Page 7 of Second Chance Fate (Hope Falls: Brewed Awakenings #5)

She’s here.

Caleb gripped the sides of the pulpit. The woman who had eluded him for months had just slipped into the sanctuary and slid into the back pew ten minutes after his sermon began.

The moment the back door opened, before he’d even had a chance to see who was coming or leaving, he’d had a premonition it was her .

Whenever she was near, the atmosphere changed.

He couldn’t explain the phenomenon and had no clue if other people had experienced it; all he knew was whenever she was near, he had a physical response to her.

The tiny hairs on the back of Caleb’s neck stood on end as he faced the congregation. His heart was pounding so wildly in his chest he was sure the mic he had on must be picking it up. Goosebumps rose on his forearms, which were bare because he’d rolled up his white button-down shirt.

He glanced beside her and in front to see if anyone looked like they were expecting her or recognized her.

No one seemed to even notice she was there, just like when he’d asked around, no one knew who he was talking about, which he didn’t understand.

Mysteries and secrets in Hope Falls were rarer than the Hope Diamond.

The first sighting he’d had of her was at the grocery store. She was in the produce aisle inspecting a cantaloupe with a look of intense concentration. A tiny wrinkle appeared between her brows as she stared down at the melon and bit her bottom lip in the most adorable way.

Several things stood out to him about the first time he saw her.

The first was obvious: her beauty. Her face was a mosaic of angelic, ethereal features.

Her skin was flawless, perfect, like a porcelain doll.

Long, silky blonde hair fell past her shoulders, framing her full lips and turned-up nose.

She had a dreamlike quality about her, almost as if she was too good to be true.

The second thing of note was a contradiction.

She looked familiar, and he was sure that he recognized her, but he couldn’t place from where.

He was generally good with faces and names, and there was no way he would ever forget meeting her, so how was it possible that he knew her, but he didn’t know her?

The last, and possibly most disturbing, takeaway from that first encounter was his overwhelming and inappropriate urge to walk over and pull the bottom lip she was biting between his own lips and sink his teeth into her soft, pillowy flesh.

He wanted to pick her up and set her on the display, to step between her legs, cup her face, tilt her chin up, and devour her.

He’d never had such a visceral, primal reaction to someone.

He wasn’t a virgin, but he didn’t have casual sex.

In fact, he had been celibate since stepping into the role as senior pastor five years earlier.

Actually, even a few years before that. Caleb wanted a wife and family.

When he met women, even women he was attracted to, especially women he was attracted to, his first thought was compatibility.

He wanted to get to know them to see if there was a chance that they could have a future together.

The last thing he thought about was the physical side of things.

But not with this woman. He hadn’t had a choice.

His response had been totally involuntary. It had been a primitive reaction.

He’d been so distracted by his response to her that he hadn’t been paying attention to where he was going and bumped his cart into a pyramid of peaches. In the time it took him to pick up the fallen fruit, she’d disappeared. He checked every aisle, but she was gone.

It was three weeks before he saw her again; this time it was at Twin Pine Pharmacy.

He walked in and saw a petite woman at the counter.

Her long blonde hair was halfway down her back, and he couldn’t see her face, but somehow, he knew it was her , the same woman at the grocery store.

That time, unlike the bridge this morning, he was right.

Acting on pure animal instinct, he charged toward her in purposeful strides.

It wasn’t until he got within earshot that he realized she was having a private consultation about medication with the pharmacist. Several medications, actually.

He immediately backed off, giving her privacy and waiting in the wings for her to finish.

While keeping his distance, he noticed Mrs. Arnold, who was in her eighties, struggling to load her wheelchair into the trunk of her car.

He went out to assist her, and when he got back inside, she was gone.

Poof. Vanished. He’d been so tempted to ask Valerie, the pharmacist, but he knew that was against the law and that she couldn’t give out personal information.

Then there was the Brewed Awakenings sighting.

