Read [Churchminster #3] Wild Things for Free Online Page A

Camilla felt him harden.
    ‘Why don’t we start trying now?’ he said.
    Camilla glanced round nervously. She was still reeling from her grandmother walking in on them, and had insisted on having sex with the bedroom door locked ever since. ‘What if someone sees us? Granny Clem takes Errol Flynn for a walk around this time.’
    ‘I don’t care.’ Jed was already unbuttoning his overalls.
    ‘Isn’t this going against the public decency act? We might get arrested!’ Camilla was only half-joking. Jed’s eyes glinted as he pulled her behind a huge oak.
    ‘It’ll be a great story to tell the grandkids.’
    April came, and with it the first official Garden Party committee meeting. They had a full turnout and Clementine was surprised to see even Stacey Turner, glowering under a baseball cap and a tight
Fame
T-shirt, walk in with her mother.
    ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Beryl said in an undertone. ‘She and Jack had a blinding row earlier, and he’s banned her from using the car. I thought I’d better get her out of the pub before they killed each other.’
    ‘Of course not,’ said Clementine, thinking by the look on Stacey’s face that she could well kill someone in the village hall instead.
    Clementine waited until the scraping of chairs had stopped and everyone had settled down. ‘Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Garden Party’s first official committee meeting. I’d like to get straight down to business, please, so let’s have a catch up on what everyone has been up to in the last two weeks.’
    Freddie Fox-Titt was the first to speak. He was a short, jolly man who lived in the Maltings, a large house on the Bedlington Road, with his fun-loving wife, Angie. Along with Jack Turner, Clementine had put him in charge of removing any graffiti in the village. ‘I’ve finally cleaned the phone box up. Took a bit of elbow grease, but I got there in the end! Now we just have to hope they don’t come back again.’
    Beside him, his wife laughed. ‘We were thinking of leaving Avon and Barksdale in there to scare any wannabe Banksys off.’ Avon and Barksdale were the Fox-Titts’ extremely bouncy border collies.
    ‘Errol Flynn would be a safer bet,’ remarked Calypso. ‘He could blast them away with one fart.’
    Several titters sounded. Clementine shot a mildly disapproving look at her granddaughter, and turned to the landlady of the Jolly Boot. Her hanging baskets were some of the best in the county. ‘Now, Beryl. Have you managed to go round to the houses we talked about, to make sure they’ve done their planting properly?’
    Half an hour later, the meeting was nearly over. Camilla and Calypso were to do alternate litter-picking duty on the green and Lucinda Reinard was making it her mission to hunt down any fly-tippers. The district had recently been plagued with people dumping rubbish in lay-bys and fields.
    Lucinda gave a grim smile. ‘Those litter-louts will think twice about dumping their old mattresses here! I’ve commandeered my daughter Hero’s old hockey stick to give them a whack across the knees if they try anything.’
    Reverend Bellows was sporting a large scratch across his forehead from the unruly rhododendron bush in St Bartholomew’s graveyard.
    ‘My dear man!’ exclaimed Clementine. ‘Are you all right?’
    Reverend Bellows blushed. ‘Q-quite. I didn’t realize quite what a f-formidable opponent I was up against! I’ve trimmed most of it back now, though.’
    Joyce Bellows, a vision in sludge brown, looked up devotedly at her husband. ‘Oh, Brian, you are brave!’
    Reverend Bellows blushed deeper, looking rather pleased with himself.
    Clementine put her clipboard down. ‘If there’s nothing else …’
    Fifteen minutes later they were all in the pub. The Jolly Boot was the oldest building in the village; a slice of history with worn flagstone floors, tankards hanging above the bar and a huge fireplace that blazed merrily through the winter months, warming the frozen