Despite the fact that it was late spring, I was wearing a hooded shirt as I walked the streets. Walking the streets seemed to be the best way I'd found to deal with the stress and uncertainty of freedom. At Leavenworth, I'd spent too much time cooped up, being told what to do, and exactly how to do it. Why was I in prison? There was a simple answer: fuck the why. Why existed for people better than me. I was a prisoner. I didn't deserve a why.

So now, freed from the confines of military prison, I walked, often for hours, starting each evening as the sun went down and sometimes lasting until midnight. As I walked, my mind would replay the frustrations of the day, driving my feet forward like an invisible mental lash. I could see in my mind the faces each time I handed my resume or application over to someone, the tightness that would come behind their eyes when they saw that I'd checked 'yes' on the box that asked if I'd ever been convicted of a felony, and the combination of fear and finality that would then come when they saw what I wrote on the line after that.

That's one of the challenges of being convicted by court-martial. If I'd been convicted of the same crime by the State of Georgia, I'd have gotten a parole officer, and the resources of said office. Now, I know it doesn't sound like much, but most parole officers know someone who knows someone who can get you a job. It may have been shoveling shit at some pig farm, but it’d be an actual job. The state system wants to at least make some sort of effort to rehabilitate its prisoners. It helps with keeping the streets safer—in theory, at least. And there's nothing wrong with shoveling shit. Someone has to do it, and I've done far worse in my years on this Earth. A lot worse.

The military justice system doesn't have that sort of backup. Once your sentence is finished and you're discharged—with, of course, the mandatory DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE stamped at the top to hang around your neck like a scarlet letter for the rest of your life—you're on your own. It was like one of the other prisoners, a former aviation captain who'd been busted for sneaking in trophies from Afghanistan and was doing a two-year stretch once told me while we played cards one afternoon:

"Uncle Sam, he's all about taking care of you when you're doing exactly what he wants you to do. Note, I didn't say do what the rules say to do, or do the right thing, but what Sam wants you do to. But as soon as you don't, Uncle Sam turns into Uncle Scrooge, and he doesn't give a fuck about you. Hell, look at the VA system. They fuck the guys who actually did good over so bad it's a fucking crime. How does that bode for us, the rejected stepchildren of Sam's brood? Bell, most of us? We've got no chance. No chance in hell once we get outside. That is, unless you want to be a mercenary. There's always someone out there with money and a need for those."

I knew all I wanted was a chance, and I didn't want to be a hired gun either. Open the door a crack, and I'd kick it in the rest of the way and show whoever gave me that chance what I could do. Hell, I was at the point where I'd take anything. Garbage man, toilet scrubber, dishwasher, greeter at Wal-Mart, anything. Still, nearly three months after being released, all I had was a growing list of rejections. I can't even say rejection letters. I didn't warrant one of those. Just rejections, usually by silence. Those were the more polite ones. There were a few who sent me on my way with choice words.

So I walked. It was cheap, and it helped the tension flow out until I could manage it enough to go back to the apartment and go to sleep, at least semi-fitfully, until five in the morning, when the dreams and nightmares would drive me out of bed, shivering and sweating despite the air conditioning that I kept cranked up to nearly frigid levels. Forty-five minutes of calisthenics and a shower before six thirty, and at seven o'clock I'd start the whole damn thing over, seven days a week. Well, except on Sundays. A lot of businesses didn't open early on Sundays, so I started my job hunting at ten in the morning instead.

I wore a hood whenever I wasn't job hunting because, despite the fact that the headlines had faded away and the chances were small, Atlanta was a military-friendly city in a military-friendly part of the country. Trainees coming to and leaving Fort Benning came in and out of Atlanta-Hartsfield airport nearly every day, escorted by their drill sergeants, some of whom were my age. These kids would get a day or two of leave if they could, and a lot of the other military members in the area would also come to Atlanta whenever they could.

It made sense for a solider. Sure, Benning had a fine military town surrounding it, and for your average run of the mill distraction, that was fine, but Atlanta was the big city, with lots to do. So between that and the former military population of the city, there were enough people. The chances of my being recognized were just too damn high. I didn't need that sort of trouble. If I'd had another option, I would have lived someplace else, but my only lifeline was in Atlanta, so I stayed and looked for work. Still, I wore a hood until my hair grew out long enough that I didn't look ex-military. Unfortunately for me, my hair grows pretty slowly, and after three months, I still looked a lot like a soldier.

