She turned her head toward him and again he felt and saw her wince. He shook his head and pressed his lips to her forehead. Both eyes. Her nose. The corners of her mouth. “Live for me, Evangeline. Do you understand what’s at stake here? What’s left of my soul? That’s yours. That’s your responsibility. Mine is to make you happy for the rest of your life. You keep my soul safe. Because if you’re not in this world and I feel the hell every minute of every day, I’ll break. You live.”

He wasn’t flowery. He wasn’t a poet. He was raw and brutal and he was telling her the truth. He wasn’t a good man. He’d never be a good man. He was shaped into something twisted and ugly. But she made him different. More, she made him want to be more than he was. She made him think about things, reach for things he had never felt were possible for him.

He loved her. He more than loved her. For a man who didn’t feel a damned thing other than his leopard raging at him night and day, he was overwhelmed with the emotion he felt for Evangeline. He hadn’t known one could feel such love. Even that with him was twisted and dark. His love damned her to the life he led. It wasn’t a good one. It was dangerous and he shouldn’t be selfish and insist on having her. But it all came back to the fact that he wasn’t a good man and he could live with that as long as she could.

She managed another smile for him and this one lit her eyes under the haze of the drug. “No need to make a bargain with the devil, Alonzo, I’ll live.”

Her voice was a thread of sound, but there was a hint of amusement in it. He didn’t find anything humorous in the situation. She just didn’t understand what she was getting into with him. He was okay with that for now, as long as she held on for him. He found that his lungs had been squeezed for air. Now they were a little less restricted. He could take a breath and actually breathe.

“Malyutka, I am the devil.”

Her smile faded slowly and she shook her head at him. Her lashes drifted down, and he knew she was going under the blanket of the morphine. He kept his hand on her throat. His other hand clasped hers in his. His hand engulfed hers, was so much bigger. He was a giant of a man in comparison to her. He was leopard, with a savage, cunning, fighter of a beast. He had fought countless battles and taken lives, yet his woman, small and fragile, lying there in the hospital bed, had leapt a counter in order to save his life.