her would have brought him; not just for his sexual desire but also from the anger and sense of ill-usage that being with his family always caused him.

Virginia, with her pathetic humility and eternal self sacrificing; her parents with their well-mannered 'niceness'; her cousin Liv with her smug self-satisfaction; Bill with his arrogant superiority; and Ron, the perfect father and husband. God, but they all irritated the hell out of him. He knew how much they disapproved of him...disliked him. How sorry they felt for 'poor Ginny,' how they talked about him behind his back, but he was the one whose name was beginning to appear with flattering regularity in the social columns; he was the one who never lacked a willing sexual partner- a variety of willing sexual partners. Well at least not normally!

Tomorrow he would have to punish Mercedes a little for tonight, to point out to her that he had virtually walked out on a family gathering just to be able to spend the night with her- didn't matter that he would have left, anyway, she wasn't going to know that. Yes, just a small cooling off on his part; a discreet hint of withdrawal should be more than enough to make her come running, eager to appease him.

He had a meeting in chambers to attend in the afternoon, which would give him an excuse to cut short the time he spent with her further reinforcing and underlining the stance he intended to take with her. It was their final chambers meeting before they closed down their office for the Christmas and New Year period.

Apart from Mercedes proposed divorce, Draco had no other major work currently in progress but that did not concern him too much. Early spring was always a good time for new briefs the forced conviviality and intimacy of the winter months en famille often proved to be the breaking point for a marriage under strain. Also, Mercedes had already dropped several hints about inviting him to join her when she went skiing. Draco had no particular love of either the sport or the cold, but he had to admit that the thought of Aspen and its social life, its socialites, was extremely tempting.

He would tell Ginny that it was business, of course. Getting off the bed, he started to strip off his clothes before heading to the shower.

Like virtually all other male members of his family, Draco was a stunningly sexy man. Tall, broad shouldered, with a naturally well-muscled torso, he shared his father's blonde hair and very masculine good looks. However, in Draco they possessed a certain most magnetic intensity that one of his smitten victims had once described as making her completely spellbound, like standing in the path of a Voldemort, knowing it had the potential to destroy you and yet being so hyped up on the mixture of adrenaline-induced excitement and fear that knowledge produced that you simply couldn't move out of its way.

'It's that look of cold ruthlessness in his eyes,' she had continued, shivering sensually. 'You just know, the moment you look at him, that he doesn't give a damn about you or your emotions, but somehow you just can't help yourself.'

There was a sharp ache in Draco's body, which he knew from experience could only be alleviated by sex. He smiled grimly to himself as he turned on the shower. He should, after all, have taken Ginny to bed before he left Haslewich. Although he would never have told her so, despite her lack of self-esteem and her plainness, there was about Ginny a very rich vein of sexual warmth and generosity, femininity, a womanless that Draco knew perfectly well most men would have found extremely alluring, all the more so because her own unawareness of it meant that it would be a secret that only a lover would have access to just only as one lover would have access to her body.

Ginny had been a virgin when he had taken her to bed, inexperienced and unknowing, untutored, but her body had surrounded him with softness, a warmth as instinctive and natural as her protective mother love for her children.

She didn't receive him with that same innocent generosity and warmth any more, of course. On the rare occasions when they did have sex, he could feel how much she resented his ability to arouse her and how hard she strived to resist her physical desire for him. It amused Draco to let her. He knew he could make love to her more often and easily turn her resistance into molten liquid and acceptance and desire, but what was the point? The last think he wanted was for Ginny to be sexually demanding or equally possessive.

He showered himself briskly, then stepped out of cubicle, smoothing his dark, wet hair back sleekly off his face as he reached for a towel.

If he was going to go to Aspen he would need to buy himself some suitable clothes. He had read that a lot of the Hollywood set went there for the season. He started to smile as he rubbed his body dry and then padded naked across to his bed.

*

Draco was going through some paperwork when he heard the front doorbell ring. On his way to answer it he quickly checked his appearance in the hallway mirror. He was wearing the expensive after-shave that Mercedes had given him and the Turnbull and Asser shirt, which had been another present from her. The gold cuff links had been a gift from another grateful client. He glanced at his watch, a Rolex that Ginny had given him as a wedding present. Mercedes was earlier than he'd expected her. Well, she was still going to have to make due reparation for last night and wait a little for her sex. Yes, and plead with him for it, too!

Draco opened the door.

'Malfoy, may I come in?'

Without waiting for Draco's assent, Mercedes husband stepped determinedly into the hallway.

Draco had met him on only one previous occasion at a dinner party given by a friend of Mercedes to which he had been invited.

Although not as tall as Draco and certainly a good twenty years older, Griffin Burton nevertheless possessed that aura of power and forcefulness common to most entrepreneurial successful men. He might not walk with a deliberate swagger nor verbally boast of his achievements or his wealth, but he most definitely had about him that air that warned other males that he considered himself to be their superior, and as he eyeballed Draco with cold aggression as he marched past him, Draco was immediately and acutely aware of a relentless dislike he could feel emanating from him.

