Puppy Love

by Lucy Gilmore

  Just like his mom. Just like Sophie. And now, it seemed, just like Bubbles.

  “No.”

  Harrison wasn’t sure where the sudden resolution came from. Saying no had always come easy to him, but never like this. He normally said no to friendship and opportunity, to happiness and love. He said no to anything that threatened to shake him out of his comfortable misery.

  This time, however, he was saying no to being left behind.

  “I’m not letting you go without a fight,” he said to the empty kitchen. Which was just as well, because he wasn’t sure who he was talking to. “You don’t get to walk away without saying goodbye. You’re a part of me now.”

  Despite the earliness—or lateness—of the hour, he grabbed his keys off the hook and shoved his feet into a pair of work boots by the back door. He had no idea where his puppy had gone or why, but he knew exactly who he could rely on to help find her.

  She was determined and strong. She was resolute and insistent.

  She was his whole fucking world, and it was about goddamn time he did something about it.

  * * *

  “She’s gone.”

  Sophie awoke to find an unshaven, unkempt, and frantic man standing at the foot of her bed.

  “I looked all over the house and the yard, but her footsteps stopped a few feet from the back door and I can’t find any other trace of her.”

  She sat up, aware, as she did, that the flimsy camisole she’d worn to bed left little to the imagination. But her nipples peeking through the thin silk fabric seemed less important than the fact that Harrison Parks had somehow broken into her house.

  “Harrison? What are you doing here? And how did you get in?”

  “I don’t know what the timeline for lost puppies is, but I know that for people, the first twenty-four hours are the most vital.”

  “Lost puppies?” she echoed, clarity beginning to wipe away some of her grogginess.

  “Yes. I woke up about an hour ago to find Bubbles missing. She’s not in any of the usual places, and she doesn’t come when she’s called. I need to set up a grid search—and I need to do it now—but I don’t have enough bodies. Will you come?”

  “Um.”

  “Please, Sophie.” His voice had never sounded so bleak, his expression never been so harsh. He’d also never looked so good. Maybe it was the dim lights of dawn peeking in through the window, or maybe it was the fact that he looked as honestly, openly human as she’d ever seen him, but the worried lines of his face touched something deep within her. “I know you officially graduated us, and that you technically aren’t responsible for her care anymore, but she needs you.”

  He paused. “I need you.”

  Those three words were all she needed to hear to click into awareness. She threw back her quilt and began tossing on whatever clothes were at hand. The result was a mismatch of knee-high socks, jeans that were two sizes too big, and a sweatshirt that proclaimed her the 2005 Northwest Volleyball Champion, but she didn’t care.

  Harrison needed her.

  Okay, so he needed her help with Bubbles, and nothing short of an emergency would have forced those words out of his mouth in the first place, but she wasn’t going to quibble over the details. Not when it came to one of her puppies.

  Or when it came to one of her friends.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” she said as she led him out her bedroom door to the kitchen. Her mother was already there, wrapped up in a fuzzy pink robe and starting the coffeepot, which answered the question of how Harrison got inside. “When did you last see her, and what did you do after you left the Department of Natural Resources yesterday? Hey, Mom. Make it extra strong, will you?”

  “Triple strength,” she promised. “Anything else I can do to help? That poor little puppy. She must be terrified out there on her own.”

  Sophie took one look at Harrison’s expression—which had moved well beyond terrified to reveal a pale, tightly drawn frown—and laughed. It was difficult to get out in any sort of way that sounded natural, but she did it because he needed her to. “That poor little puppy is probably chasing a rabbit through the woods and having the time of her life. It’s Harrison we should feel sorry for.”

  “You think that’s what she’s doing?” Harrison asked. He took a cup of coffee from her mom with a slight nod of thanks. It was a strange thing to see, her mother accepting a large, strange man in her precious daughter’s kitchen at four o’clock in the morning, but Alice had always been good in a crisis.

  “I do. We’ve probably been working her too hard, so she saw a chance at freedom and took it. She’s still just a baby in so many ways.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Mentioning how vulnerable Bubbles was only served to make Harrison vulnerable too.

  “Hey.” She reached out and placed a hand on his arm, feeling the tense strength of him through the worn flannel. “She’ll be okay. Dogs run away from their owners and come home none the worse for their little adventures all the time. I promise.”

  “Maybe it works that way for most people,” he said soberly. “But whenever anyone runs away from me, it has a tendency to stick.”

  She dug her fingers so firmly into his arm it caused him to wince. “We’ll find her and bring her home where she belongs, Harrison. I promise.”

  He nodded once, accepting her vow as though she carried the authority of the world on her shoulders. Her mother watched the interaction with unblinking eyes peeping over the top of her coffee cup. Sophie knew she was paying attention because even though the mug was held to her lips, she hadn’t taken a sip even once.

  Sophie also knew that somewhere along the lines, her mom had begun to see what she saw—that Harrison wasn’t some cold stranger bent on ruining her precious daughter’s life. He was just a man. One who was scared and lonely and who had been that way for so long it had never occurred to him that he deserved more.

  But he did deserve it, and for the first time since Sophie had entered his life, he was ready to push himself to get it.

