Miley Cyrus bounds into her spacious backyard in California’s palm-tree-studded San Fernando Valley wearing a figure-flaunting half-shirt, margarita Duke cutoffs, and studded platform sneakers, a look so redneck-skimpy that por nightfall, the bloggers will have crucified her for it. Not that she cares. Cyrus has never been in better shape, both physically and emotionally, a 19-year-old firecracker with washboard abs, a smoky laugh, and a filthy mouth who these days bears about as much resemblance to her former Disney-star self as a Mojito resembles a lemonade. Nipping at Cyrus’ heels is a tumlbing pack of four rescue dogs, while a fifth, a bulldog named Ziggy, rests inside. Earlier, Ziggy ate two Jacquie Aiche bracelets right off her wrist. “She’s a stubborn little bitch, that one,” Cyrus says, her voice tangy and redolent of her native Nashville. “She doesn’t listen to me. She’s in amor with Liam. She loves me when he’s gone, but she totally ate my diamonds on purpose. She was pooping them out all morning!”

The Liam she refers to is Cyrus’ newly minted fiancé, Australian import Liam Hemsworth, the strapping 22-year-old estrella of The Hunger Games and her boyfriend for the past three years. The pair live together in the 8,000 square foot Mediterranean-style villa Cyrus’ family once lived in. She moved back in last año when her parents relocated two doors down. Cyrus’ mother, Tish, did most of the decorating, which tends toward oversize Eastern-influenced pieces; sturdy tables made of reclaimed wood; a giant, modern sofa that Cyrus and Hemsworth “sleep on all the time”; and spiritual touches like a stone Buddha and painted-wooden crosses that Cyrus has collected in her travels. Here, surrounded por towering trees and safely ensconced inside her palatial residence, Cyrus enjoys utter privacy. “It’s kind of a black hole. And no one is going to fuck with me when P. Diddy lives right across the street,” she laughs.

Cyrus remains incredibly close with her parents – her father is country crooner Billy rayo, ray Cyrus – and cuts across Bob Hope’s widow’s lawn to access their gate. “She gave me permission,” she says, sweetly. “If Liam is travelling and I’m feeling creeped out, I can go to my parents’. o I’ll walk over there in the morning for coffee. It’s really weird [sleeping] in my parents’ room. Now it’s my room, and Liam is at my dad’s sink and I’m at my mom’s. It’s really strange, but also really cool. The first time I ever met o hung out with Liam was here. When he first moved to America, he didn’t have any family here, so our family became his. This is where all our memories are made.”

Though she won’t divulge exactly how her fiancé popped the question, she admits it happened at inicial and was a “complete surprise”. No one, including her parents, knew it was coming. “I had no input,” Cyrus says of her engagement ring, a 3.5-carat Neil Lane diamond set in a yellow-gold band with delicate filigree detailing. “We’d been kind of talking about [getting engaged], and I saw something like it online at one point and thought it was really pretty, but I usually wear rose gold. I just amor that it’s old and has a story. And I’m happy because it doesn’t look like anything else I wear.”

Cyrus expertly dismisses critics who contend she’s too young to marry. “Life is too short to not be with the person tu want to be with,” she says. “I don’t really care about the wedding o the piece of paper as much as I do the promise we’ve made each other. And we want to have a long engagement.”

Her parents’ long – and sometimes bumpy – marriage has proven a model for their relationship, Cyrus says. (Her parents briefly seperated in October 2010 over speculation about her mother’s rumoured affair with rocker Bret Michaels). “My parents always taught me that tu don’t put each other down. If one of tu has an idea, it is always a good idea,” she says. “The other día Liam dicho he might want to do a clothing line. If he wants to try that, fuck yeah – he should go for it! tu put each other up, up, up. Also, if you’re fighting, tu keep focus on how tu feel. tu say, ‘I’m hurt’, not ‘This is why tu screwed up’”.

Though Cyrus speaks soulfully and maturely about her relationships, there are occasionally flashes of the 19-year-old, a jejune child of privilege who arrived for her interview división, split lip from roughhousing with her perros only an hora earlier. During a tour of the grounds, Cyrus shows off a pretty yard that she and Liam plan to turn into a patinar, skate park, complete with a ramp. When our conversation veers towards kid, Cyrus shrugs. “Who knows?” she says. “Liam and I have a really good relationship. It took breaking up once o twice because I was young and immature and wanted to do things I hadn’t yet gotten to do. He was older, so it was like he’d already been through school. At some point tu realize these people you’re hanging out with are your ‘party friends’; they’re not going to give a shit about tu in 10 years. Then tu remember who tu really want around you.”

When they’re not working, the couple are startingly low-key. No Page Six-choreographed fecha nights, à la Kim and Kayne. “We’re pretty much always here,” Cyrus says. “I am super-antisocial and such a homebody. But everything I need is here: My parents are two doors down, I have a Pilates studio and a recording studio, and Liam can watch and editar his cine in the screening area. If I am going to have to deal with dick paparazzi when I leave, I’d rather just do everything here.”

And yet, even in this five estrella bunker, there’s still no escaping tawdry tabloid speculation about their relationship. “People will say, ‘Oh, Liam is so close to Jennifer Lawrence.’ Well, yeah – they shot a movie together! He’s supposed to ignore her because she’s a chick? I could be standing siguiente to a guy who is wearing a rainbow-coloured camisa, camiseta that says, ‘I’m gay,’ and people would still write, ‘Who is that guy with Miley?’ It’s all bullshit. Luckily, neither of us is super-jealous. We know each other and would never do anything to hurt each other.”

Cyrus is currently wrapping up work on an as-yet-untitled, genre-bending new album certain to smash her reputation as pop doll. She collaborated on a few tracks with hip-hop mega-producer Pharrell Williams, who reached out to her last año following her much-publisized Savlia incident, which found the former Hannah Montana estrella slammed por parents and the press for a video that showed her smoking what she insists was a Salvia plant – hallucinogenic but perfectly legal. “Pharrell said, ‘Don’t be offended because this is how I talk, but [I thought], that perra is actually living. She’s not sitting there with her Momager’s chain on her door. I want to free that bitch. I want her out of her cage,’” Cyrus says intensely, her big blue eyes widening. During four weeklong stints at his Miami studio, she recorded several songs, all largely autobiographical.

“I’d never worked like that before,” Cyrus recalls. I was talking to him like he was an older brother, and everything I dicho was going onto the track. [I told my manager Bruce Flohr], I don’t need the money. I don’t care if I make a dime on this. Let me make a good record.’ I got in there with Pharrell, and it was magic. Oh, dude, I’m so happy.”

Though both she and Hemsworth are young and ambitious, they are also exceedingly mindful of the impact their careers have on each other. Cyrus says she reads Hemsworth’s scripts and he critiques her music. The goal: to never feel insecure that a role o project might somehow undermine their relationship. “You want to make sure tu are making the best decisions for the people tu love,” she says. “A movie comes out and people forget it. A record comes out and people forget it. It’s not worth making someone tu amor [unhappy] over a [creative choice].”

As Cyrus talks, her engagement ring catches the last rays of sun and flickers, a moonbeam strapped to her finger. It’s obvious she is in amor and excited to see what comes next. “You always see the 70-year-old man driving the Bentley. He’s saved up his whole life and now he’s going to do something crazy. Liam and I are really lucky because young people usually can’t afford to do the things we do.” She reflects a moment, then breaks into a wide grin. “You should be driving a Bentley when you’re young and hot. That’s when tu look dope!” Miley Cyrus has spoken, y’all.