Page 1 of I Found You (Wilder #1)

Wyatt

Harpoon’s Tavern was always busy, but the Fourth of July was pure chaos.

Our seaside town in Massachusetts had one of the best fireworks shows around, and it brought tourists in from hours away just to watch them.

Then, of course, while they were in town, people would flock to one of the two bars in town.

I’d been coming to Harpoon’s for the Fourth of July after-hours celebrations for years.

It had always doubled as my birthday celebration as soon as the clock struck midnight.

Turning thirty-three years old this year didn’t hold much excitement for me, but it had been our tradition for years.

We had our own little crew, friends would come and go throughout the years, but my core crew, we were solid.

The night was hot and humid, just like it had been for a few days now.

The fireworks earlier this evening were still impressive, even if they were only visible through a cloud of haze.

It would have been a great time if it hadn’t been for Chelsea hanging all over me.

We had hooked up a few times in the past, but it wasn’t serious.

I had never dated anyone seriously, and any of the girls I went home with knew that.

They were looking for something fun and easy, just like me.

Besides, last I heard, Chelsea was with someone else.

I was usually game for a good time, but being unattached was definitely a prerequisite.

Besides, I had my eyes on a thick, dark-haired beauty all night.

Her dark brown hair was tied back in a red hair tie.

The little blue-and-white dress she was wearing would have been considered conservative compared to everyone else, but she was showing enough of her legs to capture my interest. She looked familiar, but this was the kind of town where everyone knew everyone.

I was sure I had run into her at some point, but the more I drank, the less likely I was to make any connections.

She was with Andrea Petit’s group though, another hookup from the past. Between being cockblocked by Chelsea hanging on me and not wanting to move into Andrea’s orbit, I didn’t get a chance to talk to her. Next time I looked up, she was gone.

Harpoon’s was open for another hour, but I’d had more than my fair share to drink already.

It was crowded and annoyingly loud, and to be honest, I was shitfaced and tired.

The high-top table we had congregated around was sticky with too many spilled drinks.

Chelsea had been pissing me off. And Wes, my best friend, had taken off thirty minutes ago, saying he had things to do tomorrow and didn’t want to feel like shit.

He’d offered to stay and drive me home when I was done for the night.

He was a stand-up guy like that, even if most everyone else was kind of scared of the grumpy bastard.

I lived close enough to walk, so I sent him on his way.

Now, I just needed to stay upright and walk my ass home without crawling on the ground .

Six shots of tequila and a handful of beers.

I hadn’t drunk this much for a while now. I certainly couldn’t hang like I used to. This double-vision shit was tough.

“Hey, guys, I think I’m going to head out now,” I said.

“No! Come on, Wy. It’s your birthday now. We got to celebrate,” slurred Reid, the youngest of my siblings. He was sitting with his arm slung around his high school sweetheart, Kayleigh.

“Yeah, stay. Do another shot with us. It’s on me,” Seb said. “Although, I bet you could shoot it off Chelsea if you wanted,” he joked. Sebastian Devereux had been like another brother for years. He and my brother Luke became friends in grade school and were inseparable growing up.

“Nah. You guys have fun. Close it down here. I’m heading out.”

I tried to get out of there before anyone else noticed, but I never had been a lucky kind of guy.

The exit was in sight when she stumbled away from a group of girls and made a beeline for me.

“Hey, you’re not leaving me here alone, are you?” cooed Chelsea. Her voice was nagging and whiny. We hadn’t really stayed in contact after our hookups ended. I wasn’t even sure why she latched onto me tonight.

“You’re not alone, Chelsea. You literally just stepped away from your friend group.” I wasn’t trying to be a dick, but I didn’t really have it in me to placate her either.

“But what if one of the guys here tries to take me home?” She pouted dramatically and tried to bat her lashes at the same time. It was a very strange effect. “Wouldn’t you feel bad if something happens to me?”

“Fuck, Chelsea, half the people here you’ve known since you were six. I’m too tired for this shit. Go back to your girlfriends. They’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”

“Wow, Wyatt. You’re such a jerk.”

I watched her walk back to her friends, hips swaying either from the alcohol or for my benefit, before I doubled back to my table to ask my crew if they could keep an eye on her.

They all agreed to look out for her, seeing as she was trashed.

I also checked in with the bartender, Ronnie, as a backup plan, seeing as my crew was also trashed.

“I don’t think another one is a good idea, Wilder,” Ronnie said, slinging beers from the draft machine as she tried to keep up with the crowd.

“No. I’m heading out,” I started, but I was cut off by Ronnie’s sharp brow raise as she glared at me. I raised my hands in front of me. “Walking. But could you do me a favor?”

Ronnie set the beers down in front of a couple of dudes and wiped her hands on a towel, “Good boy. What do you need?”

“Chelsea—can you keep an eye on her? Make sure she gets out of here safe?”

“She worried about someone?” Ronnie was looking past me, sweeping her eyes around the place.

“No. She’s just… Chelsea,” I finished.

“Go home, Wilder. I’m not letting anything happen on my watch. I’ve got her.”

“You’re the best, Ronnie. That’s why you’re my favorite.”

Ronnie was one of the good ones. She’d been bartending here since she was probably too young to be allowed behind a bar. In her mid-forties now, she had her braided hair pulled into some elaborate knot at the top of her head, the same as it had been since the first time I saw her over a decade ago.

It had probably been close to fourteen years since I first met Ronnie.

Back when I was using a fake ID—completely successfully, I would like to note—until a fucking buddy of mine yelled to the entire place that it was my twentieth birthday, hollering that I was now only one year away from being able to drink legally.

