Chapter 14: Hope Floats

DAMON

I lean back in my chair and kick my feet up on the rails of the porch. This lake house thing isn't so bad. Once I figure out a way to soundproof log walls, we'll be in business. It doesn't have the open-air charm of my villa in Italy, but Cinque Terre has gotten busy in the last fifty years and even with my private stretch of beach, the air isn't as un-laden of sound as it once was.

I love that place. The tiny vineyard that produces grapes that are just a hint too bitter to sell to the major vintners, but that I've acquired a very specific taste for over the years. The raised marble tub that looks out onto the second floor balcony, with a view of the ocean filtered through the flowering vines that drape the terrace. It's exactly to my taste and no one but Elena and the caretakers have ever been in the place and gotten to keep the memory.

Still it might be time to sell the villa, trade it in on something less crowded. Maybe buy an island, like all the stars do. Given the rash of box-office crashes lately, it seems like there ought to be a foreclosure on an island. Somewhere the sun still glitters on gin-clear water and all that washes up on shore are coconut husks and the scraps of Elena's bathing suit.

The door to the lake house closes and bare footsteps whisper across the wide planks of the deck. I don't look up and my brother doesn't speak, looking out across the lake with me. He doesn't own property anywhere but Chicago, that anachronistic gravestone of an apartment. I wonder what other lakes and oceans he sees in this view.

Ric would have loved an island. He'd examine every inch of it like Dora the fucking Explorer, taking pictures of all the weird bugs and animals he could find. When it got dark, he'd get out a grin and a chainsaw and help me pile up a bonfire on the beach. We'd pass out eventually and I'd drag his snoring ass up onto the dry sand when the tide came in, because he sleeps like a corpse when he's drunk.

"Tell me again how an activity that involves the girls wearing less clothes is going to help us win this bet?" Stefan's sardonic tone drops like a wet blanket on my vision of salt-blue flames dancing along driftwood.

I shoot him a sidelong glance and finish my beer. "I admit it sounded like a lot better plan before you showed up in plaid. For fuck's sake, Stefan, are you swimming or hunting elk?"

"I don't usually wear swim trunks. These were the only ones I had."

"And what the hell were all those YouTube videos of kittens earlier? Are you trying to scare your balls into sounding a full retreat?"

He grins at me. "Never you mind, brother. Just give me room to work, and we'll have this bet behind us by nightfall. I've got page 6 of the New York Post queued up to read aloud to her tonight and if that doesn't work, I got my hands on an old DVD of Home Improvement, though I'm not even sure I want to know why that turns her on. If by some miracle none of that does the trick, I'm saving all the dirty stuff for Sunday."

I shake my head. "That girl is freaky, man. Good luck with that."

"You have no idea." He smiles out at the water.

I tip my empty beer bottle in his direction, conceding the point. She was enthusiastic but fairly vanilla when I was with her. She didn't even get off on the biting, like most girls do. Something tells me that is not the case now.

I shake the thought off like a bad smell and stand up. "Help me put those canoes in the water?"

He nods, flipping a beach towel over his shoulder. "You know, you don't have to just sit back and wait for me to win. You could do your part, take one for the team." He shrugs. "I mean, I know you've been off the market for a while now, so you're probably losing your touch." He hefts one of the canoes off the rack and gives me a straight-faced look of concern. "I could give you some pointers, if you want."

I smirk and snatch his towel off his shoulder, snapping it at his bare belly. "Stefan, with looks like these, you don't even need to flirt. Her 20/20 does all the work for me."

He grunts at the snap of the towel and carries his canoe toward the water over one shoulder, fumbling with something stuffed into the pocket of his giant swim trunks. "Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night, lazy ass."

I grab my canoe and follow. "You keep up with that attitude and I'm not even going to tell you the brilliant idea I came up with for spending our blank checks."

Stefan cocks an eyebrow at me, but then the girls come sauntering down the docks, giggling about something I didn't hear. Elena's wearing a lipstick-red bikini that could easily double as dental floss, and a big floppy hat with the ugliest fake flower between here and Iceland fastened to the front of it.

She peeks out from under the shaded brim and gives me a shy smile.

I smile back, letting her watch while I drink her in. I bend my head intimately toward her and skim my hand across the small of her back.