  “Harrison says he wants to start a—what was it?” She looked a question at him. “Grid search?”

  He nodded, his firefighting training clicking into place. “Yes. It’s standard whenever anyone goes missing in the wilderness. By putting up parameters and assigning everyone a region, we can cover the most ground without doubling up. Even if she moved as fast as her legs would take her, she can’t have gone too far from the house.”

  “Okay, then that’s what we’ll do.” Sophie released her grip on Harrison and grabbed the pen and notepad Lila kept in a tidy pile next to the house phone. “You set up your parameters, and we’ll recruit everyone we know to take them.”

  Her mom nodded. “I’ll wake the girls and then give Paulette a call. She’ll want to help.”

  “Paulette?” Harrison echoed.

  “From Sophie’s knitting circle. I’m sure she and Hilda can get most of the other women from the group to join in, not to mention their families.”

  “But—”

  “And Oscar and as many DNR people as he can rustle up,” Sophie added before Harrison could protest. She knew what he was thinking—that the women of the knitting circle were the ones who caused her mother to move into the house in the first place—but that hardly mattered now. When it came to protecting their own, those fierce, loyal women were a godsend. And Harrison, whether he knew it or not, was one of their own.

  Because he’s mine.

  As Sophie was rapidly coming to learn, the people who loved her, who took such good care of her, didn’t just throw the mantle over herself. It automatically extended to everyone she held dear, no questions asked.

  If that was what it meant to be weak, to know that she and everyone she held dear was loved, then so be it. She was willing to accept the consequences—if not for her own sake, then for Harrison’s. That man could use a safety net right about now.

  “You should also include your parents,” Sophie’s mom added.

  Ha
rrison balked—as in physically balked, his entire body rearing back like a horse stopping at a jump. “Parents? Mine?”

  “Good idea. They’ll have a better idea of all the hiding places out there, and Bubbles knows and trusts your father.” Sophie took one look at Harrison’s expression and added, “I’ll give them a call right now. I’m sure they’ll meet us out there.”

  “Perfect. That gives us a nice, big number.” Her mom yanked open a cupboard and started pulling down all the to-go coffee cups she could find. “With a group this large, I’m sure we’ll have that little puppy home by noon.”

  Chapter 21

  To no one’s surprise, it turned out that noon was an optimistic estimate.

  Harrison was no stranger to the weird ways time worked in an emergency situation. Some days, firefighting in the wilderness seemed to stretch into eternity, each second a minute, each minute an hour. Other days, he went from opening his eyes in the morning to closing them twelve hours later without so much as a memory of the events that occurred.

  This was one of those former situations. True to their promise, the Vasquez women had marshalled a search party that was larger and more dedicated than he had any right to expect, but all the bodies in the world couldn’t force a two-pound puppy to materialize out of thin air.

  “Bubbles!”

  “Oh, Bubbles!”

  “Here, puppy, puppy. Come out, doggie, doggie.”

  The sounds of two dozen people scouring the woods outside his house provided a strangely soothing backdrop to his own part of the search, which was to turn over any large log and rip out any oversize brush that might have accidentally trapped her. He knew it was dangerous to undergo that kind of exertion without Bubbles there to make sure his blood sugar levels were stable, but that was sort of the whole point, wasn’t it?

  He couldn’t do this without her. Not anymore. Somewhere in the past few weeks, he’d realized that the one-man approach to living wasn’t the way he wanted to go about things.

  He wasn’t infallible. He wasn’t an island. He was just a man, and he wanted his puppy back.

  He wanted his puppy and Sophie back. He just had to find a way to get to them first.

  “Oh. Um. Hello, Harry.”

  Harrison stepped out from behind a tree to find his mother sitting on a fallen log, her legs extended out in front of her and a bag of trail mix in her hand. To all appearances, she looked like a person without a care in the world.

  Which, he guessed, was exactly what she was. She might have come at Sophie’s mom’s bidding—because, really, who could say no to that woman?—but she had no emotional investment in the outcome. She’d never had any emotional investment where her only son was concerned.

  “Do you need to take a break?” he asked. As usual, his voice came out rougher than he intended, but he didn’t know how to stop it. “If you’re not feeling up to the search, you can head back to the house and we can reassign your section to someone else.”

  Minerva hopped to her feet and tucked her snack out of sight. “I’m fine. I was just catching my breath, that’s all.”

  “It’s okay if you need a rest,” he said with a complete absence of irony. It may have taken a tiny puppy and a woman with a heart of steel to teach him that, but he’d learned his lesson. “The search isn’t worth risking your own health.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, equally unironically. “It’s taken a lot more out of me than I expected, that’s all. Being back here, seeing it again.”

  His sympathies stopped there.

  “I’ve missed it—these woods, this place.” His mom stopped. She must have seen the look on his face, because her voice quavered as she added, “You.”

  “The first twenty-four hours are the most important,” he said, parroting his words from earlier that morning. He doubted that Bubbles was the real reason she’d come out here today, but he didn’t care. She was the reason he was here, and that was all that mattered. “We need to keep searching while the daylight lasts.”

