Page 3 of Second Chance Fate (Hope Falls: Brewed Awakenings #5)

Her close-call injury was the least of her worries as her heart pounded wildly and she glanced out the window as covertly as possible.

Her anxiety morphed into a different form of tension as she spied with her little eye Caleb Harrison running, in all his shirtless glory, along the path behind the cottage.

She wasn’t sure what was more glorious, the majestic backdrop of the Sierra Nevadas covered in green pine trees and dotted with orange and yellow aspens against a bright blue morning sky with white fluffy clouds, or the breathtaking beauty that was Caleb Harrison’s upper body.

Even from a distance, the strength and power were evident in Caleb's athletic frame. His arms pumped effortlessly by his side as his legs propelled him forward with ease. The grace and command in his movements caused a flush to rise on her cheeks. At least that’s what she was telling herself the blush was caused by.

But she couldn’t deny Caleb Harrison's body was a work of art, a masterpiece. His muscles flexed and rippled with each powerful movement. Every curve and angle of his torso was sculpted like a Greek god. The early morning sunrise shone down on his damp skin, making it glisten.

As she watched him, her mouth watered, and she imagined the salty taste of his skin and the promise of sweet and satisfying kisses.

His mouth claiming hers with desperation.

She closed her eyes and felt the touch of his fingertips grazing her shoulder before gripping the back of her neck firmly, tilting her head back to deepen the kiss.

She absentmindedly licked her lips, tasting the coffee she’d just drunk, which snapped her back to reality.

She quickly pushed the borderline NSFW thoughts from her mind and stepped back from the window.

Taylor needed to clear out all dirty thoughts from her head.

Her brain was a thoroughbred racehorse that needed blinders on.

She had to keep it on track, galloping to the finish line.

There were too many things pressing on her to-do list, and she was determined to stay focused through the clutter of her life.

She shook her head in an attempt to erase any X-rated visions dancing in her mind. She had no business fantasizing about Hope Falls' most eligible bachelor, even if he was the reason she had moved to Hope Falls in the first place.

When Taylor left Illinois and traveled to California, she hadn’t just closed her eyes, spun around ten times, and pinned the tail on the arbitrary donkey map to pick a destination.

Her move was intentional. Three years before she was finally able to leave, she knew exactly where she would go if she ever got the chance.

She was at the hospital with Owen; he’d been admitted for pneumonia, and the nurses had put on a documentary called What is Love?

Taylor was only half listening as she read her latest romance by Abby Jimenez on her Kindle, but something caught her attention.

They stopped in a town called Hope Falls to interview an actor named Kyle Austen Reed.

During the segment, they had B-roll of him walking around town and also at a charity event.

It was the charity event that she saw him —Caleb, Spring Break, Daytona Beach, Caleb.

He was older, a little more filled out, but it was him; she was sure of it.

His eyes , his dimple , and his smile were exactly the same.

She remembered them all. It was hard not to since she had a daily reminder staring back at her in Owen.

It took her a month to figure out what Caleb’s last name was.

She couldn’t look anything up on her phone for fear her ex would see it.

So she had to wait and use an iPad at Owen’s doctor’s office.

The nurses gave it to him to use to play games on sometimes.

After going down a Hope Falls rabbit hole, she discovered his last name was Harrison, and he was a pastor.

Never in a million years would she have guessed that.

You don’t ever think the guy you had a fling with on spring break and got pregnant by would be a pastor.

From everything she learned, he didn’t have a wife or kids, so at least that wouldn’t add another complication to an already messy situation.

Her plan had been to come to town and find out everything she could about him without alerting him to her presence.

Despite it being a small town, she wasn’t worried he’d recognize her, if he even remembered their weekend.

There’d been a lot of drinking involved, and she looked remarkably different.

She put on the freshman fifteen plus five, and, at the time, she was in her junior college stage production of Elvis and Me in the starring role of Priscilla Presley, so her hair was dyed jet black.

Before she revealed who she was or who Owen was, she had to be sure Caleb was a good person—him being a pastor was not enough to tell her that. Her ex was a cop, and he’d turned out to be bad. She’d made that mistake already. She had already let evil in the front door and paid for it dearly.

In a perfect world, she’d continue raising Owen without anyone else being involved.

But this world was far from perfect, and one question haunted her; it kept her up at night.

What would happen to Owen if anything happened to her?

That was her greatest fear. She had no family, no close friends, or friends at all, really; Martin made sure of that.

If something happened to her and Owen had to go into care, with his medical issues, that would be…

she couldn’t even think about what that would be.

Which is why she decided to come here. Her plan had four phases.

Phase one: Get settled. Check

Phase two: Recon, make sure Caleb is a good man and can be trusted as a part of their son’s life. Check.

Phase three: Tell Caleb that he was Owen’s father.

She didn’t expect him to take her word for it.