"Your boat, Miss Gilbert?" I smoothly turn her toward our canoe.

She blushes and her eyelashes sweep down.

I shift uncomfortably, the blood rising to Elena's cheeks making all mine head directly south. Blushing means she's thinking about something deliciously naughty and I am highly interested in whatever that might be.

I turn my back on my brother and brush a kiss across her shoulder, testing her smooth skin with just a hint of teeth.

Caroline swats me on the shoulder. "Keep your tongue in your mouth, Romeo. There's no way I'm letting you turn Elena all cross-eyed and bet-losing just because you took your shirt off and remembered your manners for the first time this century."

Elena clears her throat and shifts her weight as if testing her balance. I turn my head and give Caroline a look with eyes that are filling with a crimson warning. She glares and Stefan steps into my line of vision wearing his two-crease Disapproving Papa face.

"Shall we go?" Elena's voice is half an octave too high to pass for casual.

"As you wish," I murmur, because I know she loves The Princess Bride and I'm not above cheating a little to get what I want.

Caroline groans. "Cheap, Salvatore. Don't you even bring Westley into this."

"'Death cannot stop true love,'" Stefan quotes gently. "'It can only delay it a little while.'"

Caroline's eyes go soft, and she bites her lip. "Okay, you make a good Westley, though," she admits to her fiancé.

I have to stop breathing and hold my chest very, very still to keep from laughing. My brother is all too well-suited for this bet. But if he's going to be sappy, he might as well be sappy with a purpose. Otherwise it's just not worth putting up with that shit.

I turn away to hide my smile and that's when I see it.

That fucking unicorn. Safely strapped to the center bar on the canoe, facing pertly forward as if it wants to take in the view.

"What. In. The. Fuck," I grit out from between teeth that won't unclench.

I take a breath and try to remember how pissed Elena will be if I forcibly re-route the circulatory system of her best-undead-friend.

"Listen up, Clairol. You are three strikes past your limit on taunting me with My Little Emasculating Pony. If you don't want to have to beg Bonnie to re-animate the ashes of its cottony little corpse, you will take it out of my sight. Please, thank you, and get-a-fucking-move-on."

"Damon." Elena lays a light hand on my arm.

Caroline just laughs. "I'm a natural blonde, Damon, so don't even. And it wasn't me." She's beaming at my brother. "Stefan, did you do that?"

He shrugs and glances at his feet, looking nerdy as fuck with a self-deprecating smile and those optically assaultive plaid shorts. "Uni wanted to come on a boatride, too. He doesn't get out much."

In the interest of bet-winning and my incredible idea for what to do with the spoils of victory, I try to choke back the bile that rises to my throat, and the knee-jerk declaiming of any family relationship between the two of us.

Caroline gives Stefan a look that raises the temperature on the dock by about 10 degrees. Celsius.

I distract myself by fantasizing about Elena's blank check and the Jell-O wrestling fundraiser that she and Caroline are going to agree to star in as a result.

Caroline bends down and starts cooing at the unicorn at a pitch that makes my balls shrivel, and not even my vivid imagination can keep my tongue in check.

"You know Stef, Freud might shudder at the extent of your mommy issues, but he'd fully approve your choice of get-laid gifts. A squishy little horse to soften her up, with a phallic symbol growing out of its head as a handy reminder of the end game scenario." I give a low whistle between my teeth. "Full points for effort, brother."

Stefan reddens angrily but before the committee returns the Brow Crease rating of my latest witticism, Caroline's fist hits me with the force of a soccer-mom-mobile with a V8 upgrade to the engine.

Normally I double-check my footing before I piss off my future sister-in-law, but I forgot to brace myself this time and I'm 60% of the way to a personal introduction with the nearest body of water when Elena catches my arm and hauls me back onto the dock.

I blink at her in surprise as she steadies me before she gives a pressed-lip shake of her head to Caroline.

"Behave yourself," she admonishes her friend. "I want to go boating and I'm never going to get to do that with you and Damon trying to drown each other the whole time."

I turn back to my girlfriend and salve my irritation with the sparkle in her dark eyes, shaded by the floppy brim of her perfectly awful hat. I smile despite myself.

"Ready?"

