Hope's Cornish Christmas by Jo Bartlett

Author:Jo Bartlett [Bartlett, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fabrian Books
Published: 2018-11-21T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when Jude didn’t answer his door the morning after I lost the pendant. He’d revealed so much of himself to me and he couldn’t even use alcohol as an excuse. All we’d had was tea and out-of-date Kit Kats. If I’d expected a best-selling author to sit sipping champagne and eating oysters, I would have been in for a disappointment. I hadn’t had any expectations of Jude, though, and rather than being disappointed, I’d discovered over the slightly-chewy-Kit-Kats that I really liked him. The only thing that disappointed me was that it didn’t look like he was going to keep his promise to help me look for the pendant. But I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt and live by Nana’s principles. Maybe something had happened with Barnaby, or he’d managed to work through the writer’s block that had been plaguing him for months now. Hopefully, I’d get the chance to ask him, but for now my priority was to find the pendant so I headed down to the beach on my own.

I looked into every gutter and dip in the pavement as I went towards the path that led down to Half Moon Cove, but all I found was a toy car and a cat collar, which the wearer must have escaped from. The path itself was covered in a mixture of sand and shingle, making it doubly difficult to search for the pendant, and it took me well over an hour to finally make it on to the beach. My heart lurched when I spotted a figure in the distance, moving a metal detector over the strip of sand that was exposed by the receding tide. That was all I needed, someone with the means to find the pendant, but who might not be willing hand it over if they did. Counting on the power of Christmas spirit, I forced myself to go and speak to him, in the hope he might be willing to help me.

‘Excuse me.’ I cleared my throat as I got within a few feet of the man and he turned around. ‘Jude!’

‘Morning. Did you get the note I taped to my door, telling you to meet me down here? I was beginning to think you’d overslept.’

‘There was no note on the door.’ I still couldn’t believe it was him. ‘When you weren’t there, I started searching the path down to the beach for the pendant. I didn’t oversleep, in fact I hardly slept at all.’

‘I guessed you probably wouldn’t, but I wondered if you might finally have dropped off and then woken up late.’ He smiled and for a split second an image of waking up next to him popped into my head. It was just because he was being so nice, that was all.

‘I can’t believe you’ve got a metal detector, why didn’t you mention it yesterday? It’s perfect.’

‘Because I didn’t have it yesterday. I looked online last night and there was someone selling one in Truro.

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