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  Falling for Hope

  Book #3 in the Four Winds Series

  Anne Conley

  Copyright 2014

  Published by Anne Conley.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead are purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Vanessa Booke, copyright 2014.

  Edited by Catherine DePasquale.

  Many thanks go out to everyone who has helped with the development of the idea for this series of books. My husband and my daughter, especially who have helped me immensely with the development of Damien as a character. My writing group NJ and

  Vanessa, for their words of encouragement and support, and my fans and followers, who have given me the encouragement I needed to keep going when my mojo was feeling trodden upon.

  This book is dedicated to my daughter, Elizabeth. Without her, this would not be the book it is. She is fascinated with Mr. Butterfly, and all he symbolizes. My sweet little sounding board, my biggest fan (even though you still get the edited versions of the stories, and will for many years to come), I love you so much.

  Chapter 1

  Well, this is it. Gabriel considered the unassuming brick building before striding up the steps. The familiar sounds of pages turning filled his ears as he wandered through the library. Meandering through the stacks, his fingers ran across book spines, lazily bouncing his fingernail along.

  He pondered what lay ahead. Whom had He chosen? Would she be smart? Kind? Beautiful? Would he have to rehabilitate her? Knowing The Boss, it would be someone unlikely. That was just the way He worked. Gabe reflected on the messages he'd delivered, and wondered how receptive this woman would be.

  Odd. He usually didn't wonder so much. Maybe it was starting already? He didn't feel excited at the prospect. Gabriel didn't feel much of anything, which wasn't odd. He was just fulfilling a duty. Like always. Forever and ever. Amen.

  Continuing to walk around the library, feeling the familiar pull in his gut that told him where to go, he ended up at a room that said, "Children's Library. Get Ready to Play!" It was a hand-written sign, letters neatly penned with multi-colored markers. He took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  Everything in this room was shorter; there were no stacks to hide behind, so he masked himself to observe the situation. Nobody had noticed the door open. They were too intent on the woman reading the book to notice much of anything. Gabe scanned the crowd of mostly mothers and a few fathers, who were watching the woman in the strange costume read from a book using different voices, as she showed the pictures to a mass of tiny people sitting at her feet.

  Gabe perused the faces of the crowd, not feeling the pull. When his gaze landed on the woman reading, however, the invisible cord attached to his insides tautened, and he knew she was the one.

  It took him a few minutes to realize she was wearing a puffy goose costume. Her thick legs stuck out from the bottom, and they tapered to dainty feet wearing a pair of sensible black dress shoes. Frizzy, honey-colored hair stuck out at all angles from under a wide-brimmed straw hat. Her face was beautiful: round cheeks, full lips, enormous brown eyes.

  Still invisible, he stood in the corner and studied her, as well as himself for any reaction. It certainly wasn't love at first sight. He felt the pull to her, which told him she was his target, but nothing more. She was attractive, without doubt. Judging by her legs, her body under the goose costume was probably rubenesque, which was nice. Gabe had never really found women attractive when he could see their skeletal frame under their skin. Women were meant to look soft and healthy. And this one looked soft.

  He deliberated the situation, as he listened to her awful British accent read about a mad king who baked birds into a pie. He watched the children's eyes grow wide, as she showed them the picture of the pie bursting open and black birds escaping the confines of the crust. He remembered seeing that once in France. The book's illustrations didn't do the experience justice. When real birds are baked into a pie, it's a good deal messier. Feathers, excrement, corpses. He shuddered involuntarily at the memory, and then put it back in the recesses of his mind where it belonged.

  Her voice was lovely, with its lilting tone. After she finished reading, the woman stood to lead the children to an array of tables where craft supplies were set up and waiting. She was a short woman, almost a foot shorter than his corporeal form, and the goose costume was actually pretty well-made, once she stood up and he got the full effect of it.

  She gave detailed instructions for the children to write their own nursery rhyme and then showed them how to put it into a book, complete with illustrations for them to take home. She maneuvered around the tables and between students, almost deftly in the cumbersome costume, only knocking one set of colored pencils off a table with her goose tail. Gabe watched her with interest, as she bent over to offer words of encouragement to the children, helping them come up with rhyming words, praising their efforts.

  She would do nicely.

  Chapter 2

  Hope woke up the next morning, thankful for a new day. Yesterday had just been weird. Not bad weird, just weird-- a prickly sense of being watched. She never felt in danger, but every time she looked, nobody was there. And that taste in her mouth. It was a sweet tangy taste, like she'd eaten a bunch of sweet tarts, and the tang made her jaw sting and her mouth water. She couldn't explain that. At all. It's not like the leftover meatloaf she'd eaten for lunch could have caused that. It didn't go away until she left the library. Then she went home to make some hot chocolate to get the remnants of the taste out of her mouth.

  She had fantasized about the feeling coming from some being who was madly in love with her, but some unknown force had kept him from being visible to her, so he followed her around, watching. That had come from a book she'd read, about a member of the fey who'd fallen in love with a mortal woman. She'd pulled that book out of the pile by her bed and re-read the love scenes until she'd fallen asleep.

