Hitched(61)

Hope makes the call to the sheriff’s office, and within four minutes, Cassie has a lead. “Someone posted on InstaChat that they spotted a vintage Ford station wagon with a white alpaca leaning its head out the window headed out of town on the highway to Atlanta!”

“Oo-rah!” Clint yells.

“I’m calling the sheriff,” Ryan says.

“The dogs!” Hope suddenly shrieks. “I need to let the dogs out to run. And the goats need to be fed and milked, and—”

“We’ve got them,” Olivia tells her, and Jace nods. “You go get my favorite alpaca back.”

We pile into Hope’s truck, and Clint and Ryan hop into Ryan’s truck to follow us, and we’re off, on our way to bring Chewy home. Because, in the immortal words of the blue alien from that movie I loved as a kid, family means no one is left behind.





Twenty-Five





Blake





* * *



The sheriff tells us all to sit tight and wait for the deputies to report back with news.

We, of course, pay zero attention to that and divide ourselves into search parties.

Forget waiting for the sheriff’s deputies.

We have an alpaca to save.

Hope and I are racing down the highway, me driving, while she stays plugged in to InstaChat for alpaca-spotting updates, while Ryan and Clint follow a short distance behind.

“I thought he was one of the good guys,” she fumes, refreshing the screen for the hundredth time. I keep waiting for a sign that she’s going to go uber-electric and short it out, but nothing’s buzzing despite her clear anger with Dean. “People who do yoga in the grass beside a field shouldn’t steal animals. He should know that’s terrible karma.”

I reach over and take her hand. “He won’t get away with it.”

She bites her lip and nods. “No, he won’t.” Dropping her cell into her lap, she brings both of her hands to cradle mine. “And Blake…I meant what I said to my parents. I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. I’m sorry I’ve been too weird to say it.”

“Ah, baby, I know. You show it. Even when you don’t mean to.” I squeeze her fingers. “And I like you weird. Don’t ever change.”

She smiles. “Couldn’t if I tried, so that works out.” Her phone dings, and she releases my hand to grab it, getting an update that has her bouncing in her seat. “Turn right!” she says, pointing to the exit up ahead. “Lizzie at the Kennedy Family Day School just spotted them heading toward the river port a few minutes ago! She said Chewpaca looked angry, but wasn’t trying to climb out the window.”

I swing a hard right onto the exit that quickly becomes a graying county road that’ll take us the short way to the river dock.

“Blake?” Hope says, gripping my thigh through my jeans like a lifeline.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you so much. For being here and…everything else.”

It kills me that she feels the need to thank me for being a decent human being, and that she didn’t have the love or support every kid needs growing up. But it means the world that she’s opening up and letting me into her thoughts.

And into her heart…

“Anything for you,” I say. “Anything.”

She leans in, pressing a quick kiss to my cheek that warms me all the way to my core before she hops on the phone to call Ryan and tell him the latest. “Okay, sounds good,” she says after she gives him the update. She nods my way as she points straight ahead. “You guys head to the north boat ramp and we’ll take the south. Touch base soon.”

I push the pedal closer to the floorboard, racing past the first entrance to the river port toward the second nearly a mile away. Since the Army Corps of Engineers shifted the locks on the Chattahoochee to an appointment-only basis, this port doesn’t get nearly as much action as it did in the heyday of the big river barges. But there are still an abundance of smaller boats that don’t need the locks to ferry people and product up and down the river, and farmers who prefer to move their crops and animals via water.

Hopefully one of them isn’t loading up a stolen alpaca right now…

We’re almost to the south entrance when Hope’s phone dings again.

“It’s Olivia,” she says. “Dean must have tossed the dogs steaks to keep them from barking. She found T-bone remnants in the kennels. What a bastard!”

“You don’t like the dogs to have steak?”

“Yes, but only I’m allowed to give it to them so they like me best. Oh! Blake! Look!”

She points through the trees as they open up to reveal the riverfront and largely abandoned docks. A lone tugboat is rumbling at the end of the closest pier, and there he is—Dean dragging a clearly reluctant Chewy up onto the boat and tying him to the railing.

We careen around the last corner and I pull right up to the edge of the pavement before slamming on the brakes, holding a hand out to protect Hope, even though she’s in her seatbelt, until the truck’s fully stopped.

And then we’re both flying out of the cab.

“Dean Finister, unhand my alpaca!” she shouts.

Chewy shrieks in what sounds like a mixture of terror and excitement to hear his mama’s voice, and Dean whirls around, bracing himself on the railing, which whines audibly under his weight. God only knows where he dug up this boat, but it looks about two hundred years old, with peeling blue and gray paint, a window broken out of the wheelhouse, and black smoke belching from the top pipe.