As for my walking, I liked walking through Piedmont Park for a couple of reasons. Primarily, because it's green. Between the nearly uniform brown of Iraq and the gray of Leavenworth, I hadn't seen enough green in the past five years, and Piedmont gave me a chance to catch up. The lakes, the wide open grassy areas—all of it was comfortably far from my past. Secondly, Piedmont was conveniently less than a half-mile from the apartment I was using. I could use it day or night—until eleven PM, at least—rain or shine. The one day I'd taken to relax, I could even use a fishing pole I'd found in the apartment and go fishing in the lake there. I'd caught two largemouth bass before noon and ate like a king.

The night that changed my life, though, I was walking through Piedmont Park because I was, quite frankly, despondent as all hell. I'd reached a milestone that day . . . rejection number two hundred. A perfect score. Two hundred applications, two hundred rejections. That's not even counting the people who didn't reply when I put in applications online. I'd lost count of those long ago. But two hundred times, I'd walked into an office, a store, or somewhere else with my head held high, trying to ask for a chance, and two hundred times, I'd been told no. About the only option left was to go to the Day Labor office, or maybe sit outside Home Depot with the homeless and illegal aliens who depended on under the table work to make it day to day.

At least I wasn't homeless yet, I thought as I walked. Christopher Lake may have been an asshole, like a lot of people I knew from the military, but he was still my friend. The best friend I had, in fact. More importantly in the immediate sense, Chris was willing to let me crash at his apartment until he got back into town in a week. He'd even left me some money to help me get by and a fully stocked set of cupboards in the apartment. It had saved me more than once. I owed him everything and would always be grateful for that. Still, he was coming back from Europe in a week, and I was living in a studio apartment. What I was going to do after he got back, I had no fucking idea.

Concerns about my potential future homelessness vanished when I saw the two men dragging the girl into the tree line. Piedmont Park is dotted all over the place with these little mini groups of trees, not enough during the day to really hide what you're doing, but a good place to sit down and have a picnic or get out of the sun if you wanted to. At night, however, they provided just enough cover for all sorts of nefarious activities. My time in Leavenworth had made me pretty laissez-faire about the whole thing, but when I saw that, I reacted. Memories started to flash through my brain about what had gotten me into the mess I was in, and my hands balled into fists. Not again, I said to myself.

Thankfully, the skills I'd learned in the military hadn't faded during my years in Leavenworth. If anything, they were sharper than ever, as some of the most skilled combatants I met had a problem following orders once off the battlefield. We'd shared ideas and sometimes even trained in the dim lights and the scattered moments when the guards weren't watching us. I was able to sneak up on the first attacker while both of them were distracted by the girl, who I had to give credit for fighting hard, despite the obvious bad odds she faced. Her hands were hooked into claws, and she was trying to fend off the guy on top of her by threatening to claw out his eyes. He backhanded her, her head bouncing off the turf just as I got close.

Even the best fighter sometimes has luck on his side, and in my case, it was the fact that the angle I hit the first guy at sent him headfirst into the trunk of a tree. He dropped, and I started to turn to the other guy, but he was quick, quicker than I thought he'd be. His fist caught me in the mouth just as I was turning, jerking my head to the side. There was a momentary flash of white-hot pain, and I was pretty sure he'd cut me, probably on the ring he was wearing on his right hand. I rolled with the punch, however, and didn't take too much damage.

He followed up the punch with a halfway decent kick that had a good amount of its power taken away by the fact that his pants were sagging damn near down around his knees. His pants bound up the extension of his hip so that all he did was turn me a bit more to the side. I went with it, kicking backward with a hard kick I'd been taught first from la savate, the French kicking martial art. It caught the guy square in his family jewels, dropping him before I followed up with a knee that put him to sleep. The first rule you learn in street combat is that there are no concepts of fairness or sportsmanship. The guy who goes into a street fight with codes such as chivalry or fair play will usually end up bleeding and possibly dying in the middle of the street, honorable or not. Besides, the guy had been trying to rape a girl and was wearing a metal ring, so it's not like he was deserving of a fair fight or mercy.