She nods eagerly, as if I'm about to put her in a yacht instead of an old fiberglass canoe. No wonder she always gets exactly what she wants. A smile like that could start bidding wars at a klepto convention.

I take a knee so I can stabilize the non-unicorn-bearing canoe for her to climb onboard.

She giggles. "Really, Damon? You know I have supernaturally good balance now, right?"

"Canoes can't be trusted. And there are a shortage of perfect breasts in the world. It would be a shame to damage yours."

Caroline snorts. "She'd just fall in the water. I think her breasts would probably survive."

"That's his favorite Princess Bride quote," Stefan says. "He'd work it into a conversation with his tax accountant if he could."

The canoe wobbles as Elena takes a seat, and I refrain from pointing out the flaws in her supernatural balance.

Elena grimaces. "Tell me you haven't used that as a pick up line."

"Baby, when you have a body like this, you don't need to say a word."

"And yet you rarely shut up," Caroline says.

"Pull in the claws," I say. "You were the one who wanted a family vacation."

"Ugh, don't remind me."

Stefan chuckles, unfazed by the glare it nets him.

Caroline turns back to me and raises an eyebrow that's half-challenge, half-apology. "You killed my father," she quotes in an atrocious Spanish accent. "Prepare to die."

"Hey!" I raise my hands in protest. "I only almost killed your father."

Elena laughs. "This is so not a normal family vacation."

I hop in the canoe and push off the dock, determined to put some distance between me and that demonic unicorn. I paddle for a few minutes, propelling us further out into the mirror-smooth water of the lake, then glance around.

"What's the point of this again?" I ask Elena. "You just take the boat around in circles, looking at the same shit you can see from the dock?"

"It's romantic." She's already abandoned her share of the paddling in favor of lounging in the bottom of the boat, watching me with a languid smile and appreciative eyes. I paddle a little harder, just to give her a good show.

"Like in The Notebook," Caroline says, her and Stefan's boat coming up alongside ours.

"You wrote in a notebook about how romantic canoeing is?" I ask, confused. Last I checked, Elena's diary was more of a leather-bound book affair.

"It's a movie," Stefan tells me. "There's a scene where the couple goes boating but mostly it's about a girl who leaves the nice boy her family likes for a guy she's attracted to, even though heartbreak has turned him into a bitter alcoholic and they have nothing in common." He tilts his head at me with a purposefully bland expression. "Right up your alley. You should give it a try."

Very funny, dickhead. I keep my annoyance off my face, so he doesn't know he scored a pretty big point with that one. "I'll leave the soggy Kleenex movies for you, Oprah."

"Oh Damon, you should come to our movie nights sometime," Elena says, oblivious to Stefan's jab, as usual. "Come on, I'll let you make fun of all the actors!"

I shake my head. "Sorry, no can do. I have pressing business to attend to. Murder, mayhem, misogyny. You know, the usual."

Stefan shakes his head with feigned sadness. "You know, Damon, if your man card restricts access to movie night, I guess that will only leave me to cuddle with all the beautiful women in the house." He sighs. "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, after all."

"Yeah, you and Kyle have always had a knack for befriending the ladies. One of these days you two will have to let me in on your ah…little secret." I flare my eyes.

Stefan sets aside his paddle and stands up, balancing in the small craft.

"Stefan Salvatore!" Caroline warns. "If you tip this boat over and get my hair wet, so help me God you will be sleeping in this canoe tonight."

I smirk. "Yeah, Stefan, you–" I don't even get to finish my sentence before he launches out of the canoe with a precision that doesn't ruffle a hair on Caroline's blonde head.

When he hits me, my canoe rolls bottom to the sky and Elena's shriek is swallowed mid-note by the placid water of the lake as all three of us go under.

# # #

ELENA

Men.

Men in general and Damon Salvatore in particular, with Stefan running a close second, are on my shit list. Or my drown-before-lunch list. My boyfriend can't go five minutes without taunting Caroline or roughhousing with his brother and if I didn't know that both those things were his version of a grin I swear I would wring his perfectly gorgeous neck.

As I break the surface again, I gasp for air and shriek a protest at the temperature of the water, giving my bikini top a hasty tug to get it back to covering all the important items. Stefan surfaces about ten feet away and gives me a sheepish grin.

