Title: It Had to be You
Author: Mike Owens
Genre: Romance, paranormal romance
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Book Blurb:
PHIL CLAUSSEN, thirty-four-year-old high school teacher in a small town in eastern North Carolina inadvertently torpedoes both his marriage as well as his standing in the community when he buys a huge lawn mower, falls off a bar stool, lands on the mayor’s sister, and gets thrown in jail on charges of drunk and disorderly. To spare his family some of the humiliation he has brought down on them, he does the only thing he can do, buys an Airstream RV and heads west. His trek is uneventful until, driving through Oklahoma, he picks up a female hitchhiker on a deserted county road. In short order, she moves in with him, and when he asks how she came to be standing by the road alone that afternoon her only response is “waiting for you.”
Phil learns quickly enough that DANI BIRCH is no ordinary girl. She knows things she couldn’t possibly know, does things she can’t possibly do. Her Uncle Sy warns him, “you’re in for quite a ride, my friend, but believe me, she’s worth it.”
Everything about this girl is strange, from her habit of arriving in luxury automobiles, hiding them behind his Airstream, and taking them again the next day with no explanation. She also has an uncanny ability to see into the future. She already knows a lot about Phil, but it takes him several weeks to even learn her name. Strangest of all, perhaps, is how quickly he falls head over heels in love with her. When Phil unexpectedly inherits a thousand acres of land from Dani’s uncle, a man Phil has known for less than two months, he wonders whether he might have wandered into a situation that was ready and waiting for him all along.
In spite off, or perhaps, because of all the weirdness, Dani soon becomes the center of his universe, and the deeper he gets into her world, the more he wants to stay there forever. Phil is soon an established member of a remote Oklahoma community that, a short time before, he didn’t know existed. Perhaps their marriage and the birth of their first child are events that were set in motion long before, but when he’s lost in the magic of Dani’s blue eyes, Phil couldn’t care less how he got there.
Excerpt:
“Uncle Sy never mentioned you by name, only that when the right guy came along, I would know. It sounds crazy, but he was right. I knew the first minute I saw you.” She moved closer until their noses were touching, until the only world he could see was the one in her eyes. “What you must understand is I’d been waiting for you for a long time, and I would have kept on waiting for you. It had to be you, can’t you see that?”
“Not exactly.”
“Phil Claussen, don’t you dare say that to me.”
“Sorry, just couldn’t pass it up. Will it make it better if I say that, now that I know you, I would have waited for you too, however long it took.”
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What makes your featured book a must read?
The main character in the story, Phil Claussen, confronts a seemingly random series of events that all seem connected, even prepared before his arrival. Is his love for Dani the result of a chance encounter, or a predetermined event just waiting to happen. In other words, were they made for each other?
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Author Biography:
A native Tar Heel, the author obtained his undergraduate degree and medical degrees from the University of NC, Chapel Hill, NC, and an MFA in creative writing from Old Dominio University, Norfolk, VA. His topics in fiction vary widely, ranging from science themes to end-of-life care issues to erotica…go figure! It Had to be You follows a man whose self-destructive behavior leads him to a small town in OK and into a romantic adventure with a young woman who magically appears and seems to have been waiting for him all along.