As I stood above his laid out body, I was breathing hard, not from the exertion, but from the rush. It had been a long time since I'd tasted combat again, and I had to admit the taste was sweeter than I wanted it to be. I'd lost myself in the haze of combat before, and I was surely damned if I did it again. And I didn't mean figuratively, either.

I turned to the girl, who was still lying on the ground. She'd taken a pretty hard shot from the guy when they were struggling on the ground, and I wasn't surprised she was still a bit dazed. It takes longer than a lot of people think to recover from a hit to the head. Reaching out to her, I tried to keep my voice calm.

I didn't tell her the bigger reason I wanted to get out of there was that I didn't want the cops involved, at least not with me around. If I could get the young woman up and out of the park, maybe she'd go to the cops on her own without dragging me into it. I didn't like my chances with the Atlanta police, regardless of whether I had the woman's statement to back me up. I just didn't trust them.

"No, I'm fine," she said, taking my hand. Her skin was smooth and flawless, and a long-repressed part of me flared at the electric tingle of her fingers in my hand. I think she felt it too, because when she spoke again, her eyes were wide and her voice had the faintest hint of a tremor, although perhaps I'd imagined it. "Who are you?"

"Dane. Dane Bell." The words were out of my mouth before I'd even thought about them, and inwardly, I started cursing myself for being a damn fool. The lights were dim. I still had my hood up. I doubted she had gotten a halfway decent look at my face. If I'd lied or just not answered, I could have disappeared into the night. But that touch . . . there was no way I'd have been able to resist that touch, even if it was just her hand in mine. It was like her fingertips cut through any defenses I had and left me totally defenseless.

"Abby Rawlings. Uh, pleased to meet you." Her voice was like honey and magnolias, the sort of Southern lilt that would’ve turned my knees weak even before I'd spent five years in the exclusive company of men. I'd been a sucker for it ever since the first time I heard it. I came from South Dakota, where there was plenty of accent, but nothing like a Southern girl, and especially not Abby. It was the educated type of Southern, not backwoods cracker barrel that mangled grammar to the point of incomprehension, but instead just added a velvet touch to the vowels and polished the ends of certain words. I took my hand back and stepped back, ready to run, when she reached out again for me. "Stop, please."

"I really should go," I said, looking around. I wasn't sure what scared me more: the fact that I'd just assaulted two men, or the fact that even in the deep shadows, this woman was affecting me in ways I wasn't sure I was ready for yet. I hadn't tested myself in that regard yet since being freed, and I wasn't sure if I could behave the way I needed to. "I . . . I really should."

"Please, Dane. Walk me out at least. My . . . my ankle's a bit twisted, and my feet are killing me," Abby said. The way she said ‘please’ was irresistible, a magnet that pulled me closer to her, unable to stop myself. "And . . . I’d feel safer too."

"You don't even know me," I replied, but my feet couldn't seem to listen to my brain. Instead of turning and taking off like a bat out of hell, I stayed where I was while she found her purse and picked it up. We walked slowly back out onto the path, looking for all the world like two people taking a pleasant evening stroll and not a potential rape victim and the man who'd just beat the hell out of her attackers. "I'm not a very good man."

"You just did the most noble thing I've ever seen someone do," Abby said simply. As I listened, I realized she was more than just a wilting flower Southern belle. This girl had some strength within her, although I suspected that she didn't know just how strong she was. There was a sort of uncertainty about it, like it was just starting to come out, or she was at least unfamiliar with speaking with men like me. "You've probably got your flaws. I know I do, but for that, I feel safe enough for you to . . . what happened to your face?"

I stopped, realizing that the light from the lamp up ahead was allowing her to see what I looked like for the first time. I reached up with my fingers and felt my face, stopping when my fingers made my right cheek sting. I'd forgotten that the guy wore a ring on his hand. "Oh. I forgot the second guy must have been wearing a ring or something. It caught my face just right. It doesn't feel like much. I'm sure it'll clean up easily enough."

