A cold frisson went down Elena’s back, the most delicate of shivers. Damon didn’t ask for kisses.
This wasn’t right.
“No,” she whispered.
“Just one.”
“I’m not going to kiss you, Damon.”
“Not me. Him.” Damon denoted “him” with a tilt of his head toward Matt. “A kiss between you and your former knight.”
“You want what?” Matt’s eyes snapped open and he got the words out explosively before Elena could open her mouth.
“You’d like it,” Damon’s voice had dropped to its softest, most insinuating tones. “You’d like to kiss her. And there’s no one to stop you.”
“Damon.” Matt struggled up out of Elena’s arms. He seemed, if not entirely recovered, perhaps eighty percent of the way there, but Elena could hear his heart laboring. Elena wondered how long he’d lain feigning unconsciousness to get his strength back. “The last thing I knew you were trying to kill me. That doesn’t exactly get you on my good side. Second, people just don’t go around kissing girls because they’re pretty or their boyfriend takes a day off.”
“Don’t they?” Damon hiked an eyebrow in surprise. “I do.”
Matt just shook his head, dazed. He seemed to be trying to keep one idea fixed in his mind. “Will you move your car so we can leave?” he said.
Elena felt as if she were watching Matt from very far away; and as if he was caged somewhere with a tiger and didn’t know it. The clearing had become a very beautiful, wild, and dangerous place, and Matt didn’t know that either. Besides, she thought with concern, he’s making himself stand up. We need to leave — and quickly, before Damon does anything else to him.
But what was the real way out?
What was Damon’s real agenda?
“You can go,” Damon said. “As soon as she kisses you. Or you kiss her,” he added, as if making a concession.
Slowly, as if he realized what it was going to mean, Matt looked at Elena and then back at Damon. Elena tried to communicate silently with him, but Matt wasn’t in the mood. He looked Damon in the face and said, “No way.”
Shrugging, as if to say,I did everything I could, Damon lifted the shaggy pine rod“No,” cried Elena. “Damon, I’ll do it.”
Damon smiled the smile and held it for a moment, until Elena looked away and went to Matt. His face was still pale, cool. Elena leaned her cheek against his and said almost soundlessly into his ear, “Matt, I’ve dealt with Damon before. And you can’t just defy him. Let’s play along — for now. Then maybe we can get away.” And then she made herself say, “For me? Please?”
The truth was that she knew too much about stubborn males. Too much about how to manipulate them. It was a trait she’d come to hate, but right now she was too busy trying to think of ways to save Matt’s life to debate the ethics of pressuring him.
She wished it were Meredith or Bonnie instead of Matt. Not that she would wish such pain on anyone, but Meredith would be coming up with Plans C and D even as Elena came up with A and B. And Bonnie would already have lifted tear-filled, heart-melting brown eyes to Damon….
Suddenly Elena thought of the single red flash she’d seen under the Ray-Bans, and she changed her mind. She wasn’t sure she wanted Bonnie around Damon now.
Of all of the guys she’d known, Damon had been the only one Elena couldn’t break.
Oh, Matt was stubborn, and Stefan could be impossible sometimes. But they both had brightly colored buttons somewhere inside them, labeled PUSH ME, and you just had to fiddle with the mechanism a little — okay, sometimes more than a little — and eventually even the most challenging male could be mastered.
Except one…
“All right, kiddies, enough time out.”
Elena felt Matt pulled from her arms and held up — she didn’t know by what, but he was standing. Something held him in place, upright, and she knew it wasn’t his muscles.
“So where were we?” Damon was walking back and forth, with the Virginia pine branch in his right hand, tapping it on his left palm. “Oh, that’s right ”—as if making a great discovery—“the girl and the stalwart knight are going to kiss.”
In Stefan’s room, Bonnie said, “For the last time, Meredith, did you find a backup file for Stefan’s note or not?”
“No,” Meredith said in a flat voice. But just as Bonnie was about to collapse again, Meredith said, “I found a different note completely. A letter, really.”
“A different note? What does it say?”
“Can you stand up at all? Because I think you’d better have a look at this.”
Bonnie, who had only just gotten back her breath, managed to hobble over to the computer.
She read the document on the screen — complete except for what seemed to be its final words, and gasped.
“Damon did something to Stefan!” she said, and felt her heart plummet and all her internal organs follow it. So Elena had been wrong. Damon was evil, through and through. By now, Stefan might even be…
“Dead,” Meredith said, her mind obviously following the same track that Bonnie’s had taken. She lifted dark eyes to Bonnie’s. Bonnie knew that her own eyes were wet. “How long,” Meredith asked, “has it been since you called Elena or Matt?”
“I don’t know; I don’t know what time it is. But I called twice after we left Caroline’s house and once at Isobel’s; and when I’ve tried after that, I either get a message that their mailboxes are full or it won’t connect at all.”
“That’s about exactly what I’ve gotten. If they went near the Old Wood — well, you know what it does to phone reception.”
“And now, even if they come out of the woods, we can’t leave them a message because we’ve filled up their voice mail—”
“E-mail,” Meredith said. “Good old e-mail; we can use that to send Elena a message.”
“Yes!” Bonnie punched the air. Then she deflated. She hesitated for an instant and then almost whispered, “No.” Words from Stefan’s real note kept echoing in her mind: I trust Matt’s instinctive protectiveness for you, Meredith’s judgment, and Bonnie’s intuition. Tell them to remember that.
“You can’t tell her what Damon’s done,” she said, even as Meredith began busily typing. “She probably already knows — and if she doesn’t, it’ll just make more trouble. She’s with Damon.”
“Matt told you that?”
“No. But Matt was out of his mind with pain.”
“Couldn’t it have been from those — bugs?” Meredith looked down at her ankle where several red welts still showed on the smooth olive flesh.
“It could be, but it wasn’t. It didn’t feel like the trees, either. It was just…pure pain. And I don’t know, not for certain, how I know that it’s Damon doing it. I just — know.”
She saw Meredith’s eyes unfocus and knew that she was thinking about Stefan’s words, too. “Well, my judgment tells me to trust you,” she said. “By the way, Stefan spells ‘judgment’ the preferred American way,” she added. “Damon spells it with ane. That may have been what was bothering Matt.”
“As if Stefan would really leave Elena alone with everything that’s been going on,” Bonnie said indignantly.
“Well, Damon fooled all of us and made us think so,” Meredith pointed out. Meredith tended to point out things like that.
Bonnie started suddenly. “I wonder if he stole the money?”
