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Her 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 it over the heart that beat too fast. “You’re in here, and I think you have been, from the moment you ripped open 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 going to be crawling all over this place in the next two minutes.”
Cain reluctantly broke away from Miranda and jerked on the jeans.
Santiago frowned 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-sorry,” 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 an idiot. He should have taken care of her sooner.
The deputies burst onto the scene. Santiago had been wrong. Not quite two minutes.
Santiago started shouting orders. “All right, we’ve got an animal attack here. Stay on guard and—”
Cain turned away from the others. He kept his hold firm around Miranda and headed for her house. “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 human again.
“Sam told me it didn’t happen, you know,” she murmured the words as she turned in his arms. For the record, 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. “Sam 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—”
Cain grunted, and his fingers stroked along the base of her back. “What? Some wild cat? A jaguar out prowling the countryside?”
Miranda stretched beneath his touch. They’d already made love once, but she wanted him again. “Something like that.” Yet despite Sam’s blustering words, she’d seen the real knowledge in his eyes.
It was a knowledge he didn’t want to deal with, not yet. She didn’t particularly blame him. The world was a bad enough place just with the screwed-up humans. When you threw monsters into the mix, things truly went to hell.
“What does the deputy really think?”
Ah, he’d read her so easily. Miranda sighed. “I think he believes it’s best to keep pretending, for now.”
“He can’t pretend forever.” A quiet warning as his fingers stilled on her spine.
“No.” No one could. She stretched and kissed the rough line of his jaw. “I didn’t thank you before.”
