Free The Guest House by Erika Marks Page B

other hand flattened on the top of her hat.
    Tucker slowed, afraid of startling her, but despite his best intentions, she glanced back and promptly lost her balance. She teetered for what seemed an eternity, her feet shooting out as the bicycle thumped toward the ditch.
    “Oh, crap,” whispered Jim.
    Tucker watched helplessly as she spilled into the culvert. He steered the roadster to the shoulder, shoved it into park, and dashed out to help. By the time he arrived, the girl had already climbed to her feet, her straw hat crooked, knees and palms covered with dirt and sand. Her bicycle lay on its side, its back wheel still spinning. He reached into the ditch to stand it up, but she stepped in front of him. “I can get it myself,” she said, glaring. Her eyes were piercing under the dappled shade of her bent brim, a startling shade of pewter. It was hard to be sure how old she was. She could have been fourteen or forty, given the hard frown line that ran down the center of her forehead, or the way her small, pale lips were set.
    “I’m just trying to help,” Tucker said.
    “It’s a little late for that,” she snapped back, straightening her brim. “I wouldn’t have crashed if you’d just kept driving, you goddamn maniac.”
    Jim hooted. “Listen to this one!”
    “You wouldn’t have crashed,” Tucker said gently, “if you’d had both hands on the handlebars.”
    “What do you know?” The girl righted her bike and climbed back on, color seeping up her freckled cheeks.
    Tucker saw a brown bag in the dirt and retrieved it, brushing sand off its bottom, then handing it to her. “I hope that wasn’t your lunch.”
    “It wasn’t.” She took the bag from him and tossed it roughly into her basket.
    “Why don’t you let me give you a ride,” he offered. “My name’s Tucker, and this is my good friend Jim—”
    “I don’t need a ride,” she said, moving her bike past him.
    “No, really.” Tucker was determined now, the desire to remedy his offense irrationally urgent. “I don’t mind. I can come back for your bike. I live right up the—”
    “I know who you are.” She stopped and turned back to him. Their eyes locked. “And the way you drive, I think I’m much safer on my bike.”
    The young woman continued on, pushing her bike through the sand.
    Tucker considered her a moment longer as she marched beside her bike, her red braid sweeping furiously across her back, reminding him of the swishing tail of a vexed horse. He had the sudden and ridiculous urge to tug the knot from its end and unweave it between his fingers, wondering what shade of red it would be all spread out in his hands.
    Instead he climbed back into his car and returned them to the road.
    “Never let it be said Tucker Moss doesn’t know how to sweep a girl right off her feet,” Jim teased when they’d picked up speed.
    Tucker said nothing, just shifted his eyes to his rearview mirror so that he could watch the young woman slip out of view, undone that she could know something about him and that he could know nothing about her.
    •   •   •
    H eck, Moss, I thought you said y’all lived in a cottage!” Jim Masterson exclaimed as they rounded the final turn and the massive, multigabled house came into view.
    “This
is
what they call a cottage around here,” Tucker said, steering the sports car down the driveway and pulling in beside the carriage house.
    “What’s with all the trucks?” Jim asked as they made their way through the cluster of vehicles that filled the turnaround, the sounds of construction growing louder.
    “Dad’s building a guest house.” Tucker led Jim to the side entrance and pushed through the screen door into the kitchen.
    Doreen Packard looked up from the far end of the long counter. The stout, red-cheeked woman with a bowl of silver-black hair and thick glasses broke into a broad smile of tiny square teeth. For five years, the Packards had managed the Moss cottage: Dorrie its kitchen, her