The Guest House Read Online Free PDF Page A

him,” said Edie. “Before he hears it from someone else.”
    As if on cue, Owen’s truck rumbled up the driveway, sliding into view of both women through the kitchen’s screen door. Meg came into the house in front of her father, a pie box in her arms, which she delivered to Edie with a hug.
    Edie pointed Owen to the fridge. “There’s beer or wine, Owe. Help yourself. What do you want to drink, Meggie?”
    Meg slipped between her aunt and grandmother, inspecting the pan. “I’ll have some wine.”
    “You will not,” Owen said, looking startled.
    “Mom lets me have wine when we have people over,” Meg informed him gently. “All the girls at my school drink wine, Dad. It’s not a big deal.”
    “I passed the Bells’ place today, Owe,” said Edie. “The dormers are looking fabulous.”
    “They’re getting there,” Owen said. “You hear back from Lou on that bathroom reno you quoted him?”
    “Not yet,” Edie reported, handing a basket of bread to Meg for the table. “I may have to start Operation Nag if I don’t hear soon.”
    Owen pulled a beer from the fridge. “How about you, Lex? Any leads on work?”
    Lexi stirred her dish, feeling her mother’s pointed gaze beside her. She shot her a silencing look before she answered, “Nothing firm yet.” After all, what was the point in telling her brother now? She hadn’t even met with Cooper, for God’s sake. For all she knew, he might change his mind when he heard her rates—though Lexi doubted it. Money was never an issue for the Moss family. Still, she had no interest in stirring a pot she had yet to put on the stove.
    “You could always work at the bike shop, Aunt Lex,” Meg said cheerfully as she set the table. “Caroline’s older brother works there. She said they’re really short-staffed this summer.”
    Owen frowned. Caroline Michaud worked the frozen custard shack three days a week and had returned this summer, according to Meg and much to Owen’s distress, with an ankle tattoo and an affinity for clove cigarettes. God only knew what her brother was into. Owen had seen those guys at the bike shop—hell, he’d
been
one of those guys once—caring only about kegs on the beach or scoping the shoreline for the season’s new crop of bikini-wearing summer visitors.
    As much as he missed having Meg with him in Harrisport, a part of him was relieved that she didn’t have to contend with boys like that year-round.
    •   •   •
    D inner ended the way it always had in the Wright house—with a clatter of dishes and a few hurried good-byes. Growing up, she and Owen had always had somewhere to run off to: a party, a date, a friend waiting. Now as she climbed the stairs shortly before ten, Lexi realized she had nowhere to be. Her brother, her niece, even her mother had rushed from the table with a destination. For Lexi, the night was an empty page.
    Going up, she smiled at the patchwork of framed family photos that covered the wall, stopping briefly at her senior picture. It was always so hard to look at that photograph, knowing it had been taken just six months before she would meet Hudson Moss—harder still to analyze her confident and carefree eighteen-year-old face and not feel longing, the desire to step back in time and stop the girl she was from falling headlong toward heartbreak. And now she had agreed to go back to the house where it had all started.
    She thought about her mother urging her to seek out a relationship this summer, how she’d bristled when Lexi had claimed—rightly so!—that there was no one here in Harrisport to date whom she hadn’t already dated. It wasn’t an excuse; it was the truth. Or Kim looking discouraged when Lexi hadn’t come back from London with sordid stories of great love affairs. She’d been neck-high in photography critiques for twenty-four months—who had time to get involved in something serious?
    In her room, she sat down and opened her laptop. She had always been drawn to