  This morning Hope lay in bed, idly stroking Hermes, the giant tom cat who slept on her chest every night. He was ready for her to get out of bed and feed him, but she wanted to enjoy her new sheets just a little while longer. She had splurged on them last month. Twelve hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton. They were sinful.

  She snuggled down in them, and Hermes took that as invitation to creep up her chest to rest on her neck, purring loudly. He started rubbing his face on her cheek. An impatient meow came from the floor at the foot of her bed, before it shook with the arrival of Perseus, a black, white, and orange calico. In kitten-stage, she’d thought it was a boy, but when he went into heat, she realized she’d been mistaken, but the name stuck. Come to find out, all calicos are girls. She should have known that.

  "Okay, okay…I'm getting up." Perseus was the pushy one. She knew that if she didn't get into the kitchen in the next two minutes, she would have all five of the cats in bed with her, on her head, demanding food. And Athena bit. Not the best way to wake up.

  Dislodging Hermes from his spot on her neck, she sat up and swung her feet to the floor. Shuffling into the kitchen, she grabbed a Dr. Pepper out of the fridge and three cans of cat food out of the cabinet. When she started opening them, cats swirled at her feet, rubbing against her ankles, filling the kitchen with purring and mewling sounds.

  While the cats were eating, Hope toyed with the idea of getting back into her bed for just a few minutes, but she loo
ked at the can of Dr. Pepper in her hand, and decided to just get in the shower and get ready for work.

  Wrapped in her fuzzy bathrobe, Hope dug through her closet looking for the loose-fitting dress she wanted to wear today. It was comfortable, and she had just bought it last month, but it wasn't in her closet. She looked around her room. The pile of clothes by her bed were dirty, for sure, and she didn't think it was there. So she rummaged through the pile on the chair in the corner. Those clothes could be worn again before being washed. Her semi-dirty pile. The only problem was, Di had claimed this pile as her lounging spot, and more often than not, she didn't get the opportunity to wear the clothes more than once before they were covered in cat hair.

  Hope found her dress and shook it out, trying to dislodge some of the wrinkles. Cat hair danced in the air, and Hope resigned herself to using the lint brush to remove it from the dress. If it was a print, it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but this dress was a really pretty caramel color that matched her eyes. And white cat hair showed.

  Dionysus came into the bedroom and rawled at having her lounge disturbed, before hopping up and settling in for the day. She watched Hope through half-closed eyes, as Hope walked over and ran her fingers over the feline's head.

  "Sorry, girl. I needed my dress. I'll put it back this evening, as long as I don't spill anything on it today or get too sweaty." A purr resonated from the cat, who closed her eyes, seemingly content with the explanation.

  Hope would spend most of the day re-shelving books from the day before. On Story Day, she was usually too busy setting up for craft time and then cleaning up from craft time to actually put away books. And it was her busiest day of the week, so there were usually a ton of books to re-shelve.

  Today when she walked in she was surprised by a man sitting in the corner looking at picture books that had been left on the table. Her mouth suddenly filled with the tangy-sweet taste from the day before, and she shook her head, swallowing with annoyance.

  "Do you need help finding anything?"

  She was hyper-aware that this was one of the best looking men she'd ever seen, let alone spoken to, in her lifetime. He had an almost feminine look to him, his almond-shaped eyes, high cheek bones, eyelashes that were full and fluttered at her as his eyes rose, a delicacy of his features. He was tall, she could tell by the way his body folded in upon itself in the children's chair. His eyes were an intense brown color, shining with specks of gold. His hair was also brown, though it was lighter than his eyes and shone in the fluorescent lighting of the room. She stifled the urge to reach out and touch it.

  His gaze landed on her, and his eyes widened with interest, making her heart flutter ridiculously. Get a grip, Hope.

  "No thank you. I just need a quiet place to sit for a while. Is it okay if I sit here?"

  His voice made goose bumps pop up on her back. It was low and husky, and reminded her of liquid sex, pouring over her body. It was a voice of a shifter, one who would turn into a game cat, like a leopard, or some other sexy predator.

  Hope nodded, before turning abruptly to gather her books. Holy Cow! She needed to chill out. The prickly feeling was back, and she looked over her shoulder to see him studying her. She wracked her brain to try to remember if he had been there yesterday. Her memory grazed over the two fathers that had been at story time, and he was neither. She would have remembered those eyes. And that voice.

  She moved around the children's section, picking up books and stacking them on her cart, grouped by subject. They didn't use the Dewey decimal system in this room. Children didn’t get it yet. When she went back to the table the man was sitting at, he had already stacked the books on the edge for her. She flashed him a grateful smile, before scooping the books up in her arms and organizing them on the cart.

  She could smell him. He wore a lot of cologne, but she wasn't complaining. It was a sweet, spicy smell that surprisingly complimented the tangy taste in her mouth. She swallowed the rush of saliva that suddenly filled her mouth again and tried to ignore the swarm of sensations that were quickly overwhelming her body in such close proximity to this man.

