The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (53 page)

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 me, 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.

“Apparently you hate shirts, too.”

She grins and nods.

I pretend to turn back toward the coolers just to see what she’ll do. “Maybe just an iris or something...” I test and feel her fingers lock onto the waistband of my jeans before I’m even finished with the sentence.

Once my jeans are gone, I’m utterly lost and
shit
it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I had a whole plan with the flowers and this was supposed to be romantic, especially now that I rushed her through registering for wedding gifts, and I’m totally going to have to take her back to that store and do it all over again or all she will have to unwrap at the wedding will be a coffeemaker and I’ll be the world’s biggest jerk of a husband.

“Hey,” I say softly, pushing my fingers into her hair and tilting her face up so I can see her, her eyes dilated with the single-minded focus she always gets in bed, her beautiful lips wet and a little swollen from kissing me earlier. “I love you.”

Her face softens. “I know,” she whispers, her hand sliding up my jaw, the band of her engagement ring cool and comforting against my cheek. “Wanna see how much I love you back?”

I try to wait, I really do.

But then she shifts in the way she knows I love best and with a groan, I give up and move,
treating her to exactly what she wants while my fingers knot in her hair and my head drops to her shoulder. She gasps and her arms flex tight around me and
fuck,
it’s happening again.

More and more lately, this feeling catches me by surprise in the first moment when we’re together like this. It clamps my throat closed even as something in my chest loosens and it feels like the second when I left the fire of the Augustines’ prison behind and the shadowed walls of the barn surrounded me, cool and solid.

Safe.

It catches me off guard every single time, but Elena never seems to mind when I go still and quiet. She just wraps her arms around my back and lays her head on my shoulder even as mine rests on hers, her lips tracing slow, secret kisses against my bare skin until the urgency of my desire overwhelms the part of me that’s struck dumb that I’m here with her, that we’re okay. That no one is trying to hurt us.

When her small hand drifts down my back and settles at the base of my spine, it wrings a moan from low in my throat and after that, I don’t even remember the word “romance.” All I know is that the scent of her is lighting up the center of my brain and no matter how closely I gather her to my body, some dark instinct has me moving fiercely, demandingly, as her cries get all tangled up together and I forget about everything but this moment with the woman I love.

The metal of the table is warm beneath my hands when I notice it again, only now Elena and I are lying on its surface together. I don’t realize until her nails tickle slowly down my spine that all my muscles are still wrapped breaking-taut against my bones. With a puff of air, I release them and sprawl gracelessly on top of her.

Elena just hums happily and hugs me with both her arms and her legs. “I think we smashed the flowers,” she says, her syllables lazy like her tongue doesn’t quite remember how to do its job yet.

I consider this.

“You hate flowers,” I say after a while, and she giggles.

“I love flowers. I just said that so you’d have sex with me.”

I try to work up a convincing scowl, but it’s pretty well wasted because I can’t lift my head enough for her to see it.

“Soon,” she says happily, “we’re going to have married people sex.”

With a great effort, I shift my weight to the side on the narrow table so I won’t be crushing her. “Well,” I say philosophically, “you’d better practice lying back and thinking of England then.”

She pinches my side but I don’t have enough energy to react.