Ronnie was pissed that I’d pulled one over on her and immediately kicked me out.

I was pissed that one of my good friends outed me like that.

I came back one year later to celebrate with her on my twenty-first birthday, and she had been cool with me ever since.

My feet hit the pavement outside of the bar, and I could hear all of the noise and revelry that I was leaving behind.

I couldn’t wait to crawl into my bed and pass the fuck out.

The night air was still thick and humid, salt from the ocean settling low in the sky, but it was a lot better than earlier in the day.

I started walking the couple of blocks back to my house when I heard a strange sound.

My head was pounding already. I knew this hangover was going to kick my ass. I kept walking, but still it persisted.

What is that?

It almost sounded like… I don’t know, maybe a bird or an animal or something. Again, I tried to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. The noise still sounded from somewhere around me, relentless. I stopped.

I’m just going to check it out .

It was kind of loud and sounded like it might be in pain or something.

There were bushes and shrubs that lined the border between a wooded patch of land and the street.

The noise sounded like it was coming from beneath the brush.

I dropped to my hands and knees, nausea churning in my stomach instantly, and used my phone’s flashlight setting to see better.

I had no idea what I was thinking, but something about this was not sitting right with me.

Shining my light, I scanned the area. Something was wrapped in cloth, a shopping bag left on the ground next to it.

People sucked. Why did they just leave their shit lying on the ground?

Some poor animal was probably stuck in one of those plastic ring things.

I went to grab the cloth out of the way so I could reach behind it for the shopping bag, but the bundle was heavier than I expected.

As soon as I grabbed hold of it, it clicked.

That the noise I’d been hearing was coming from this bundle of cloth, not some animal in the bag.

My heart stopped for a solid three seconds while my drunk-as-shit brain tried to comprehend what I’d found. Moving the brush out of the way as best as possible with my left hand so that when I dragged the cloth bundle out, it didn’t scratch anything… anyone…

What the fuck? Is that a baby? A real, live human baby? Just lying on the ground, wrapped in a blanket?

Pulling the baby to me, I immediately unwrapped him or her.

There were no scratch marks on it—or at least no noticeable ones—but the little thing was wearing some little one-piece outfit, so I couldn’t see all of it.

I cradled the baby in one arm and lay on my other side so that I could grab the shopping bag too.

It got snagged on some undergrowth, but I tugged it free.

It was really light. Inside was a baby bottle and a ball of something white.

It smelled like shit. Literally and figuratively.

It must have been a dirty diaper that whoever left this baby must have thrown in the bag as they changed her or him.

The baby was still screaming in my arms. The bottle didn’t have much left, but I tried to give it to the baby. It took a second for the little thing to realize that it was there, but once it did, it latched onto the bottle and stopped screaming.

Was this real life right now or some weird-ass hallucination?

I didn’t think I’d taken any recreational drugs tonight, and liquor didn’t typically make me hallucinate, but this couldn’t be real.

Right? I had to take the bottle away from the baby so I could use my hand to give myself a lift off the ground, but I gave it back as fast as I could before it started screaming again.

Now that I was on my feet, I searched around for anyone else. This poor little thing’s mother, or father, or someone.

“Hey,” I yelled. “Is someone out there?” Walking around the area, looking under brush and trees, I tried to find someone.

Ten minutes must have passed while I shouted and walked through the wooded area.

I didn’t know what to do. My brain was not functioning the way it should.

Everything was foggy. My feet started moving of their own accord while I tried to process what the hell was happening.

I realized that I was still holding the baby, now sleeping with a bottle still perched in its mouth, when I went to find my key, and my hands were full.

I shoved the bottle into the pocket of my jeans so that I could pull out my house key and unlock the door.

I put the baby down on the kitchen island, along with the shopping bag that I was somehow still holding on to.

Opening the bag, now that I had a second to go through it, not that there was much here to see, I found that the bottle the baby had just finished off was the only milk they left behind.

A clean, unused diaper was hiding under the dirty one.

I took the clean diaper out of the bag, threw the rest of it away, and took the bottle to the sink to wash it out.

Spinning around in a panic, I realized I’d left the baby unsupervised on the kitchen island.

I looked back to see that the baby hadn’t moved at all.

Was the little thing even old enough to move yet? It looked really small.

“Fuck. That could have been bad,” I breathed out.

I needed to stop calling the little thing “it.” There were some little snaps at the bottom of the baby’s one-piece outfit.

I unsnapped them and found a soaking wet diaper.

I had that clean diaper with me, so I checked out what I was working with here.

This couldn’t be too hard, right? I mean, I was thirty-three years old.

A fucking adult. I could figure out how to change a diaper, even in my drunken state.

Lifting the front and back of the outfit out of the way, I un-velcroed the tab things and pulled the soiled diaper away.

A girl. Okay, now I could stop referring to her as “it,” at least. Whoever left her behind wasn’t thoughtful enough to include wipes along with the diaper.

Tissues from the tissue box I had on the counter would have to do.

I did not want to get all up in her little baby business, so I just kind of patted around, hoping that would be good enough.

With the clean diaper laid out, I shuffled her baby butt onto it, pulling the front of the diaper up between her legs and velcroing the tabs.

I carefully picked her up, and her knees immediately pulled into the front of her, making her look like a little baby ball.

Too tired to even bother snapping up the one-piece outfit, I brought her to the couch with me and laid her on my chest. Her chest rose and fell against mine as I held her close to me and let out a large sigh.

I had no idea what the hell I was going to do, but whatever it was, it was tomorrow Wyatt’s problem.

Right now, I was going to take a page out of Baby Girl’s book and sleep.