"You're bleeding like a stuck pig," Abby objected, her face full of concern. "We need to get you patched up, take you to a hospital."

"I . . . I don't need a hospital. Really. I'm sure it looks a lot worse than it really is," I said. A hospital was the last place I wanted to go. A hospital would mean an explanation, and an explanation could mean involving the cops. "I'll just wash it off when I get back to the apartment. It's not that far. A little hydrogen peroxide, maybe a little bit of gauze, and I'll be fine. I promise."

"No way, mister," Abby said, sudden strength and confidence blooming in her voice. If I'd thought she had hidden strength before, I'd seriously underestimated her. "That needs to be washed out better than what you can do yourself in the mirror. You sure you won't go to the hospital?"

"I'm sure," I said. "I . . . I’ve got my reasons."

She tilted her head, giving me a questioning expression, but she nodded after a moment. "Fine. Then take me back to your place and let me clean you up. It's the least I can do."

Again, the logical side of me, the side that reminded me that I was a dishonorably discharged former soldier with a felony on my rap sheet, screamed at me to refuse her offer. But the same light that let Abby see my face, let me see her for the first time, and that logical side kept getting drowned out more and more by the voice that told me this was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my entire life. Long, dark blonde hair framed a face that looked like it was carved by the gods.

Abby was stunning, with dark blue eyes that looked like flawless sapphires sparkling in the street light that seemed to bore straight into my soul. I couldn't resist those eyes and that face even if I wanted to. "All right," I said. "Uh, the place I'm staying is only a little way away. Are you sure you don't want me to call you a cab or something?"

Don't say yes, don't say yes, the voice in my head that was talking not with logic but with fiery emotion pleaded. When Abby shook her head and instead reached out and took my hand again, it let loose a cheer loud enough that I was sure she could hear it, even if it was invisible and inside my skull.

"Are you all right, really?" she asked as we walked. "You winced a bit there."

"Just an unpleasant thought," I said, deflecting my real thoughts. I felt like I was back in junior high school or something, and the cute girl I'd just asked to dance had actually said yes, and I was holding her hand for the very first time. "I guess the cut stings a bit more than I thought it would."

The rest of our walk seemed to nearly float by. I barely noticed when we reached the edge of Piedmont Park and turned north toward my apartment. "You know, you really handled yourself well," Abby said as we walked. "Where'd you learn all that?"

"I was in the Army for a while," I said, trying to think of some other way to answer it. "I guess it was just one of those things you learn after a while."

"Really? How long have you been out?" she asked, giving me a dazzling smile. My heart did a few lurches, along with another part of my body that was also saying it had been a long damn time since he'd had any female attention either. It was so dazzled, in fact, that I barely even noticed the alternative meaning of her question. "I mean, you're rocking two days of beard, so I guessed you’re not in service anymore."

"I'm not," I quickly said. "I was discharged three months ago."

I regained my composure with the answer, and knew I didn't want her to probe there anymore. In hoping she wouldn’t talk about my military history any longer, I changed the subject. "What about you? What do you do?"

"Oh, I'm a senior at Georgia Tech," she said, as if being a student at such a good school was nothing at all. "I'm studying biology and hoping to get into a good grad school program this fall. I'd like to go into nutrition research and food science. So I guess you're not in school, then?"

"Uh, not right at the moment," I answered, slightly ashamed. After high school, I'd messed around, mostly screwing off in college until enlisting, and had never gotten any formal degree after high school. It took my going to Leavenworth to understand the value of learning. "Oh, here we are."

The Mayfair Tower is one of the best high-rise apartment complexes in Midtown Atlanta, and the look in Abby's eye as I led her inside sent chills up and down my spine. "Wow, this place is amazing. You really live here?"

"For now," I said, unwilling to say that I was merely house sitting. I wasn't an official resident, just a guest, which is why I didn't avail myself of most of the facilities in the building. The most I'd done was sneak in a couple of workouts in the fitness center during the dead of night when no one else was around to wonder who the tattooed stranger was. I would sometimes also go down and grab the newspaper from the front desk when it was a day old, looking for the classified section. In a high rise where most of the cars were under two years old, and most of the residents I'd seen had the appearance of wearing suits that probably cost more money than I'd seen in years, it was the better choice. The less I stuck out around the place, the better, I thought. "Here, let's take the elevator."

