Cali bursts out laughing and Elena claps a hand over her mouth, flaming bright red. “Damon!”
I shove his shoulder, hard, in the direction of the other side of the terminal. “Seriously, man?”
He goes along, sighing heavily to register his complaint. “Fine, Whiny Pants. Have it your way.”
I walk him past the noisy confusion of the security line, so the buzz will disguise what we say from the girls, more for his sake than for mine, because I know this is going to make him hugely uncomfortable. And if that happens, he’s likely to say something terrible, which will piss Elena off, and neither of them needs that on his first day home in weeks.
When we’re as far away as I can get without him losing sight of Elena, I turn and force myself to meet his gaze.
“I wanted to make sure you knew I didn’t mean what I said at the hotel.”
“You were pissed, you were being a dick,” he says dismissively. “Make you a deal: if you take the closest room to Stefan and his new favorite teddy bear tonight, I’ll let you off the hook without a Hallmark card.”
“No.” I take a step closer and lower my voice so he can’t brush me off. “Listen. I wouldn’t trust anyone else to marry my sister, not Stefan, not even Matt.” I swallow quickly and say it like I rehearsed a dozen times, before I lose my nerve. “And there’s no one I’d be prouder to call my brother.”
His lips go hard and his eyes brighten to an almost painful intensity, like they sometimes do when somebody’s too nice to him. I tense my shoulders and stand firm, determined not to let him try to dilute what I said by riling me up or changing the subject.
Instead he clears his throat quickly and looks away, his jaw flexing once.
“Yeah, well, you may want to wipe the ink back off that stamp of approval. I haven’t had the best luck with women, or with family.”
I follow his gaze and see that Cali’s joined the group in the line for Starbucks, and as I watch she says something and bumps Ric with her shoulder, and he laughs. Stefan’s chin tips up in one of his gently amused faces, and then he touches his hand to Caroline’s back, ushering her forward as the line moves. Elena’s still watching us, and when she smiles at Damon, I can sense some of the tension easing out of him.
“You know, I didn’t use to think I had much luck with family or women, either,” I tell my new brother, my eyes still on the group at the Starbucks as a smile starts to spread across my face. “But maybe all we really needed was time.
Chapter 27: Silent Answers
Three Months Later
DAMON
Of the many things I would do for Elena Gilbert, I never expected department store shopping to crop up on the list.
But as she skids around the corner, dark eyes shining happily and her arms full of electronic gun-shaped objects, it’s not hard to see how I ended up here.
“Okay,” she says, proffering one of the blocky plastic guns. I take it gingerly. “It’s super-duper easy. When you see something you want, you scan the barcode and it automatically loads it into our wedding registry list.” She holds her gun in a two-handed grip in front of her suddenly serious face, glancing furtively around before she abruptly spins, Charlie’s Angels style, and blasts the bar code of an innocent paper towel stand. Her gun registers the hit with an anti-climactic little meedle-meep.
She tosses her hair over her shoulder and looks expectantly at me. I holster my bar code gun in the back of my pants and slow clap for a long minute, giving her a wink.
“Remind me again why you need my help, Annie Oakley?” She scrunches her nose cutely and rolls her eyes, head dropping back in frustration with her long ponytail swishing right above the lush curve of her bottom.
“Da-mon. The bride does not register for the wedding alone. That has to be some kind of terrible omen.”
I move one step closer and take her lightly by the hips. “Yes, but then the bride gets to decorate the house with exactly what she wants. How is this not a good thing? Come on, Elena, I’ve bought dozens of refrigerators and toasters and shit. Trust me, they’re all pretty much the same.”
Elena turns with a sigh and leans back against my chest as she begins to distractedly peruse all the different types of dishware. “Yeah, but these are different. Just think, in sixty or a hundred years or whatever, we’ll look back and get sentimental about the kind of plates we had when we first got married.”
“Okay, but they still have a better selection online. And then we could do it…naked.” I roll the word silkily off my tongue with a flirty little flare of my eyes, but instead of smiling, Elena glances down, flushing slightly.
“I know,” she says quietly. “It’s just that I’ve dreamed about this ever since I saw people with these scanner guns when I was a little girl. It’s like magic. You just point it at a tiny piece of the future, and you pull the trigger and it’s like KAZAM! You just…get it. People that we love buy it and they bring it to us on a day when I get to kiss you in front of everybody we know and say that I did it. I found The One.” She looks down, toying with the gun. “And if that’s silly…” She shrugs one shoulder. “Then I’m silly.”
I just stare for a moment, because of course Elena would find something so incredible in the ordinary act of buying household crap, and of course I would stick my foot in it and be a total asshat when she’s counting on me to be one half of her dream of the future.
I duck my head, kissing her slowly and sweetly, trying to show her without words that I care about our future too. The kiss starts as an apology, but she feels so good that it seems like she’s making it up to me instead of the other way around.
