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KISSING IN COVENTRY
Jandy began to laugh as dogs and people scattered in all directions, turning over crates and kennels and toppling pedestals. She looked again at Sam, who held tightly to Sue’s leash while he watched and laughed at the chaos. Their eyes met, and before she knew what she was doing, Jandy began walking toward him through the bedlam.
Sam and Sue met her halfway. She wasn’t sure which of them made the first move, but Sam’s free arm went around her and she held Grayson’s camera behind her as she tilted her head to avoid his cowboy hat. It could have been a friendly kiss or a happy kiss, but it was a different kind of kiss, the kind that sent a shock wave down her spine, then radiated out to every nerve of her body.
Between one moment and the next, she forgot it was broad daylight and that most of the population of Coventry and all of its tourists could get an eyeful if they were so inclined. She forgot caution and her fiancé in California and lost herself in the kiss that she hadn’t allowed herself to want or dream about for four weeks….
Books by Becky Cochrane
A COVENTRY CHRISTMAS
A COVENTRY WEDDING
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
A Coventry Wedding
Becky Cochrane
In loving memory of my mother,
Dorothy Cochrane,
who gave me my love of words, and
John Riley Morris,
who always gave
my imagination
a soundtrack.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Sometimes books and maps and the Internet aren’t enough, and the following people shared their time and knowledge, earning my deepest gratitude: Jim Carter, Simmons Buntin, Mark G. Harris, Jak Klinikowski, and Gary Beagle and his students at Volunteer State Community College.
Thank you to my editor, John Scognamiglio (a patient man), my copy editor, Debra Roth Kane, and my agent, Alison J. Picard; my husband Tom; and Timothy J. Lambert, Timothy Forry, Lynne Demarest, and especially Jandy, who loaned me her name without conditions.
The list of people who give me support and encouragement gets longer and longer. Thank you to my friends and family in Houston and elsewhere, the booksellers who are just amazing, my fellow writers whose good opinions and good will help keep the words coming, and my blogging and AOL, LiveJournal, and Yahoo friends. If I named you all, I’d have to cut a chapter from the book, so take the chapter of your choice and consider it your gift.
Thank you, Todd, for the family names, Jess and Laura for letting me borrow Sue, Lisa B. for the Florence story, and all those readers who sent e-mail about A Coventry Christmas. I hope you enjoy your summer visit to our town.
I’m grateful to John, Paul, George, and Ringo for giving me dreams and ideas about love, peace, and romance.
Finally, for lightening my load and brightening my world every day, thanks Guinness, Margot, Rexford G. Lambert, the visiting EZ, and the late Lazlo.
Chapter 1
“Call me Jandy.”
She cringed a little inside every time she remembered saying those words aloud. Technically, she hadn’t lied. When she was a little girl, her grandpa had called her Jandy. But she hadn’t thought of that in years, and even the way she’d presented it—“Call me Jandy” instead of “My name is Jandy”—sounded dishonest. Lying about her name was ominous, much like the sign a few feet away with its warning: POISONOUS SNAKES AND INSECTS INHABIT THE AREA.
She dismissed her feeling of doom. She’d never been superstitious; she believed in cold, hard facts. She also believed in things she could see, and so far, those things hadn’t included snakes or spiders. She was more concerned with a pest that walked upright on two legs, called itself Sam, and belonged to a gender that tended to boast that it ran the world. Considering the state of the world, she wasn’t sure that Sam had much reason to brag. Nor did she think his current suggestion of a coin toss to settle their argument over custody rights indicated any great intellect.
Maybe it was the effect of the desert heat on her brain that made her agree to his proposition. Or maybe it was her memory of Burger v. Burger (Los Angeles County Superior Court). Perhaps if Theodore Burger and his former wife Mary Therese had settled their custody dispute with a coin toss, they’d have spared themselves millions of dollars in damages and attorney fees.
Maybe a coin toss was a quick solution to an unexpected and unwelcome roadblock on her road to liberty.
With a pang of guilt, she nodded at Sam. He took a quarter from his pocket and flipped it in the air while saying, “Heads I win; tails you lose.”
She pressed her knuckles against her lips to stop herself from protesting. No matter how infuriating it was to be considered stupid—did he really think she didn’t understand that “heads I win; tails you lose” meant that she lost either way?—the last twenty-four hours were proof that her judgment skills had faded almost as fast as her cell phone battery. She needed sleep. She needed food. She needed help with her stolen truck, which only a half hour earlier had suffered a much noisier death than her cell phone. What she didn’t need was a custody battle under the broiling Arizona sun.
She could tell by the sweat running down her face and the way her hair was plastered to her skull under the yellow bandanna—and yellow was so not her color—that she wasn’t looking any better than she felt. She was hideous, hot, and hopeless. She was five hundred miles from home without a soul to call to rescue her. Not that she believed in being rescued. And not that she could call anyone anyway, with a dead cell phone.
The single advantage of losing phone service was that she no longer had to dread a possible phone call from her mother. Unfortunately, having Dear Prudence along for the ride was nearly as bad—even if Dear Prudence was nothing more than the name she’d lifted long ago from a Beatles song and given to the nagging voice inside her head. Dear Prudence didn’t smile, didn’t play, couldn’t see or hear the beauty in the world, and cast a pall over everyone else’s good time.
When she’d been a child, Dear Prudence kept her from making mud pies with the fresh dirt the landscapers put in the flower beds. Dear Prudence kept her from running through the jets of water that kept the grass a brilliant green on the golf course behind their house. When she became