There was a comfortable silence as we took the elevator up, and I could sense a growing tension between us. It might have been a long time since I'd seen the look, but I recognized it in Abby's eyes. She thought I was attractive, and I think she also recognized that I found her stunning as well. Still, her dress, her shoes, even her purse and the way she wore her hair screamed high class and money to me. I may have been just out of jail and I may have been growing increasingly horny, but there was no way that a girl like that ended up with a guy like me. Not long-term, at least. She might want me to give it to her one time, just so she could say she’d fucked a bad boy, but that’s it.

If there was one thing that my time in the Army and my time in Leavenworth had tried to drill into me, it was that for guys like me, there were no happily ever afters. I'd been born to a hard working miner who'd tried to raise me and two siblings on just what he could dig out of the ground. And while I'd not always been the best son in the world, I'd done my best to try and make myself better. But guys like me don't get a happily ever after. We get an hourly job that breaks our back while we dream of having a bigger television to take up the corner space in the double-wide trailer that's busting our checking account every month. That was a lucky ending for guys like me. Girls like Abby Rawlings never figured into our fates. Still, I couldn't repress the little ember of hope that was burning in my chest. It was why I didn't stop, and with the way Abby looked at me, I couldn't stop either way.

"Here we are," I said when the elevator stopped. I led her down the short hallway to the door, unlocking it and holding it open for her. "It's really not much, just a studio, but it's good for me."

I knew I was downplaying things, but I didn't know what else to say. The floor plan was called a Stratford, and for the Mayfair Tower, it actually was the least expensive and smallest of the apartments or condos in the place. Who knew what the hell Chris Lake paid in yearly fees? Still, compared to the cell I'd had in Leavenworth, which I shared with another man, the condo still seemed immense to me.

"It's more than good. This is really something else,” Abby said as she looked around. "What's that, a sixty-inch TV?"

"I'm not sure. I don't watch it all that much," I said. In Leavenworth, TV was one of the few means to pass the time when you were indoors, and I'd had more than my fill of it. Reading, on the other hand, I couldn't get enough of. I'd come to value the knowledge contained in books, and I found them infinitely more interesting than watching reruns of cable programs—at least those the guards thought we were cleared to view. I wished that I’d been that way back in school. “I think so though."

"Daddy and I . . .” Abby started before pausing, something causing her to grow quiet. I heard the way she said the word Daddy, and knew that whatever her strength was, she was still at least a bit of a daddy's girl. I just hoped that didn't come with daddy issues as well. I couldn't handle that. "It doesn't matter. Come on, let's get that cut cleaned up."

"And while we’re at it, let’s take a look at that ankle,” I said. I watched her limp when we walked, and while it wasn't bad, I didn't want her to keep putting pressure on it. "You've been hiding it pretty well, but you were limping across the lobby. I could hear it in the sound of your high heels on the tile."

Abby smiled shyly and nodded. "Okay. Do you mind if I take them off here? I'm more comfortable barefoot anyway."

"Mi casa es su casa," I said, trying to force casualness. I hoped that it would calm the raging inferno that was building inside me, growing larger and larger each second I saw her in the full light of the apartment. If I thought she was stunning in the park, in the apartment, fully illuminated in the tastefully recessed track lighting LEDs that cast a glow around the room, she was ethereal. I'd never seen a more beautiful woman in my life. Barefoot, she came up to just below my chin, and her figure still concealed underneath her dress was the sort of thing artists dreamed of. She didn't seem to notice my growing desire, however, and glanced toward the back of the studio.

"I assume your stuff is in the bathroom," Abby said, looking around, her hair tossing lightly side to side. I knew instantly that when she wasn't dressed up, she was the sort of girl who liked to keep it in a ponytail. Unfortunately for me, ponytails are a major turn on, and the idea of wrapping that spun gold hair around my fingers caused my cock to surge in my pants to nearly bursting. "Or do you want me to play hide and go seek?"

