posed, was flushed with
blood. His eyes dropped to watch Elena automatically massaging her
wrists. She could feel pins and needles now: she was getting back some
circulation. Once he’d looked away, he couldn’t seem to look her in the
eye again.
Eye contact. All right. Elena recognized a weapon, groping for a
chair and finding the bed unexpectedly close behind her. She didn’t have
many weapons right now; and she needed to use all of them.
She sat, giving in to the weakness in her body, but she kept her
eyes on Damon’s face. His mouth was swollen. And that was…unfair.
Damon’s pout was a part of his most basic artillery. He had always had
the most beautiful mouth she’d ever seen on anyone, man or woman.
The mouth, the hair, the half-drooping lids, the heavy lashes, the
delicacy of his jawline…unfair, even to someone like Elena, who’d long
ago gotten past interest in a person because of some accident of beauty.
But she’d never seen that mouth swollen, the perfect hair
disordered, the eyelashes trembling because he was looking everywhere
except at her and trying not to show it.
“Was that… what you’ve been thinking about while you’ve been
refusing to talk to me?” she asked, and her voice was almost steady.
Damon’s sudden stillness was perfection like all his other