When they got to Hope Falls, she uploaded Owen’s DNA into a public genealogy site, and to her surprise, Caleb’s DNA was also in it.

It came back as a 99.9% chance that Caleb is Owen’s father.

Thankfully, since Owen was a minor, his record was not only sealed, it was anonymous.

He was just a number, so even if, somehow, the server or site was hacked, no one would know anything about Owen.

Phase 4 (dependent on how phases 1-3 went): Tell Owen that Caleb is his father. She’d never lied to Owen about who his father was. She explained that she met him on spring break and that she didn’t have any way of finding him.

For most of his life, that was the truth…now…now she was keeping a secret from him, and it felt wrong. The problem was, she had been in Hope Falls for eight months and was still stuck in phase two.

A week after they arrived, when she was still in phase one, Caleb went viral over a post that a singer named Karina Black posted about him, calling him “Hot Pastor” and comparing him to Andrew Scott’s “Hot Priest” in Fleabag and Adam Brody’s “Hot Rabbi” in Nobody Wants This to her fifty million followers.

Overnight, he became an internet sensation.

Since then, there had been a flurry of media attention around him.

Multiple entertainment sites, including Access Hollywood, ET, and E News, had come to town to run stories on him.

There was an online petition for him to be the next Bachelor that had over a million signatures.

With the media storm and women lining up to date him, she didn’t feel it was a conducive environment to show up with an eleven-year-old kid and have the Jerry Springer Caleb-you-are-the-father moment.

Hence why it had been eight months, and she was still stuck in phase two. As soon as Caleb ran in front of Golden Years Retirement Home, which they lived next door to, Taylor snapped out of the haze she’d fallen under.

She crossed back to the kitchen and lowered back down in the chair, determined to get some work done while she waited in hold purgatory.

Instead, she ended up absentmindedly doodling on her notebook paper.

She wondered what Caleb would be like on The Bachelor.

Would they market him as Hot Pastor? What was he looking for?

Would he be upset to find out about Owen with all of this going on in his life?

It surprised Taylor that he was single and didn’t have a family. Even though they’d only just met, he talked about how much he wanted kids. And the connection they had was so strong, even though it was brief. If he felt that with other people, it was strange that he wasn’t married.

Or maybe he felt that with a lot of people, and that’s why he wasn’t married.

“Who’s that?” Owen asked as he walked past her, dropped his empty bowl of cereal in the sink, and then came and plopped down in the chair in front of her. His thick brown hair was sleep-mussed, and his signature cowlick stood straight up.

“Still on hold.” She lowered the phone and saw the time. “It’s been almost an hour. I’m starting to think they fled the country.”

“Not on the phone.” Owen placed his forearms on the table and leaned over, peering down at the papers in front of her, reading them upside down as Taylor sipped her coffee. “Who’s Hot Pastor?”

Taylor choked on the liquid as it went down the wrong pipe. She coughed as she set down her cup, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and looked down at her paper. She hadn’t even realized she’d written that. “Nothing. Just…notes…for a book. A book I’m reading.”

“Oh.” Owen lowered back in his chair with an amused glint in his eye. “You’re reading a book about the guy who ran by without his shirt on?”

She stared at her son, caught between wanting to laugh and bang her head on the table.

How did he know about “Hot Pastor”? He hadn’t even gone to school in town yet; he’d been homeschooled.

The only people he’d hung out with were the residents of Golden Years and the nurses and doctors at the hospital, but that was forty-five minutes away.

“Go take a shower. We have to leave in an hour.”

He grinned, clearly delighted with himself.

She’d barely recovered from her choking when the line clicked, and a cheerful voice said, “Allied Medical, this is Marsha. How can I assist you?”

After fifteen or so minutes, the battery life on Taylor’s phone wasn’t the only thing that was drained; her patience was quickly moving into the I-don’t-give-a-fuck-I’ll-burn-this-whole-place-down territory.

The upshot was one of the prescriptions would be ready this afternoon; the other…

wasn’t. Ordering a new sensor for Owen’s blood glucose monitor was more complicated than it needed to be, and it could take a week, possibly two, for them to get a replacement sent out.

Which meant that Taylor was going to need to pay for one out of pocket because Owen was starting school tomorrow, and there was no way he could go without his blood sugar being monitored.

“Is there anything else I can help you with today, Miss Taylor?” Marsha asked cheerfully.

Taylor resisted the urge to scream, “ Yes, you can give my son a replacement sensor, and if you happen to have any tips on how to tell someone that they are the father of an eleven-year-old, that would be great, too .”

Instead, she politely thanked Marsha and ended the call.

Tips or not, she knew she needed to find the right moment to talk to him, but after eight months of living in limbo, she was beginning to doubt if that moment would ever come.

The problem she was finding was that the longer she waited, the harder it got.