Page 95 of Puppy Love

Ifthatwas 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.

Harrison balked—as inphysicallybalked, 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 puppyandSophie 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 reasonhewas 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.”