The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (52 page)

I can feel the prickly heat of a flush climbing up my neck, but I just cross my arms and wait, refusing to give him the reaction he’s fishing for.

This only seems to alarm him.

“Do not tell me you wrecked the Camaro in a fiery explosion while I was gone,” he orders with a glare that clearly promises missing and otherwise mangled limbs.

“No, it’s still in storage because I thought it would be safer there, at least until we tracked down all the Augustines.”

“Okay, then we’re good,” he says, his eyes already skating away from me.

I think that’s going to be it, but then he claps me firmly on the shoulder and my throat closes up tight as I read the motion loud and clear.

Damon Salvatore isn’t great with forgiveness, but when he gives it, it feels a lot like this: his hard palm against my shoulder blade for one extra moment before he moves away.

But no way, I owe him better than that.

“Damon…”

“Jeremy….” he whines back.

Cali crosses her arms. “He’s trying to apologize to you, jackhole. The least you could do is let him talk.”

“Oh, apologize?” Damon says innocently, and I nearly flinch. “You mean for doing something incredibly stupid that nearly got all three of us killed?”

“Yes,” I make myself say. “It was incredibly stupid to leave the hotel alone, on foot, with no plan.”

Damon takes a quick step back and looks to the left, then to the right, eyes narrowed.

Cali stiffens, following his gaze, but Elena just rolls her eyes, a long-suffering smile twitching at the edges of her lips.

“What?” I ask warily.

“Just waiting for Klaus to show up in his Hannah Montana costume with a Candy Gram,” Damon says. “It’s been that kind of day.”

Elena laughs and pokes him in the side. “It’s a good day. That’s why you’re so suspicious. Don’t worry,” she says, tucking her arm into his and beaming up at him. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Yeah, you two are probably going to hate me for this.” I wince. “But that wasn’t what I wanted to say either.”

Elena turns her head and leaves a kiss on Damon’s shoulder before she gives him a gentle push toward me. “You guys go ahead. Cali and I were hoping to get a chance to talk anyway.”

“About organic gardening,” Cali says helpfully. “And Proposition 32.” When Damon still shows no sign of moving, she adds, “And what kind of tampon applicators we prefer.”

Damon folds his arms and flares his eyes. “Wrong species, darlin’. But if I recall, Elena used to buy plastic applicator, name brand. You? Betting you’re a budget shopper, even when it comes to the up close and personal items.” He tips his head, raking her with his gaze as he pretends to consider. “As for materials…”

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.

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 to 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.