"Sorry, Elena."

Before I can say something I may or may not regret later, Damon's head pops up in between us and he spits a fountain of water right in Stefan's face before stuffing him down below the surface again.

Damon looks back at me and raises an eyebrow.

"You okay?"

"I hate you."

He laughs, and then his eyes light on Caroline, sitting alone in her canoe.

"Not if you want to have enough fingers left to count your brain cells," she says.

A wave erupts behind him as he strikes out with powerful strokes for her boat. She raises her canoe paddle in warning and he ducks just in time to avoid a blow that would have landed a human in the hospital.

"Caroline, stop it!" I shout as I start swimming toward them. I can hear the sound of Stefan coming up behind me, but I ignore him.

"In case of a crash," Damon intones. "Your seat may not be used as a flotation device."

With one firm yank, he overturns Caroline's canoe. She jumps into the air as it flips, landing impossibly on the underside of the boat. She staggers once and nearly goes in before she plants her feet wide and manages to balance, beaming down at Damon. "Boy, you just got served!"

I love her, but sometimes, I just can't stand my best friend. I duck under the water and kick a little vampire speed into my strokes, coming up silently behind the boat while Caroline taunts Damon. I wrap a hand around her ankle and surge backwards.

She topples with a high-pitched shriek that feels like a needle straight to the center of my brain. As soon as she loses her balance I let go and swim for Damon.

He catches me in his arms, kicking to keep us both afloat as he smiles at me, droplets of water glittering seductively in his eyelashes like he's an advertisement for swimwear.

"That's my girl," he purrs, snagging something as it floats by. His hand flexes, there's a popping sound, and then he places the hat gently on back my head.

I take it off to examine the water damage. "The flower is missing!"

Damon clicks his tongue. "Too bad. Casualty of war, couldn't be avoided."

The soggy flower is drifting next to me and I snatch it up, noting the torn threads where it was ripped off the hat.

I give Damon an injured look. "You said I looked cute after I bought this hat."

"You do look cute. But that hat looks like a Hallmark card threw up all over it."

I press my lips together but before I can start to argue, Stefan interrupts us. "You guys, where is Caroline? Did you see her come up?"

"She's probably waiting just under my feet, getting ready to play Swamp Thing," Damon says. "Why?"

Stefan frowns. "She should be back already."

"She can't exactly drown," I tell him as gently as I can manage, trying not to roll my eyes. The Salvatores are irrationally paranoid courtesy of the couple years of bad luck we had when they first moved to town and it seemed like somebody new was trying to kill us every week.

"She should have surfaced by now. And how do we know we're the only vampires in town this weekend? An underwater attack would be the perfect way to catch one of us by surprise."

Damon goes still. "Get back in the boat," he orders me.

Both their dark heads disappear under the water.

I groan. "Seriously? Not everything is a fight to the death."

I wait, but none of them come back up.

"So much for my romantic boat ride." I cram my ruined hat back onto my head so I won't lose it. The water-logged brim sags down in front of my eyes and I resist the urge to curse, even though there's no one to hear.

I know from plenty of summers boating with a mischievous brother of my own that I'm not going to be able to crawl back into the boat unless I have the dock to brace it against, so I just grab hold of a canoe with each hand and start kicking my way back to shore.

Halfway there, there's a splash and Damon pops up, shaking water out of his eyes. "Did she come back?"

"No but Damon, she's fine. I'm sure she's just messing with you."

He grabs my hand and pulls me away from the canoes.

"Damon!" I protest, but then I have to hold my breath to keep from inhaling water. There must be some kind of secret to vampire-speed swimming that I don't know because he's worlds faster than I am. We're back to the dock in seconds.

He takes hold of my waist and with one powerful kick, he propels himself high enough to place me on the edge of the dock. The speed of the swim has my strapless bikini top placed much further south than it was intended to be and I yank it back into place, blushing furiously.

"Go back to the hou–" he begins, but the last word is interrupted by Caroline as she breaks the surface next to him with a huge grin.

"Surprise!" she yells. When he doesn't respond, she looks from him to me. "Did I get them? They were really freaked, weren't they?"

Damon's jaw flexes once, hard, and my chest squeezes in response. It wasn't that long ago that the only disappearance that could have upset him was Stefan's, and it's probably two decades too soon to tease him with the fact that his list of important people is much longer these days.