What made her stand out that day was that she was wearing a yellow rain jacket, but it was a perfectly sunny day.

Caleb was trapped in a conversation with the Bartollo brothers.

They’d just gotten back from competing in the monster truck show in Sacramento at Cal Expo and were fired up showing Caleb the pictures and videos.

She walked in, and in the sixty seconds it took Caleb to extract himself from the conversation, she was nowhere to be found.

She’d vanished from the crowd of caffeine seekers.

Each time he’d seen her, she'd been alone, and each time, she left him with more questions than answers. Why was she concentrating so hard on that cantaloupe? Why did she have so many prescriptions? Why was she wearing a rain jacket when it was a clear, sunny day?

“Hem, ahem.”

The sound of a man clearing his throat cut through Caleb’s inner thoughts.

He blinked and glanced over to see the mayor, Henry Walker, seated in the front row staring up at him with an expectant look.

It was only then that Caleb realized that he’d completely zoned out.

The entire congregation had disappeared.

All three hundred people vanished. The only person who existed was her.

The blonde beauty who had some sort of gravitational pull over him.

He had no idea how long he’d been standing behind the pulpit in total silence. It could have been ten seconds or sixty; he had no frame of reference because, to him, time had stood still.

Luckily, he was able to recover. He may feel like a fraud in some aspects of his job, but this was where he felt the most confident and at ease. He loved public speaking. He’d always had a gift for it.

Without even glancing down at his notes, he stepped away from the pulpit and moved to the front of the altar.

“If I asked everyone to close their eyes and think of the first thing that comes to mind when they think of the word love, I bet there’d be a lot of different answers.

” Caleb watched as people glanced around at the people sitting beside them.

He paused before continuing, “Let’s try it. Everyone, close your eyes.”

As the entire congregation did as instructed, Caleb’s gaze went straight to the back row, to his mystery woman. She was sitting with her eyes closed, and the corners of her lips were curling up at the edges.

Whenever Caleb was asked if he could have one superpower, what would it be, he never said he wished he could read people’s minds.

Growing up, he’d overheard his dad counseling his fair share of people, and it taught him a valuable lesson at a very early age: nine times out of ten, you do not want to know what goes on in people’s heads.

There were some things you couldn’t unknow.

But, for the first time in his life, he would do almost anything to have that power.

He wanted to know what love meant to this enigmatic, beautiful creature.

Why did she have that tiny grin on her lips?

Was she thinking of someone special from her past, or was it someone in the present?

Was it from a memory, a joke, or an accomplishment?

The possibilities were endless.

“Okay, now I want you to think of the word love. What’s the first thing that pops into your head?

Is it a word? A feeling? A place? A person?

A color?” There was a scattering of chuckles, but he was serious.

Some people thought of love as a color. He gave them a few moments.

“Okay, now open your eyes, turn to your neighbor, and tell them what you thought of. If it’s a person, you don’t have to be specific.

This isn’t some elaborate plan to trick you into confessing your secret crushes.

But, hey, if it is a person and they are sitting next to you, I mean, it wouldn’t be a bad way to tell them. ”

There was more scattering of laughter, and Caleb watched as people turned to the right and left, telling each other what their words were.

As inconspicuously as possible, he tried to read the mystery woman’s mouth as she relayed her word to Betsy Sanders.

Mrs. Sanders, who was in her late eighties, must have had trouble hearing her because the blonde beauty had to repeat her response again.

Unfortunately, lip reading was not a skill he possessed, because even the second time, he had no clue what she said.

“Okay, show of hands, who had the same answer as the person next to them?” He scanned the congregation and saw about a dozen hands raised.

“So that’s about twelve out of three hundred?

So approximately four percent of people had the same answer.

Obviously, that number is based on proximity, and if we took a poll of the entire room, there would be more matches.

” He walked back behind the pulpit. “But, I don’t think anyone would disagree that love is a big word with a lot of different meanings to different people.