To give Draco his due, though, apart from a small betraying distortion of his pupils and a reactive tensing of his muscles, he gave no other sign that his visitor was not the person he expected to see, even managing a passably plausible, polished wave of his hand in the direction of his sitting room as he invited, 'Griffin. Good to see you, old man. What can I do for you.?'

On the verge of walking into the sitting room, Griffin Burton turned round and thoroughly scrutinized Draco.

'I'll say this for you Malfoy, you've got nerve,' he commented tersely. 'I'm a very busy man and I don't have time to play verbal games. Mercedes had told me what's been going on and.'

'Ah. Good.' Draco cut in on him smoothly. 'I did counsel her to tell you that she wanted a divorce. These things are always better when the two parties concerned discuss them as adults, and-'

'Better for the bank balances of their Aurors, yes,' Griffin Burton cut him off acidly, 'but let's not get side-tracked. It isn't your professional relationship with my wife I'm here to discuss.' He paused meaningfully. 'I do know, like I said, what's been going on. A friend tipped me off. Apparently you've got quite a reputation for bedding your female clients.'

Draco gave a small shrug. 'When a marriage is breaking down, people become emotionally-'

'Vulnerable,' griffin Burton supplied darkly before Draco could finish. 'But it's hardly professional behaviour to use that vulnerability against them, is it, and I should have thought that a man in your position would have to be very careful about guarding his professional reputation. After all, that's really what an Auror has to sell, isn't it? His reputation is his product. Unless, of course, you've decided that it's more financially profitable for you to trade your reputation in the bedroom rather than the workroom. Rumour does have it, of course that it wasn't so much your legal skills or qualifications that got you into your chambers in the first place. Does your wife know that you regularly bed your female clients?'

'It's a very pleasant bonus to my work, ' Draco acknowledged with a taunting smile and a small shrug, 'and I cant deny that it is a perk that I don't find very enjoyable...after all, what normal heterosexual man would not?'

It was one of Draco's greatest assets that he possessed a remarkable gift for turning the tables on his opponents and sending back the arrows they fired at him with devastating speed and accuracy, and he could see from the betraying narrowing of Griffin Burton's eyes and the hard edge of colour seeping up under his skin that he had succeeded in getting him on his guard.

'In your shoes, I'd be rather careful about what I admit to,' he warned Draco. 'I doubt very much you'd enjoy being on the other side of a lawsuit.'

'No, I wouldn't,' Draco agreed, and added urbanely, 'but then I doubt that very men would like to stand up in court and admit that their wives preferred me as a lover. Which reminds me, since I am acting for your wife in the subject of divorce, I really should advise you that it is quite unethical for you to approach me.'

'There isn't going to be a divorce.'

Draco stared at him in disbelief.

'Mercedes and I have had a little talk,' Griffin Burton told him with heavy irony, 'and we've decided that we're going to give our marriage a second chance. I think that what Mercedes really needs is to be a mother. A woman needs a child, children, and they say, don't they, that the conception and birth of a child cement a couple more closely together than anything else. You've got children, haven't you?'

He gave Draco a challenging look.

'Divorce can be an extremely expensive and messy business, and as Mercedes now agrees, it makes sense for the two of us to stay together. Oh, and by the way, there's no point in you trying to get in touch with her. She Portkeyed out of New York this morning.'

'I hope I've made myself understood,' he told Draco as he turned around and opened the door, 'but then, I know you'll have got my drift, wont you Malfoy.'

As Draco automatically followed him to the front door, the older man continued with obvious enjoyment, 'Oh, and by the way, perhaps I'd better warn you, I've had a word with the senior partner in your chambers, alerting him to certain facts I felt he should know. After all, a chamber like yours trades on its reputation, and anything that might damage that reputation has to be very swiftly and mercilessly dealt with, doesn't it...rather like anything that might threaten a man's marriage or his financial status.

'It's the mark of an intelligent man, I believe, to act quickly and decisively to protect what he values.'

Draco said nothing. He didn't need to. He knew exactly what Griffin Burton was saying to him. He had somehow or other persuaded Mercedes not to go ahead with her divorce because he had no intention of allowing her to profit financially from her marriage to him. Simpler and far more financially expeditious to remain married to her. But it was his remark about his own professional status that had alarmed Draco the most, especially that comment he had made about speaking with the head of his chambers.

Although technically Draco was his own boss and none of the other members had any kind of jurisdiction over his actions or his morals- in practice. Well, he would soon find out, since no doubt the subject would be raised at his afternoons meeting, if it was going to be raised.

'Hell and damnation,' he muttered grimly as he consigned Mercedes to the past and the long list of his ex-lovers an hour later as he left his mews house en route to the old fashioned set of chambers in the Inns of Court where the high status of their address more than compensated for the cramped office that Draco occupied.

The senior partner's office was, quite naturally, the most luxurious: large, elegantly furnished, reeking of that unmistakably indefinable aura of old money, class and power, and Draco could never walk into it without coveting it and everything that went with it. Already he had promised himself that one day it would be his.