Title: It Had to Be You
Author: Mike Owens
Genre: Romance, paranormal romance
Book Blurb:
PHILLIP 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 a charge 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 that afternoon, her only response is “Waiting for you.”
Phil learns quickly enough that DANI BIRCH is no ordinary girl. She knows things she can’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 woman is strange, from her habit of arriving in luxury automobiles, hiding them behind the Airstream, and taking them away the next day, to her apparent ability to see the future. She already knows quite 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 her uncle, a man he’s 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 of, or perhaps because of, all the weirdness, Dani 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 all set in motion long before, but when he is lost in the magic of Dani’s blue eyes, Phil couldn’t care less about how he got there.
Excerpt
“Uncle Sy never mentioned you by name, only that when the right guy came by, 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 have to 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.”
“Phi Claussen, don’t you dare say that to me. How could you?”
“Sorry, just couldn’t pass it up. Will it make it better if I say, now that I know you, I would have waited for you too, however long it took?”
Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub)
Giveaway –
One lucky reader will win a $100 Amazon gift card.
Open internationally.
Runs September 1 – 30, 2024
Drawing will be held on October 1, 2024.
Author Biography:
A native Tar Heel, Mike Owens obtained his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, and later, an MFA in creative writing from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, where he is occasionally inspired by the ghost of a beloved Weimaraner. His topics in fiction vary widely, ranging from science themes to end-of-life issues to erotica…go figure! His new release, IT HAD TO BE YOU follows a man whose self-destructive behavior leads him to a town in Oklahoma and into a romantic adventure with a young woman who appears to have been waiting for him all along.
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