“He was going to . . . transform me.” Her gaze darted over his shoulder to the vampire, then jerked away. Her voice was quiet, hoarse, when she said, “Make me . . . like him.”

Cain’s jaw clenched. “You could never be like him.”

Tears clouded her eyes. “If you’d been . . . just a bit later. If you hadn’t come . . . I would have been . . . a vampire.”

Or she would have been dead. He’d met only a few female vamps in his time. Men transformed much easier, while the women usually had quick, brutal deaths.

“If he’d changed me”—she blinked her eyes, and the moisture eased a bit—“would you have k-killed me, too?”

“No!” He reached for her then. He had to touch her, simple as that. He caught her hands in his. Held tight. “Miranda, don’t you understand? I would never hurt you—no matter what you are or—or what you become.” If she’d been made into a vampire, she’d have experienced the bloodlust, the desperate thirst, but she wouldn’t have become a sadistic killer like Roberts. That poisonous instinct just wasn’t in her.

“But if I’d . . . been a vampire—”

“I would have wanted you just the same. Loved you just the same.” Oh, damn, he’d said it, but there was no taking the words back now.

Miranda’s eyes widened and he saw himself reflected with the moonlight in that stare. “Cain?”

“You’re mine, Miranda. Mine. And I don’t care what you are—human, vampire, it doesn’t matter. You’re mine,” he repeated, growling the words.

Her lips lifted into a smile. “You mean that, don’t you?”

With every bit of his heart. But he knew she didn’t feel the same. Things between them were too new. He’d probably scared ten years off her life with his shifts and—

Miranda kissed him. A soft, open-mouthed kiss. Her arms curled around him, held on tight.

As tight as he was holding her.

Her lips lifted a bare inch from his. “And you’re mine, Cain Lawson. The jaguar, the man—both of you are mine.” Another kiss, one that had his cock rising and his blood heating.

The sirens were dangerously close now and Cain could hear the murmur of voices floating toward them. He tasted her with a quick thrust of his tongue, then pulled back. “Miranda?”

“I love you, Cain.”

The words hit him straight in the heart. “Are you—”

Now the smile reached her eyes. “I’m absolutely certain though I don’t really think this is the best place for a declaration—”

Not with a dead body a few feet away and a pack of deputies about to burst onto the scene any moment.

“—but I wanted you to know.” She brought his hand to her chest.Pressed against the heart that beat too fast. “You’re in here, and I think you have been, from the moment you kicked down my door and saved me.”

She didn’t understand. She’d saved him. From a life alone. From the darkness that could so often torment his kind.

Miranda was offering him life, a real life with a woman of his own.

He wanted to shout his joy to the world. He wanted—

“Shit, Lawson, did you have to leave such a damn mess?” Santiago shoved through the brush and he threw a pair of jeans at Cain. “Hurry up, the county folks are goin’ to be crawlin’ all over this place in the next two minutes.”

Cain reluctantly broke away from Miranda and jerked on the jeans.

Santiago was frowning at the body. “How the hell am I going to explain this mess? I mean, I know the head had to come off, but—”

Footsteps pounded close by. Cain forced a shrug, wishing he and Miranda were alone and far away from the stench of death. “Just say it was an animal attack.” The truth was sometimes the easiest way to handle these situations. “That story worked well enough before for him, didn’t it?”

Miranda swayed next to him. Cain grabbed her, scooping her up into his arms and hoisting her high against his chest. Her lashes lowered. “S-sorr y,” she muttered, “this looks . . . weak as . . . hell . . . but I think . . . I’m gonna . . . fai . . .” Her head sagged back against him.

Too much blood loss. Cain cursed. He was such a damn idiot. He should have taken care of her sooner—

The deputies burst onto the scene. Not quite two minutes.

Santiago started shouting orders. “All right, we’ve got an animal attack here. Stay on guard and—”

Cain turned away, kept his hold firm around Miranda, and headed for the houses. “It’s all right, baby,” he whispered, bending to press a kiss against her cheek. “I’ve got you.”

And he was never planning to let her go.

Cain had Miranda out of the hospital and back at his place in near record time.

The next evening she found herself naked in his bed. Cain was curled possessively around her, and Miranda realized she was feeling almost, well, human again.

“Sam told me it didn’t happen, you know,” she murmured the words as she turned in his arms. God, but she loved the feel of his arms around her. The steely muscles, the warm skin.

She and Sam had shared a hospital room for a blessedly brief time. “He told me he was delusional, that he only imagined Roberts was a vampire.”

“And how’d he explain the jaguar?”

Her lips pursed. “He figures in light of the attack, the cat part was real. The cat wasn’t you, of course, just—”