I reach down and catch Damon's hand with a flirtatious smile, urging him up onto the dock next to me.

I make my voice a little guilty when I answer Caroline. "Actually, we were sort of using you as a distraction to get some alone time together, but Stefan's pretty worried. You should go find him."

Her grin fades. "Oops. For real worried?"

"Uh-huh."

"Ah, Stef gets his panties in a bundle over every new episode of How I Met Your Mother," Damon says. "Don't be too proud of yourself."

I dig an elbow into his ribs, but Caroline's not paying attention. She kicks off toward where the canoes are drifting. She doesn't make it far before Stefan appears, forgetting to even refill his lungs at first as he grabs her arms and hangs on tight.

"Are you hurt?" he manages once he gulps some air. "What happened?"

"I was just teasing," Caroline says in a small voice. "I didn't mean for you to–"

He lets go of her and just stares for a second, and then begins to swim back to shore.

"Oh, damn." I edge a little closer to Damon.

Stefan doesn't look at either of us when he gets to the dock, but Damon reaches a hand down and hauls him out of the water anyway.

"There are a lot more fun kinds of revenge than the silent treatment," Damon murmurs, so quietly that I barely catch it.

Stefan doesn't answer, but he waits there for Caroline and then nods toward the house when she finally arrives, looking uncharacteristically subdued.

"What about the canoes?" she asks nervously.

"I'll swim out and get them later," Damon says.

I wait for him to say something snarky, but he just looks the other way while Stefan takes Caroline's hand and pulls her back toward the lake house.

"I didn't mean to scare you, it was just a little joke. Stefan, say something," Caroline pleads, but Stefan doesn't respond until they make it all the way back to the porch. Just before the steps, he swings around, grabbing both her wrists and holding them behind her back as he growls something down at her, his whole body taut.

I shift uncomfortably and Damon slings an arm around me. "Don't look while the adults are playing," he warns in a surprisingly cheerful tone.

"Maybe we should go play referee. He looks really mad."

"Stefan is a damn fine manipulator."

"Yes but–"

"Are you kidding right now?" Damon asks. "Give them two minutes and I'll be able to have my way with you, free and clear."

Damon's probably right. Caroline goes crazy for Stefan when he's all dominant like that, and I'm sure he knows it.

"Wait, was this all some kind of elaborate set up?"

"Nope. But apparently Baby Bro has learned to take an opportunity when it hits him square in the face." He tilts his head, his eyes warming as he looks down at me. "You covered for me."

I sigh and look back out at the lake. "It was a mean trick to pull on you two."

It's not fair to tease a man who is constantly on guard for any hint of danger to his family. He freaked out when I cleaned the lake house early, for heaven's sake. As crazy as that is, there's something comforting about it, too. People can say what they want about Damon, but if anything ever happens to me, it really will be over his dead body.

"Aaand there they go into the house." Damon's hand grazes the small of my back in a deliberately brief movement that leaves all my skin begging for more. "Do you want to write me that blank check now or later?"

A shiver runs through me and I try to cover it by clearing my throat and gazing out at the horizon. I hope he wants to cash that check in bed. Or on this dock. Or maybe he has somewhere more exotic in mind. Though I can't imagine why he'd waste it on something sexual when he knows he can talk me into almost anything.

"They're probably not in bed yet." I press my thighs together. My bathing suit feels damp and cool against my overheated skin.

"A few minutes one way or another won't hurt. They are absolutely on the path to sin and flagrant bet-losing." He leans close and lets his breath bathe my neck, my veins prickling for his attention. "I won't tell if you won't."

I have to ball my fists in my lap to keep from reaching for him and when I try to answer, the sound that comes out doesn't quite make it all the way into a word.

But I know a lot of things about my boyfriend and one of them is that he does his best when challenged. "Give me one good reason to lose."

His fingers give a deft flick and my bikini top falls in my lap, my skin flushing in a rush that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with ice blue eyes running over me like the brush of a warm breeze.

"How do you feel about multiples?"

"Very good," I assure him, and he laughs.

"Like you would even know what a single was like anymore."

I smile but he doesn't see as he lowers his head to me.

I love to lose.