  Moving her cart away from his dizzying presence, she risked another quick look over her shoulder. He was studying the table, arms folded in front of him, resting. He appeared to be thinking about something intently. Hope went about her business shelving books from the cart, moving from one stack to the next. She was efficient and worked quickly. This was something she did all the time, but it still took a while, due to the sheer amount of books that were left out yesterday. From time to time, she stopped to help a child pick out a book or answer a parent’s question. Throughout it all, the man sat in the corner.

  He stayed so long Hope began to wonder about him. As a child's librarian, she had been to certain training classes about paying attention to your surroundings. She had been taught to watch for predators of children, adults without kids, hanging around where children did, looking for targets. But this man didn't seem interested in the children at all. The only person she had caught him looking at was her.

  When she got to the American Girl section, a slip of paper fell out of one of the books. She bent to retrieve it and noticed it had writing on it.

  In a delicate script that was so perfect it looked computer generated were the words, "Have dinner with me tonight."

  Hope stilled, as her heart pounded. Did he write that? Was it meant for her? She looked up at him, to see him studying her again. His eyes almost sparkled, crinkling around the edges, but he made no move to speak. He hadn't spoken all day, and it was nearly two in the afternoon. He sat stock still, made no move to acknowledge her at all. Except he was still staring.

  Hope looked down at herself. Sure, she liked this dress, because it camouflaged her curves. By camouflaging them, she was afraid she looked fatter than she really was. Her hair was frizzy, because she had no idea how to fix it, and she wasn't a fan of make-up. She was covered in cat hair, because she'd forgotten to dig out the lint brush before she'd left for work.

  And he had the face of an angel, or a vampire, or an alpha shifter. He was larger than she imagined the Fey to be, but he certainly had the perfection of one. There was no way he had written this note to her. She swallowed the tangy saliva pooling in her mouth, offered a weak smile, crumpled the note into a tiny ball and put it in her pocket to throw away later.

  Chapter 3

  He was still sitting there when she left late in the afternoon. An assistant librarian came in during the evening to keep an eye on things after Hope left.

  She still had the prickly feeling today and that strange yet oddly yummy taste in her mouth. She attributed the prickly feeling to the man in the corner today. But the taste worried her. Was she coming down with some sort of chronic illness that caused strokes or seizures? She vowed to herself to look it up on WebMD when she got home. But first, she had a date with a man in a painting.

  The Fine Arts Museum had a touring exhibition of Titian at the moment. As a member (at a reduced rate, due to her employment status), she got free tickets to special events and reduced price tickets the rest of the time. She took advantage of this every chance she got. Since the Museum was near the library, she had lots of chances.

  Titian was a Renaissance painter of the Venetian school from the 16th Century, and Hope found herself entranced by the wonderful colors and the subject matter of his paintings. She had looked at them all, in-depth, but one in particular had struck her when she first saw it and kept coming to her mind the last couple of days. She didn’t know why, just that she wanted to look at it again.

  As she entered the room with the paintings displayed, a reverence filled her at being in the presence of such talent. The emotions evoked with simple brush strokes centuries ago, by the hand of long-dead masters, almost brought a tear to her eye. She sat on the bench in front of the painting of the Archangel Gabriel and studied it, yet again.

  It was by far her favorite painting in the collection. Not that it was more visually stunnin
g than the others, but it was more striking to her in its simplicity. The depiction of Gabriel was asexual, she couldn’t really tell by looking at it if it was a man or woman. His hair was long and curly, and the color of cinnamon, the light shining on it turning it golden at the ends. The face was delicate, with a strong Roman nose, clear porcelain skin, and a large supple mouth. Gabriel’s eyes were dark, and he was looking to the side, his face in profile, as if seeing something that arrested his attention. Hope chose to think he was arching an elegant eyebrow at whatever had his interest. One hand was raised and one lowered, a banner loosely strung between them, as if he was going to hold it up, but whatever had captured his attention and arched his eyebrow had halted his progress.

  Of course, she knew what had captured his interest, the image of Jesus ascending on the panel next to Gabriel, but Hope liked to look at the image in a secular fashion, without the rest of the piece. She knew that wasn’t how it was supposed to be viewed, and she was probably doing the artist a serious disservice, but she just liked the image of the archangel. There was something vaguely familiar about him.

  The look on the angel Gabriel’s face was one of someone whose prayers had been answered, and Hope felt a familiar longing at the image. She wished someone would look at her like that. She wanted to be the answer to someone’s deepest desires. She wanted to feel needed like that.

  Never mind the answered prayers part. She didn’t pray. It wasn’t because she wasn’t Christian or anything, she just felt that God was so much bigger than her. Tthere was no way her meager little wishes would be heard in the sea of prayers deluging him. When she sat quietly and really thought about God and religion and stuff, she just felt so small. What were her needs beside war, famine, disease? She believed in the power of prayer, had no reason not to. Desperate people making desperate pleas. That’s who needed prayer. Not her. She almost had everything she needed. Besides, her one prayer wasn’t really fixable now, was it? Melissa would always be dead.