The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (13 page)

He turns me gently and tips my head back to rinse my hair, but I open my eyes before the soap is all gone, impatient to see him.

“But the fog couldn’t have been because of your time with the Augustines,” I argue. “Because I can do it, too.”

Damon smiles. “’Cause you’re a badass,” he singsongs, and drops a kiss onto the tip of my nose.

I can’t hold back a grin, the warmth of pride singing up through my chest. “Do you think it came through your blood?” My fingers trace the edge of his pectoral muscle as he smoothes conditioner through my hair. “Because you’re my sire?”

“No idea,” he says. “I’ve never seen anyone else do it. But until I met Sage, I didn’t know vampires could dreamwalk, either. I think there’s probably a lot of shit we could do if we were taught.”

“I wonder if Bonnie’s old grimoires could give us any clues.” I link my hands behind Damon’s slim waist, enjoying the sensation of him rinsing water through my hair.

“Well, next time we have a few free weeks for dusty book research again, have at it.” He smirks. “You can write the eBook edition of
Vampire Tricks for Dummies
.”

I sigh. “That doesn’t help us now, though. The Augustines have unknown power and resources and we don’t have the first clue of where to start looking for them. Even if their laboratory is on Whitmore campus, that wouldn’t help us identify all the members, or figure out how to neutralize them.”

He steps back, picking up the bar of soap and starting to lather his chest. My eyes are drawn downward, watching the circles of lather appear over his muscles in a way that invariably reminds me of my eighteenth birthday, when he strolled naked into the living room of the boarding house just to get a rise out of me. Which of course, he did.

“Oh, I’ve been looking plenty. I’m just not finding much,” Damon says, and I’m distracted enough that it takes a second for his words to register.

“Wait, you’ve what?” I frown.

He tosses me the bar of soap and I catch it as he turns his back expectantly.

“You’re spoiled, you know that?” I tell him, a smile tugging at my lips despite the seriousness of the situation.

“Think of it like a last meal. Because once I tell you how I’ve been looking for the Augustines, my chances of getting my back washed by a pretty girl are going to go straight to the firing squad.”

I pinch his taut bottom. “You’re going to be having that last meal sooner rather than later if you have any other girls washing your back.”

He chuckles, deep and low, as I begin to smooth the soap over his wide shoulders. “
That’s
what you took away from that statement?”

I sigh. “I was trying to ignore the other part as long as possible. Let me guess, you’ve been leaving a trail of wounded vampires like breadcrumbs to lure in the Augustines.”

“Hmm,” he murmurs, his eyes a deep splash of blue as he peeks back over his shoulder at me. “I like the way you think. But no. We got too far away for me to send the raven back and forth, so I started using something a little bigger.”

“Wait,
people
? But who?”

Damon reaches down and retrieves the razor off the edge of the tub, jokingly flicking it up and over the shower curtain so it’s safely out of reach before he turns back to me.

“Pretty much anybody I can get my hands on,” he says. “At every gas station and truck stop between here and Mystic Falls, I’ve picked up a couple to compel. They’ve searched the entire Whitmore campus and other than some bizarre but unhelpful documents in Maxfield’s office, they’ve found nothing. If the Augustines have any labs or dungeons or member lists, they’re someplace else.”

“You compelled someone to break into Maxfield’s office?” My eyes go wide.

“Yeah, and if you think it’s easy to talk a compelled person through picking a lock, over the phone, with inadequate tools, then you’re welcome to take on the next round.”

“Damon…” I look down and pinch the bridge of my nose, shaking my head as I step a little further out of the water. “You can’t just send people away from their lives. They miss work, people look for them. What if they had kids waiting at home, for God’s sake?”

“Then they should have gotten a sitter before running to the Gas ‘N’ Go.” Damon ducks his head to catch my gaze. “Elena. We’ve got to find the Augustines before they find us. Do you get that?”

I close my eyes, and all I can see is flames. I was so focused on Damon, on getting us out of the boarding house, that the first time I really heard the screams of the dying vampires was in my dreams. He’s right. We can’t let them find us.

“Yes,” I murmur, looking up in time to see his lashes flare in surprise. “I get that. But they’re
people
, Damon. You can’t just use them like that.”

His expression hardens. “I’d use priests, drone planes, and trained bears if I had to. We’ve got to finish this before they nab one of us, or worse, Silas. If they jackhammered him out of his portable prison, he’d be only too happy to help them eradicate vampires.”

My hands clench and I fight the urge to pound them against the tile walls. I’ll only break something the poor hotel people have to fix, and they don’t need that hassle. Besides, Damon shouldn’t have to pay the bill for me to throw a temper tantrum because of something I can’t change.

“I hate this,” I whisper. “I don’t want our lives to be like this.”

I’m staring down at our bare feet, but I feel his fingers curl gently around the back of my neck, urging me closer.

“I know,” he says quietly, in that voice I swear he saves just for me. “I’m sorry.”