By the time I pull away, she’s smiling again. I relax a little, pointing my gun at the button on her jeans, and frowning with concentration as I squeeze the trigger and a little red line appears, but no beep sounds.
“I think mine’s broken,” I announce.
She’s still grinning even as she rolls her eyes. “Oh really?”
“I’m pointing it at exactly what I want and it’s not working.” I pout. “Magic hates me.”
“No surprises there,” she says dryly, her eyes heating as they skim down the long lines of my body. “Just give me one minute, okay?” Elena zips around the aisles, dangerously close to blurring and she’s back less than three minutes later. “Done.”
My eyes narrow. I grab her gun and press the back arrow, checking her selections on its tiny screen. “All you want is a coffee maker, what looks like a seriously mismatched selection of mugs and an economy-sized bottle of Bayer Aspirin?”
She looks up at me, her eyes glowing the soothing color of hot cocoa, and nods hopefully.
I chuckle and sling an arm around her. “Whatever you say, sweetheart.”
She points her gun right at the fly of my jeans, running the red line of the laser down the denim with a lazy thoroughness that makes me think of zipper teeth falling open.
“Mmm,” she hums throatily. “Maybe it is broken.”
My breath snags and I shake my head slightly to try to clear it. Only Elena could make a price scanner feel like foreplay.
She peeks up at me, her cheeks faintly flushed the way they only get when she’s thinking about something dirty. “Wanna get out of here?”
I nod immediately, my mouth too dry to be trusted with words. I gather the two electronic guns and tip my head toward the parking lot. Elena bites her lip in a way that immediately makes my pants two sizes too tight, then turns and heads toward the exit, hips swaying just a little extra in the rhythm that she damn well knows is going to put me in a hurry.
I return the registry price scanner in record time and shove out through the glass doors into the clear winter sunshine. I hop in the Camaro, toss something into the backseat, and Elena reaches over and traces one finger up the seam of my jeans.
“Careful, gorgeous,” I warn her. “I think we’ve already played the game of who can get who hotter before we have to pull over, and I believe I won.”
Her eyes stray t
o the chip in my driver’s side window and she grins. “I don’t know, I kind of feel like I won.” She looks up at the road, frowning. “Hey, this isn’t the way to our house.”
Ric’s waiting for me at our house right now, so I’d rather not go back there, but I don’t tell her that. Because this afternoon seems like a perfect time for the surprise I set up a while back.
“Nope.”
Elena scowls at my one-word answer and toys threateningly with the lowest button on my shirt. “Where are we going?”
“I’ll never talk,” I swear, and she smiles wickedly and pops the button open.
It’s a two-mile drive to our destination and she nearly tortures the entire surprise out of me four different ways by the time we get there. I park and practically leap out of the car, tugging the hem of my shirt a little lower than normal because the front of my pants is in desperate need of camouflage if I don’t want to be arrested for demonstrating to the entire world how eager I am to spend some one-on-one time with my fiancé.
Elena comes around the hood and takes my hand, smoothing her hair with a cough that does nothing to hide the flush in her cheeks.
“A florist? I mean, that’s really sweet of you, but I thought maybe, erm…” She clears her throat. “Maybe we could stop by the house first and do errands later?”
I grin and bring our clasped hands up to drop a kiss onto the knuckle of her third finger. “Patience is a virtue, Elena.”
“A virtue neither of us has,” I hear her grumble under her breath as I push through the door into the florist shop. It’s thankfully empty of other customers, the owner behind the counter looking up with a practiced smile.
She drops her pencil and her smile expands to a grin. “Damon! And this must be Elena…” she practically purrs.
“Hey, Lainie,” I greet, trying to look nervous. She beams, hugging a bewildered Elena quickly before she sashays toward the front door, flipping the Open sign to read Closed before she slips through.
“Just text me!” Lainie says with a cheerful wave, and then locks the door behind her.
“Damon!” Elena shakes her head, folding her arms. “Did you seriously exile that woman from her own florist shop?”
“It was for a good cause,” I tell her as I lead her into the back. Once we push through the door, we’re surrounded by coolers of flowers and several racks of fresh ones waiting to be arranged, all in a ring around a central steel working table.
“Well, yes,” she says, glancing away a little guiltily. “But still…”
“Not that,” I protest, hooking a finger into her belt and pulling her toward me. “Jeez, get your mind out of the gutter, Gilbert. I was just thinking we needed to pick a new flower.”
My agile fingers flick open the button on her jeans and the zipper follows before she manages to say, “Flower?”
“We’re vampires,” I explain. “So what’s going to happen if we outlive all your favorite species or move to a place where we can’t get daffodils or roses? I thought we should probably make some new memories with different kinds of flowers.” I lower myself to one knee before her. “Just in case.”
I don’t give a shit what flowers I buy her in the future, if they are daffodils to remind her of our first florist-shop romp, or roses to look back on those last bittersweet moments before the boarding house burned. It’s just…the whole world looks different since I met Elena.