  His mom brushed her hands on the seat of her jeans and nodded, her eyes not quite meeting his. “She means a lot to you—this dog?”

  He didn’t know what it was about her tone that annoyed him, but it probably had something to do with how disbelieving it was, how unsure. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Naturally this woman, who had seen a son in peril and walked away, couldn’t fathom putting in this kind of work for a mere puppy.

  “Yes, Minerva. Mom.” He placed a heavy emphasis on her title. “Bubbles means a lot to me. I’ve only had her for a few weeks, but I love her.”

  She lifted a hand to him before dropping it well out of reach. “Of course you do, darling.”

  On the contrary, there was no of course about it. Of course was the last thing anyone would have expected when pairing a man like him and a puppy like Bubbles. In fact, the only person in the world who would look at the two of them and think, Huh, this seems like a great idea, was Sophie.

  Not because her world was one of comfort and coddling, but because she was the only person to believe he could change. She’d taken one look at him, seen straight through to his heart, and decided to single-handedly bring it to life again.

  And that was exactly what she’d done—up until the moment he’d crushed her with a few callous words.

  Yet she was still here, helping him.

  She was still here, making sure that whatever was left of his heart had a chance to thrive.

  “I don’t believe in forgiveness and second chances,” he said with an abrupt change of subject.

  His mother’s face fell. “I know I don’t deserve either one, but—”

  “Just because Dad is capable of reversing twenty-two years of conditioning and is willing to open his heart to you again, that doesn’t mean I have to too.”

  “No, and I completely understand, only—”

  “Don’t hurt him,” Harrison said.

  She blinked, almost as confused as he was by the sudden change in his tone. But although she couldn’t know what kinds of battles were being waged inside his chest, had no idea that Sophie had triumphed there so many times already, he did. Forgiveness and second chances sounded pretty good right about now. So did opening his heart to all those possibilities he’d shunned for years.

  “That’s all I ask of you,” he said. “I don’t know why you decided to come back now, of all times, or what you said to convince Dad that this time would be any different, but these past twenty years haven’t been easy on him. I haven’t been easy on him.”

  “Oh, Harrison.”

  This time, when she reached for him, she made contact. It wasn’t much, just a press of her fingers before she dropped her hand away, but it was enough. This woman may not have had the strength to sit by his bedside and watch him in pain, but that was on her. She was the one who’d missed his childhood, his adolescence, his young adulthood. She was the one who’d run away rather than face the harsh realities of life.

  She was the broken one. Not him.

  “It must have been really difficult, seeing me like that,” he offered.

  His mom’s lower lip quivered. “It was. You have no idea. I was—Oh, I don’t know. Weak? Scared? A little of both, I think. I’m not as strong as your father. I never have been. I took one look at you, so tiny and unconscious in that bed, and had to get away.”

  It was a sentiment he didn’t understand, since Bubbles was tiny and could very well be unconscious, and he had no intention of stopping until he had her in his arms again. But he softened anyway.

  Especially when his mom muttered a curse and said, “You were better off with him anyway, believe me.”

  He had to chuckle. “I might not have agreed with you a few weeks ago, but I think I do now.”

  She looked a question at him.

  “I always thought it was the worst thing about me, how much like Dad I am, but I’m starting to think it might be a good thing.”

  As if to prove it, his dad’s voice sounded in the dis
tance. He called out for Bubbles in his usual cantankerous tone, offering several reasons why tiny puppies who took off in the middle of the night deserved their inevitable fates.

  “He won’t stop until we find her,” Harrison said. “He won’t leave when things get rough. In fact, he wouldn’t even leave me until a few days ago when he finally realized I’d be okay on my own.”

  “And will you?” his mom asked, watching him.

  Harrison nodded. He had no way of knowing what the future held for him, and there was a good chance Sophie would never forgive him for hurting her, but he’d wait. Twenty-two years if he had to, growing even more irritable and set in his ways as the years progressed.

  Parks men were built that way—for the kind of love that lasted a lifetime. For the fairy-tale ending they deserved. For the kind of life that refused to accept anything but a happily ever after.

  * * *

  “You should take a break.”

  Sophie approached the wooded copse Harrison was searching with a bottle of water in her hand and a look of determination on her face. “You’re not going to do anyone any good if you faint out here. It’ll take at least twelve of the men to drag you back to the house.”

  Even though it was the last thing he felt like, he huffed out a laugh. It seemed like the least he could do. They were nearing the eight-hour mark for their search. Even though everyone else’s optimism had flagged, she remained determinedly positive, all smiles and encouragement and rah-rah promises.

  “Thank you.” He accepted the water and took a few deep gulps. “But I’d like to stay out here as long as possible.”

  “I’m sure you do, but my sisters want to talk to you, so you might as well take fifteen. Apparently, Lila has a theory she’d like to share with you.”

  “She has a theory?” He blinked. “Like…of relativity?”

  “Something like that.” Sophie’s smile faltered. Clasping her hands in front of her, she became unnaturally focused on a hangnail on her thumb. “Lila’s supersmart when it comes to animal behavior, so she’s worth listening to. I told her what you said yesterday, about how Bubbles misses me, and she thinks you could be right. She says the puppy might be out looking for me.”