I noticed that her skin was slightly flushed, and her joke was as forced as my casualness, but still, both of us smiled and I shook my head. Maybe she was feeling it as much as I was? Fresh hope flared in my chest. "Come on."

The bathroom was just after the kitchen in the L-shaped design of the studio apartment, and I found a bottle of antiseptic spray inside the medicine cabinet after rooting around for a few seconds. "Here," I said, handing it to her. "No peroxide, but this should do."

"All right then, off with your hood," Abby said. She grinned at the slightly macabre joke, her lips curling up in the most enchanting bow I could imagine. "You're already bleeding onto it, and you need to get some cold water on that fabric or else it’s going to be ruined."

An electric thrill ran through me as I let her peel my shirt up and over my head, leaving me in just my jeans and boots. Abby had turned to toss my shirt through the open door to the laundry room beyond the bathroom, so when she turned back, her startled pause when she saw my upper body for the first time actually caused me to blush. She reached toward me before pulling her hand back, suddenly realizing that she hadn't asked permission. "Wow."

I tried not to let it show that I was pleased with her unexpected compliment, but I couldn't help it.

Abby blinked and shook her head, tearing her eyes from my torso to look up at my face and taking the bottle of antiseptic in her hand. "Okay, hold still," she said, moving close enough that I could almost feel the heat of her presence against the skin of my upper body. "I'll try and be gentle."

Unfortunately for Abby, the button she'd originally taken to be a weak spray turned out to be much stronger than either of us anticipated, and the resultant shot of mist not only got my cut, but also my left eye. "Ow, shit!" I gasped, immediately closing my eye and turning around. I planted my hands on the countertop, my fingers digging into the curve made by the marble of the sink. "Fuck!"

"I . . . I’m sorry!" Abby said, her voice apologetic. I was blind and in pain, but she sounded just as hurt as I was. "God, I'm so sorry!"

"No . . . it's okay," I said, tears running down my face. "You didn't mean to, and I should’ve closed my eye."

"Hold still," she said, putting her hands on my shoulders. I stilled, a blissful calm almost coursing from her touch into my body, as if she were some sort of magical being. "Keep your eyes closed."

I heard the water in the sink turn on, and a minute later, the cool bliss of a wet washcloth pressed against my injured eye. "Here," I heard Abby say as she gently wiped my eye and down my cheek. "I'm so sorry, Dane. You go and save my life, and I try and repay you by blinding you."

"You didn't mean to, and you don't need to repay me," I said. The pain was lessening. I turned away from the sink and reached up, putting my hand over hers to hold the compress against my eye. Her hand didn't move though, and I could feel how close she was to me. "Just let it flush out a bit, and I'll be fine. You just surprised me, that's all."

In the silence that followed, which was now tense not because we wanted to be apart, but instead because of the unspoken desire to be closer, I could hear her breath quicken. In the reddish darkness of my still tightly shut eyes, I almost thought I could hear her heartbeat. "Dane?"

"Yes?"

"What are those tattoos for?" she asked, her free hand coming up to rest on the ink that adorned my chest and arms. "There are quite a few of them."

" I got most of them in the Army," I said, trying to remember in my mind's eye what her fingers were touching. The truth was, some of them were from before the Army, a few were in service, but a lot of the others were from my time at Leavenworth. Every prisoner has their own little way of telling the administration to fuck off, and for me, it was ink. There had been a Specialist from the 10th Mountain division locked up with me who was quite the amateur artist, even though he didn't always have access to the best supplies. "I think that one is my jump wings. The parachute, right?"

"Yeah," her voice, thick and a bit deeper, said. She was feeling it too, and I was quickly losing any resistance to wanting to pull her closer. She may have been untouchable. She may have been a bit younger than me and most likely the worst mistake since I'd permanently fucked my life up with a single act in Iraq, but if I was going to be damned, there were a lot of worse ways to go than what I wanted at that moment. "What about the others?"

I took the compress away from my eye, blinking as light returned. The first thing I saw was Abby's beautiful face, and without an instant's hesitation or reconsideration, I knew that I was going to fuck her. I pulled her closer to me, my hand coming to her waist, our lips coming together, and I happily fell into damnation again.