There’s a street corner in Mystic Falls where I challenged her to a race back when Ric had her jogging every morning, and she nailed me in the ear with a dirt clod when I teased her for losing. Then there’s the Pizza Hut just off the Whitmore campus where I made her laugh so loudly that she snorted Root Beer through her nose.
There are a hundred otherwise ordinary places that make me smile now, and I intend to return the favor, to attach happiness to as many small things as I can for her.
I should have realized, in the store, that she was trying to do the same thing with the wedding registry. I was just momentarily distracted by the annoyance of shopping and now I’m determined to make it up to her.
I nudge her jeans aside and brush my lips across the smooth skin of her stomach, her abs clenching beautifully below the hem of her shirt. I smile, lowering the zipper on the inside of her knee-high boots.
The sound is loud and almost unbearably sexy in the small room, especially when I hear Elena swallow. She says, a little breathlessly, “But the owner didn’t look compelled… Did you pay her off?”
“I claimed I wanted a memorable place to propose to you,” I explain, removing one boot and steadying Elena as I pull her sock off after it. Her bare toes curl cutely when they touch the cold floor and I can’t resist a small kiss to the inside of her jean-clad knee before I turn my attention to the other boot.
Elena’s fingers settle into my hair, her nails raking over my scalp in a way that sends sensation dancing over every inch of my skin.
“Didn’t your ring kind of blow that cover story?” she wants to know, and one corner of my mouth tips up as I glance down at my left hand. The steely sheen of my new ring greets me: my wedding band that Elena insisted I start wearing immediately and which Ric has been snickeringly referring to as my Man-gagement ring.
It’s tungsten, one of the hardest metals found on earth, and it's shiny and enigmatic on the outside, but with Elena’s name engraved on the inside because I like the way it feels against my skin. I had to move my daylight ring to my right hand, which should have felt strange after so many decades on my left, but in the end, I didn’t mind at all.
I take my time removing Elena’s second boot, because I like to listen to her breathing go rough at the sound of the zipper.
“I told the owner it was my promise ring.”
Elena’s distracted, so it takes a second before that sinks in and she gasps with laughter. “You didn’t!”
I stand in one smooth movement and flatten my palms along her hips, following the curves down until my fingers are all nuzzled inside her tight jeans and I start to slowly peel them off.
“I did,” I vow and she smiles.
“I can’t believe you set all this up just for me,” she says.
I just shrug and kiss her playfully while she shimmies and wriggles, trying to kick her jeans off her ankles. Just before she’s finished, I let my fingertips sneak under the waistband of her panties, ducking my head into her neck to whisper against her skin, “Do you mind being naked in a public place?”
Her answer sounds more like a squeak than a word and my skin heats urgently in response. With a quick flick of my fingers and a nearly inaudible sound, lace and silk hits the floor of the florist shop.
I lift Elena onto the worktable and she flinches as her bare bottom touches metal, chilled from all the closed, glass-fronted coolers surrounding us.
I steal one soft kiss from her lips. “You okay?” I whisper, and she nods, leaning away from me just enough to pull her shirt off over her head.
My eyes dilate as I take in the sight of her: miles of smooth skin, her toned thighs flexing as they press restlessly together and the fragile lace edge of her demi-bra tormenting me with the memory of everything it is concealing.
The nape of her neck is soft in my hand and I support her weight as I lower her back to lie on the table. My lips lay a kiss just above the center of her bra, then over her belly button. The shop is as quiet and watchful as a cathedral as I slide my palms down her legs, my thumbs rubbing comforting sweeps against her inner thighs as a moan rakes its way up her throat.
“Damon, please…”
I catch her hands and kiss both palms, and as much as I want to give her exactly what we both want, I need to rein it in a step because today isn’t just about the way sex is always incandescently hot between us. Reluctantly, I rise and move away from her, surveying the flowers surrounding us until I find an orchid, the petals exotically lush. Elena’s eyes follow me fondly as I return and lay the flower on her stomach.
She smiles and reaches for m
e, but she’s relaxed and slow and I slip out of her grasp long enough to find a white lily, open like an explosion, that I lay on the dark sweep of her hair.
This time she catches me with one hand on my hip, her thumb sneaking under the edge of my un-tucked shirt to trace the diagonal cut of my muscle above my hipbone.
“Where are you going?” She pouts.
“You need to pick a flower,” I remind her. “We’re supposed to be making new memories here for you to get all sentimental about.”
“I hate flowers,” she announces, surging up to a sitting position with her legs curled around to her side so the flowers fall to the table beneath her. Wearing only her ornate bra, she looks like some kind of Greek goddess, displaced from her altar into a strange modern setting. I blink, unable to stop staring, and Elena takes advantage of my momentary helplessness to burst most of the buttons on my shirt and yank it back down off my arms, tossing it triumphantly into a corner. I turn my head to watch its fall, amused.
The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) Page 37
