She was both the most vulnerable and the strongest person I knew. My very own living breathing oxymoron.

I knew I would get her to react when I brought up the night we met because my own reaction was always strong when I thought about that night.

The night I almost put a bullet in her head.

More felony than fairy tale.

But it still made me smile every time I recalled the first moment my eyes landed on the little ball of attitude who would eventually become my wife.

My world.

I was getting my cock sucked by some girl I went to high school with whose name I barely remembered then or now. I didn't want to bring her into my little apartment attached to the shop because I didn't want her to get the wrong idea and think that what we were doing involved a sleep over.

Or a bed.

Or more than ten minutes.

After I picked the girl up from the Bert’s, I drove to my dad's shop and led her out back to the car graveyard. Before I could fully unzip, she'd already thrown her purse onto the asphalt to use as a makeshift cushion and dropped to her knees.

My back was against an old dusty truck, and the chick with my cock down her throat was going at me like I was her last fucking meal. I heard a rustle, but it wasn't enough to distract me from the girl working me with her mouth like it was her fucking job.

Then, there was a sneeze. I will never forget that sneeze for as long as I live. It seemed to come from nowhere.

The girl I was face-fucking didn't seem to notice.

It sounded really close.

Too fucking close.

The girl deep-throated my cock, pulling me in further than I thought possible. Before I could form another coherent thought, I was coming, and she was punching my my thighs with closed fists and spitting onto the pavement, screeching at me for not warning her I was about to come. I laughed because I grew up in Coral Pines, and there wasn't a guy I knew that hadn't shot his load in her throat before tenth grade. She stomped to the fence, and I followed her to let her out, sliding the gate shut behind her. She walked away mumbling to herself, but I was to preoccupied with the sneeze to give a fuck about what she was bitching about.

I took off my jacket and set it on a bicycle with no seat. Slowly, I crept back to the old truck and pulled my gun from the waistband of my jeans. It was when I rounded the truck that I first saw a ball of black hoodie hunched over on his knees. Whoever it was had puked onto the pavement.

I aimed my gun at his head and cocked it. The hoodie froze.

"Who sent you, motherfucker?" I asked. Stepping forward, I pressed the barrel of my gun against his head.

No answer.

"So you want to play it that way, huh?" I asked angrily. I grabbed at the hoodie, yanking it back over the intruders face. I was glad that I was going to be able to hand down my own brand of perverse justice on this guy.

I was already planning his disposal when I was suddenly distracted by something soft in my hand. It was a clump of long, bright red hair.

What the fuck?

I looked from my hand to the small figure crumpled in front of me. I nudged him in the back of the head with the barrel of my gun. He finally turned and looked up.

SHE looked up.

Huge innocent blue eyes masked in pale skin stared up at me. Not a woman. A girl, no older than seventeen or eighteen.

A beautiful girl.

THE most beautiful girl.

My girl.

I was twenty-two. Not an old man by any means, but too old for a girl as young as her. It was wrong for me to be drawn to her the way I was. But my brain, my dick, and my thawing heart didn't seem to give a flying fuck about propriety.

It sounds so fucking cliché, but it was when our eyes first met when my life changed irrevocably.

I wouldn't say that I believe in any sort of destiny, but if something like that did exist, it was working that night. Abby crossing my path was when my life took another path the fork in the road of life offered, and I'd never looked back.

Although it wouldn't be an easy road traveled by any means, the scared girl on her knees before me would eventually welcome me into her life, into her body.

She would bear my child.

She would become my wife.

That skinny girl with the oversized sweat shirt had suffered so much in her life and little did either of us know then that she would suffer so much more.

Fucking OWEN.

The mere mention of his name was enough to send me into a rage right there in the visiting area.

It wasn't until Abby finally told me what Owen did to her, when she showed me the pictures, the evidence of a crime that makes my stomach roll every time I fucking think about it, when I'd learned that the true depths of my sickness and depravity had no limits when it came to protecting both Abby and Georgia.