I catch my breath and take a quick step forward, my arms tightening around his back even as his envelop me. I can’t take it when he apologizes, because it takes so much pain to pull those words from my flippant boyfriend. “Don’t be sorry,” I tell him fiercely. “This isn’t your fault.”

I’m braced for him to argue, but he sighs instead and I know he’s thinking about the Augustines in the fifties, and how he managed to miss one in his mission for revenge.

“What if I paid them?” he asks. “Make sure they don’t have kids and give them a pocketful of cash for a couple days of playing super spies?” He snorts. “Shit, if I told them it was for a reality show, they’d probably do it for free.”

I pull my head back, furrowing my brow. “You’d do that? You’d pay them instead of just ordering them to help?”

His shoulder twitches in half a shrug. “It’s not that hard. I’m still erasing their memories, though.”

My lips purse suspiciously, but warmth is spreading all through my chest. It wasn’t that long ago that he would have blown up the second I questioned his methods, and we both would have stormed off angry. A compromise seems too easy.

“That would be good,” I say cautiously. “Better, anyway.”

He presses a soft kiss to my forehead and reaches over to turn off the water. “Let’s go to bed.”

I groan. “Don’t even tell me. We have to get up in like an hour, don’t we?”

“Three,” he corrects, passing me a towel. “Because a certain insatiable siren kept me up
all day long.
”

I point at him, narrowing my eyes. “Hey, don’t blame me. A certain somebody was parading around without his shirt on, and he got exactly what was coming to him.”

He spreads his arms in all his wet, naked glory. “What, a man can’t undress in his own hotel room without being attacked? I thought this was a free country.”

“If I recall, you attacked me the second time,” I point out with a saucy smile, bending to dry my legs.

“Bows,” he groans, scrubbing a towel carelessly over his head so his inky hair stands up in beautifully spiky disarray. “How in God’s name am I supposed to control myself when you put on panties with those tiny bows on them?”

I laugh, snapping my towel at him. “Damon, pretty much all panties have bows. You ought to be used to it by now.”

“There was lace,” he says, looking disgruntled and a little scruffy because I distracted him before he could get around to shaving the dark hint of stubble gracing his jaw, and now it looks way too sexy to part with. I make a mental note to hide his razor. “It wasn’t fair.”

I roll my eyes. “Poor baby.”

His eyes narrow, and I jump for the door of the bathroom a split second before he reaches for me. I laugh because I can already sense him behind me as I pretend to make my escape, and I’m not running very fast at all.

Our playful chase ends up lasting two rounds around the hotel room and then through a good five minutes of me trying to put on pajamas while Damon tries to take them right back off again.

He keeps me giggling until I am lightheaded, but by the time we are snuggled into bed together and the lights are off, the melancholy has started to creep in again.

In a short few hours, we’re going to be stuck in the car, driving all night again on random roads so that the Augustines won’t have a chance to track us. And after tonight we’ll do it again and again and again because we have no leads and I won’t risk anyone as bait to try to lure them in. And even if we took them by surprise, I’m afraid we couldn’t win.

I nuzzle my face into Damon’s chest.

“Stop brooding,” he murmurs.

“Distract me then,” I tell him, snuggling against the warmth of his bare skin. “Tell me something happy.”

“Once upon a time there was a pony that ate nothing but rainbows and farted out Lucky Charms,” he begins, and I poke him in the side.

“
Happy
, Damon, not gross.”

“Mmm,” he grumbles. “I’m a darkly dangerous vampire. I don’t know so many happy stories.”

“You knew poetry,” I tease, recalling his drunken phone call when I was at Whitmore.

So many of the nights I was up there, I fell asleep to the velvet murmur of his voice over the phone. It makes me sad suddenly, thinking that he must have had to go to sleep alone, with only the sound of my breathing over the line to keep him company.

“Hey, you never told me your favorite day from this summer,” I remember.

“Well, there was red panty day a
nd black panty day…” he debates. “And no panty day. Always a fan favorite.” He pats my bottom and smiles.

I pull my head back, eyeing him suspiciously. He’s deflecting. Why wouldn’t he want to tell me his favorite memory?

I prop my chin on his chest and try to look as sad as I was feeling a moment ago. “Please?” I say softly, and he blinks.

“Damn it, Elena, that’s cheating,” he grouches and I try to hold back a giggle.

“I showed you mine…”

“Yours wasn’t embarrassing,” he says, and now I’m even more interested.

“Unless you count you and Jeremy’s infantile behavior as embarrassing,” I say, “which I obviously do.”

Instead of rising to the bait, he closes his eyes and traces the waistband of my shorts with his middle finger. “Tick tock, Elena. We don’t get much time to sleep today.”

I prop my chin on the back of my hand and watch him. There’s no way I can sleep now, wondering what on earth we did this summer that Damon Salvatore would find embarrassing.

“I don’t want to go to sleep worrying about the Augustines,” I whisper. It’s true, even if it is the teensiest bit self-serving.

He opens one eye. Narrowly.

I wait.

“Promise not to laugh,” he says.

I roll my eyes. “Damon, I love you. Why would I laugh at something that makes you happy?”