Chapter 4

Bella hugged herself as she sat on the counter that separated the kitchen form the tiny dining room in the house she grew up in Phoenix. She had made the necessary trip to the basement to start up electricity and water and was now waiting for coffee to brew.

Three weeks ago she had kissed her father goodbye and left for a two weeks bliss with her mother in Italy. Renee had won tickets for a tour of Italy in some morning show and she had called Bella excited.

Bella who had just woken up from her breakup induced coma state couldn't say 'yes' fast enough but only 3 days in Voltera, Italy and one run in with a red eyed vampire, the eighteen year old girl had begged her mother to ditch Vampire City and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. Renee was a free spirit who saw the urgency and the pain in her daughter's eyes. At once the two packed, faked an emergency and went to Florence to continue with their tour.

Renee never asked why Bella panicked so much by he beautiful city but if Bella didn't know that her mother was deceptively observant. The extraordinarily beautiful with the charming red eyes had Renee thinking hard. She had only met the bastard who hurt her baby once but the tour girl looked far too much like him for Renée's taste.

The loud barb of the bright red coffee machine broke Bella from her memories. Half dazed she took a lengthy gulp from the black liquid straight from the scalding pot to chase the images away, before pouring the rest into a thermos.

For better or worse Bella had chosen to stay in Phoenix for the rest of her school vacation, alone so she had no one to make breakfast for and nothing to do except care for the man in her garage.

"What are you thinking, Bella?"

Muttering to herself didn't really help, but it had become a habit during the last few months. Before going to Forks, Washington she hadn't any friends. Hell she never connected with people her own age well. Until Forks. Until Him. Until that blasted baseball game. Until her birthday.

Until she'd finally awakened one morning literally drowning to decide that she was through looking at life through her rearview mirror.

So she'd made an effort to round the kids that had welcomed her into their lives but gotten turned down. During one of her father's famous fishing weekends she had over heard Charlie talking about 'animal attacks' and sightings of a red headed woman with the dead men just prior to their deaths and she panicked.

One trait Renee, her mother, was known for was running away from her problems. Apparently Bella had that trait as well because when the trip to Italy was over she began looking for ways to stay away from the cold, dreary and vampire friendly forks.

Phoenix is the exact opposite. Sunny, deathly hot and big enough to not attract attention to herself. So she went home, at least for a while. Her stomach jittered uneasily and Bella slapped one hand to it in a futile attempt to calm herself.

"Don't make this a bigger deal than it is,"

She said quietly, glancing at the garage that was connected to the house via two doors with locks on them.

"He's hurt. You're going to help. Then he'll leave. End of story. Everything back to normal."

Normal? By whose standards?

"Focus. He's just a hurt man not a blood thirsty vampire that wants to make a meal out of me. Hell he'd sizzled under the early morning sun. He hadn't sparkled!"

Taking a breath, she picked up the well used first-aid kit from its place under the kitchen sink and the thermos and headed for the garage before she could find an excuse not to.

The sun was up and slanting on her the moment she stepped out the door. With a sign she lifted her face to it letting it warm up her skin. The air was warm and fragrant thanks to some wild flowers that found their way to the unkempt yard and the sun caught on something glistering on the ground.

With a slight frown Bella knelt to pick it up. It was a ring with a large midnight blue stone on it. It had an intricate design and the letter D in the middle. Cursing her pocket-less jeans Bella slipped the ring on her thumb intending on asking Damon if it was his. The desert sand that had somehow made its way in the yard had a Damon shape almost next to the fallen ring.

Pushing a dark curl from her face she headed to the garage but as stopped cold right beneath the large open doors. He was gone.

"Mr. Salvatore?"

She took another step and now her sneakers touched the gravel of the pale pink garage. Renee was in a 'my baby girl is bruising all her body in ballet' phase when she painted the garage in Barbie colors.

"Over here."

Her head whipped to one side and she spotted him, all the way into the corner of the garage; he had his back to the wall and his gaze on her. All around him slivers of sunlight peeked through the roof like golden bars of a cell, holding him in place.

A niggling, ridiculous notion tugged at the back of her mind for a second before she could dismiss it.

"Are you all right?"

"Great. Your roof needs fixing."

His voice was tight.

"Yeah, but its low on the list right now."

She walked toward him with slow steps. Funny, but she felt almost as if she were trying to ease up on a hungry tiger. He had a taut stillness about him that made her think of a predator. And that was almost enough to make her back out of the barn and leave him alone. But if she did that, then she would be surrendering to her own fears and she'd worked too hard to get past that time in her life. To rediscover her own courage and the spirit that had once been so completely crushed.

"Look,"

She said, forgetting about the fact that just a few minutes ago she'd wanted him gone,

"You don't have to stay in the barn. I told you, you can come inside. It's cooler there and the roof doesn't sprout sunlight every few inches."

He scraped one hand across his face, and then focused his gaze on her. Even in the shadows, she saw the flash of something molten in those light depths.

"You don't have to do this."

His voice rumbled out around her, soft, deep, almost hypnotic.

"You should go back inside. Don't come back here."

"This is my garage"

Bella reminded him.

"Of course I'm coming back here."

He groaned and let his head fall back against the wall behind him.

"You have no sense of self-preservation at all, do you?"