Love, friendship, and humor come together in this tender romance as a high school student and a young married girl are attracted to each other in a small conservative town in the mid 1950s.

Jimmy Trenton finds something fresh and beautiful in Carol Dulaney, a religious young girl who wears a mysterious gold chain around her neck that intrigues him. And Carol discovers that Jimmy’s positive outlook on life and sensitive nature fulfills a need for love in her life. Their separate worlds clash unexpectedly in Lakewood, Maryland where respectability is very important to its residents or at least it seems on the outside.

The novel is slow-paced and filled with twists and turns as both struggle to break free of this unlikely and forbidden attraction to each other and also must deal with a blackmailer’s threats. High school days weren't supposed to be this way as Carol jolts Jimmy's curriculum a bit and she's definitely not a student.

Excerpt 1:

I slowly put my arms around her and reached the back strap, fumbling with it, but finally unfastening it. The bra fabric, which had been taught against her skin, relaxed.

“You’re almost there," she whispered. “Pull the straps down, Jimmy.”

“Is this what you want, Carol?”

“It’s what has to be. We both have to resolve something, Jimmy,” she said.

It was the final step I would take to cross that line away from Lakewood and into that other reality whose boundaries I had been toying with for so long. All the issues about right, wrong, and righteousness were for parents, schoolteachers, and others to debate.

I had put them aside as obstacles I did not wish to deal with…………..……..,